The Desperate Need for the Reprograming of the Hearts in Silicon Valley
Samuel J. Alvarez
Most normal Palo Alto resident, Mark Zuckerberg, once said, “Some people dream of success, while others wake up and work hard on it.” Silicon Valley is home to some of the richest people in not only the nation but also the world. It is a hub of intelligence and technology, with beautiful views, amazing homes, and great educational institutions. In stark contrast to this, it is also home to some of the highest homeless population numbers in the nation; I, for 5 years, was part of this population.
From 2010 to 2015, my family moved in and out of various homeless shelters in Silicon Valley. During this time, I navigated an underfunded public school system that had many students in my situation; every morning, my mom would wake up, work on finding new shelters for us to stay, wait in long lines for food stamps, and work long hours to support her and her children. Despite this extremely hard work my mom did, Mark Zuckerberg’s “success” was never achieved for my family, (that being his net worth of 203.8 billion dollars).
Many people have a misconception about poverty, that it is simply not having money, which isn’t true; poverty is being ashamed; poverty is feeling like the government is against you; poverty is cancer that forms because you are forced to live next to a contaminated piece of land; poverty is waiting all day in line for food stamps; poverty is instability combined with fear; poverty is all the aches my mom gets working cleaning houses; poverty is a combination of piling problems that go on and on. Many people worldwide, especially in Silicon Valley, do not understand that. They approach the poor with distorted notions, that we’re criminals, we’re dirty, we’re bad and lazy people. The area’s approach to poverty is delusional; it chooses to divide and push people further into the margins, rather than take the best approach, which is simply radical kinship with the poor.
I believe this flawed idea of the poor comes from our culture’s ability to lack understanding and empathy; it is easier to look at a man on the street and see him as just dirty rather than to think about all of his suffering and all of the privileges we have. As the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy stated, “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.” To add to this, our media perpetuates this way of thinking. It suggests that poor people have chosen this life, with news outlets often glorifying people like Mark Zuckerberg’s “hard work” and “genius,” then turning around to show those living on the streets as a mess we must solve. In All About Love, bell hooks writes that this artificial gap we make between us and the poor “Removes from all of us who are privileged the burden of accountability” (hooks 73). With this lack of accountability, we so easily brush the poor off with these false thoughts.
These distorted views of the poor cause more damage than healing however, as they allow for harmful actions to be inflicted by our governments with us not even batting an eye. San Jose, the capital of Silicon Valley, is where I’ve lived most of my life, and where I had the opportunity to work for over a year, working in the mayor’s office and then my councilmember’s office. I remember one moment very vividly in my time with the mayor; he had posted on his Instagram how they had cleaned the highway entrance into our city, being very proud of this “beautifying.” The post was a before and after photo; before there was a homeless encampment, after there was nothing. The post failed to mention what happened to the person, rather focusing on the “beautifying.” That was somebody’s life, their home, all of their things, all the security they had, only seen as trash.
I asked my boss what happened to the man; he explained to me how he was deemed unstable and sent to jail. This is common however, embodied in the city’s systematic approach to the issue, which can be encapsulated well by this quote from our local newspaper, “first, the city offers resources and shelter repeatedly to homeless people living in camps. Those who refuse services will be swept, and lastly, unhoused people can be cited or arrested” (Freimarck).
However, this is not just a local approach, as highlighted in Matthew Desmond’s Poverty by America: “The United States doesn’t just tuck its poor under overpasses and into mobile home parks far removed from central business districts. It disappears them into jails and prisons, effectively erasing them” (Desmond 19). Why do places do this?
Cities often adopt this system because it is easier to criminalize homelessness than to confront the underlying issues that cause it. Houselessness exacerbates many challenges: those without stable housing are at a significantly higher risk of severe mental illness, are more prone to physical health problems, and face a drastically shortened life expectancy—up to 30 years shorter than those with stable housing (Handunge). Addressing so many diverse issues is costly for governments, creating a vicious cycle: poverty leads to worsening mental and physical health issues, which become increasingly expensive for governments to address, disincentivizing them to; in turn, the lack of investment allows these problems to deepen, making future interventions even more costly. Instead of investing in long-term solutions early on, governing bodies often resort to arresting and hiding unhoused individuals, avoiding the immediate time and resources needed to support them as human beings.
