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15 June 22
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Amnesty International report accuses Moscow of dropping banned cluster bombs in Ukrainian city killing hundreds of civilians.
“The repeated bombardments of residential neighbourhoods in Kharkiv are indiscriminate attacks which killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and as such constitute war crimes,” the rights group said in a report published on Monday.
Since late February, Russian forces have relentlessly targeted Kharkiv, the second-largest city in Ukraine, resulting in hundreds of deaths and massive destruction of the city.
Amnesty International found evidence of Russian forces repeatedly using international banned weaponry such as 9N210/9N235 cluster munitions and scatterable mines that are known for their indiscriminate effects.
“The people of Kharkiv have faced a relentless barrage of indiscriminate attacks in recent months, which killed and injured hundreds of civilians,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s senior crisis response adviser.
“The repeated use of widely banned cluster munitions is shocking, and a further indication of utter disregard for civilian lives. The Russian forces responsible for these horrific attacks must be held accountable for their actions, and victims and their families must receive full reparations,” Rovera added.
‘Indiscriminate attacks’
Since Russia invaded its western neighbour on February 24, 606 civilians have been killed and 1,248 injured in the Kharkiv region, the director of the Medical Department at the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration told Amnesty International.
Russia and Ukraine are not parties to the international conventions banning cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines. But, Amnesty stressed, “international humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate attacks and the use of weapons that are indiscriminate by nature”.
“Launching indiscriminate attacks resulting in death or injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects, constitutes war crimes.”
A large number of Kharkiv residents have been forced to leave the city due to heavy shelling since the February invasion.
Al Jazeera reported from the city in March showing the widespread destruction due to the Russian bombardments, with an Al Jazeera correspondent describing the city as one ridden with “apocalyptic scenes” of bombed-out buildings.
More than six million refugees have fled Ukraine since Russia’s invasion began on February 24 by May 11, according to figures from the United Nations refugee agency.
In May, Amnesty International reported war crimes in Ukraine, including the “wilful killings of civilians” by Russian forces when they occupied an area northeast of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in February and March.
Similarly, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Russia of carrying out “apparent war crimes”, detailing summary executions, torture and other grave abuses in two regions of Ukraine.
Ukraine says it has launched more than 12,000 war crime probes since the war began.
Russian opposition politician, anti-corruption campaigner and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Alexey Navalny is seen on the screen during his legal appeal against his nine-year prison sentence. (photo: Getty)
“There is no such convict here,” authorities chillingly said, according to a social