A common question I get is, why might a person refuse housing? When the houseless accept shelter, many times they lose control of their lives, and who would want that? Shelters can have many rules: you can’t use substances; you can’t have dogs; you can’t keep everything you own; these are hard to give up for any human being, especially one who doesn’t have much control to give up to begin with. Along with this, shelters are seen as very dangerous, rightfully so, some are wild, (I should know). In the local newspaper about this very topic, it is described: “There are often rats in shelters. He [a homeless person] said he once saw a person get stabbed with a pair of scissors, so he’d rather risk it on the streets, sleeping in different places each night to avoid trouble” (Freimarck). How would you feel if your options were to risk getting fined living on the streets, going to jail, or living in a shelter like that?
This punishment done to those on the margins for not accepting housing causes more harm than help. In a study done on the mental health of the homeless, it was concluded that “The criminalization of homelessness and mental illness significantly exacerbates the challenges faced by individuals with SMI [severe mental illness]” (Handunge). Poverty is embarrassing and exhausting, and this stress can be detected at the cellular level (Desmond 62). When you are deemed a trash criminal by society, it just adds another problem to the pile, and it feeds the shame already there in your life. When the homeless have substance issues or mental health problems, it does not heal them, it ruins them more.
The approach Silicon Valley takes literally pushes people further into homelessness. Sweeping them provides just more instability in the people’s lives, and it is just a temporary solution to the city’s “trash” problem. The poor do not have the means to pay for a citation; they have bigger things to worry about, but the city chooses to beat the dead horse. And if they get sent to jail, they remain in poverty, and their ability to look for a better life is made significantly more difficult, as with a criminal record, it is harder to find a job and shelter once they’re out.
Despite all of the negatives of this method, California keeps on pushing it. It used to be that the fining, arresting, and sweeping of homeless encampments would be legally ambiguous, as it was deemed a cruel and unusual punishment, something the Eighth Amendment protects against (Schroeder); that is why certain criteria would have to be met before this punishment would occur: often the person denied an alternative shelter, or they broke a law commonly associated with living on the street (i.e. setting a fire on public roads or creeks). However, this dynamic changed with the Supreme Court’s ruling on the City of Grants v. Johnson this year. A group of unhoused people argued that the city of Oregon was violating the cruel and unusual punishments clause with their ordinances; the Supreme Court deemed that prohibiting sleeping on public land was not a cruel and unusual punishment, therefore not violating the Eighth Amendment (Schroeder). When this occurred, California Governor Gavin Newsom promptly made an action plan for the state with an executive order. The plan was to keep the status quo of offering housing, then fining, arresting, and sweeping. Newsom encouraged cities to urgently sweep encampments, providing a 3.3 billion dollar state grant for cities to pull from if they follow through with it (Schroeder). Currently, this leaves California in a place where they are expediting the cruel process they have had in place for years, just now with less legal ambiguity and billions of dollars of aid to support it.
Instead of pushing people further into the margins—treating them as problems to be swept away—what if we erased the margins entirely? What if, instead of defining people by their struggles, we recognized their unshakable dignity and met them with compassion? The current approach to homelessness, rooted in criminalization and exclusion, fails because governments refuse to acknowledge the humanity of those suffering, and it continues because so many of us do the same thing. It is far easier to arrest, fine, and displace individuals than it is to confront the deeper systemic issues that led them there in the first place. But real change requires more than just reactive measures; it demands a fundamental shift in the way we view and treat the most vulnerable members of our society.
At the core of this shift is the idea of radical kinship—the belief that no one is beyond redemption, that every person, regardless of their past or present circumstances, is worthy of love, dignity, and a chance at a better life. Radical kinship is not about offering temporary aid or handouts; it is about walking alongside people, investing in their future, and creating systems of support that allow them to thrive rather than just survive. It means rejecting the narrative that the poor are a burden and instead embracing the truth that they are a part of our shared humanity.
This isn’t just a utopian ideal—it is a philosophy that has been successfully implemented in places that refuse to see human beings as disposable. One of the most powerful examples of this is Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world, founded by Jesuit Father Greg Boyle. Unlike traditional intervention programs that focus on punishment or forced rehabilitation, Homeboy Industries operates on the belief that transformation happens through love, community, and opportunity (Boyle). But what does this approach look like tangibly with the homeless? Well, when we make this love ethic central to our policies, the road ahead is clear.
First, the arresting and the fining need to stop. They perpetuate the issue, leading to more poverty and more of this rhetoric that the poor are criminals. As stated before, the criminalization of the poor does much more harm than good. However, it is often easy to follow this approach when society deems these people as outcasts and fails to see their goodness. When you take the radical kinship approach, you are too focused on loving the person to even consider arresting them and sweeping them under the rug. Frequently, people get scared of the poor, assuming they are dangerous because of their actions, which is why we arrest them. I understand this fear at times; as pointed out in Poverty by America, “Poverty can cause anyone to make decisions that look ill-advised and even downright stupid to those of us unbothered by scarcity” (Desmond 21). So we, governments and individuals, must change how we view the homeless; a beautiful shift in our view is described by Father Greg Boyle, who calls us to be “in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it” (Boyle 67). Radical kinship is all about where we are standing; we must stand in a loving place on the margins, not in a judgmental place outside of them; we must stop burying those we deem as outcasts with thousands of dollars in fines while hiding them in prisons; be in awe of what they have to carry, and help them carry it, do not pile onto the problem.
Second, there must be more high-quality and low-barrier shelters. A Dallas, Texas shelter, named Esperanza, is a good example of this; this shelter is low-barrier, meaning it does not expect the unhoused to be completely sober, to give up their pets and everything they own, it meets the unhoused where they are, and invites them in with a welcoming hug. A person living in the shelter described it as feeling like this invitation: “Bring your baggage. Bring your whole self. Bring all your problems. Bring your mental illness. Bring your drug addiction. Bring all of it to us, and we will bring you into safety and warmth” (Austin American-Statesman). With this approach, the unhoused, rather than feeling like criminals and outcasts, feel love and warmth and are more likely to accept shelter. These types of shelters provide an environment not of expectations that you must be perfect but of, “we know you aren’t perfect, that’s ok, we love you anyway,” an approach that erases margins rather than pushing people further into them. When a person is crowded by this warmth and love, it guides them to a place of true healing, bringing them closer out of the streets; this is a space where they can better respond to their substance issues and their mental health problems, rather than those things getting ignored and worsened.
Third, these shelters also need to be accompanied by more housing. As stated in On the Housing Crisis, “the crisis of homelessness is a crisis of homes” (Demsas 124). Shelters are meant as transitions, yet in areas like Silicon Valley, this transition cannot be done because there is no affordable place to go to afterward; this usually means once your time is up in a shelter, and you have been hopefully doing a little better, you get kicked out, left on the street, and back to where you started.
Affordable housing is so hard to find, especially in Silicon Valley, because people tend not to support building any; quite frankly, I think it is because we are greedy. On the local level, it is well documented that the Bay Area and our citizens do not like to approve affordable housing. At a 2021 Palo Alto city council meeting, “one resident argued against pro-housing policies, saying, “Does it make sense to be planning for more people?” (Demsas 108). Last year, Stephen Curry, the multimillion-dollar basketball player who lives in the wealthiest community in the Bay Area, Atherton, sent a letter to the city council stating he did not want the approval of a three-story townhome in his neighborhood. On the state level, this trend follows, with just in the 2024 election, Californians’ votes on propositions made this view even more clear: voters rejected removing the high threshold for approving housing-related bonds (prop. 5.), they blocked a statewide minimum wage increase that could help renters keep up with rising costs (prop. 32) and voted to maintain restrictions that restrict local governments from imposing new rent control laws (prop. 33) (Morgan). By doing so, voters upheld barriers to affordable housing.
When I was homeless and moving from shelter to shelter, my mom applied for us to live in a permanent, affordable Catholic Charities apartment complex. Due to her having three kids, our application was fast-tracked, but the waiting time to be even considered at this place usually took around two years. Luckily, we got in, and I have been living there for almost a decade now. This place has provided my family stability; it gave a home to the homeless; it gave our family dignity and a place to heal. My story in Silicon Valley is rare though, as we have some of the most expensive housing in the nation, and waiting lists for places like the one I stay in have only been growing with an increase in demand. When people vote to maintain the status quo, to keep their neighborhood “safe,” and to help maintain their property value, the poor suffer; this approach must change to end this pain, we must vote to build these homes, we must support permanent affordable housing, we must change our hearts.
This approach with the poor is crucial, but as stated before, it cannot change without a “reprogramming” of all our hearts, and honestly, I think that is the hardest part of this process. This nation is greedy, and that greedy nature has been forced down upon us since the day we were born; this greed is a sort of addiction, illustrated beautifully by hooks: “It keeps us unable to love… it promotes a psychological state of endless craving… [this] addiction is both a consequence of widespread lovelessness and a cause” (hooks 111). So, how do we get people to change their hearts on this, to end this addiction? The answer, just like the answer to the former problem of addiction and lovelessness, is radical kinship. Though it is difficult, just as we love those on the margins into a healthier, better life, we must also extend that love to those who reject them, guiding them toward the same healthiness, back to the goodness that resides within all of us.
Father Greg Boyle states, “Systems change when people do. People change when they are cherished” (Boyle 149). Love is the heavyweight champion of the world; with it, places like Silicon Valley and California as a whole might see the humanity of the poor and choose to approach the problem of homelessness a bit differently. Though this change might take a while, the first step is for us to look into ourselves and ask, where are we standing? Are we truly standing with the poor? Are we crossing the street when we see the unhoused in front of that store? Do we have these misconceived notions? Do we see the unshakeable goodness in everyone?
Works Cited
Austin American-Statesman. “More cabins, more ‘radical kinship’ to help homeless at Esperanza Community | Grumet.” Austin American-Statesman, 16 Sept. 2024, www.statesman.com/story/opinion/columns/2024/09/16/more-cabins-to-help- homeless-at-esperanza-community-grumet/75204235007Links to an external site.
Boyle, Greg. Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. Manitoba Education and Advanced Learning, Alternate Formats Library, 2014.
Desmond, Matthew. Poverty, by America. Crown, 2024.
Demsas, Jerusalem. On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy. Zando, 2024.
Freimarck, Annalise. “Will Supreme Court Ruling Change San Jose’s Homeless Policy?” San José Spotlight, 2 July 2024, sanjosespotlight.com/will-supreme-court-ruling-change-san-joses-homelesspolicy/:~:text=The%20Supreme%20Court%20ruled%20in,for%20camping%20on%20p ublic%20property.
Handunge, Veronica L., Jordan J. White, and Enrico G. Castillo. “Housing, Homelessness, and Mental Health.” Psychiatric Annals, vol. 54, no. 7, 2024, pp. e202- e208. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/housing-homelessness- mental-health/docview/3083201096/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.3928/00485713-20240618-02.
hooks, bell, and January LaVoy. All about Love: New Visions. HarperAudio, 2023.
Morgan, Claire. “Here’s What We Know About How California Voted on 2024 State Propositions so Far.” CapRadio, www.capradio.org/articles/2024/12/02/heres-what-we-know-about-how-california-voted-on-2024-state-propositions-so-far/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2025.
Schroeder, Leah. “Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Order on Homelessness, Explained.” The Dispatch, 30 July 2024, thedispatch.com/article/gavin-newsom-homelessness-explained/.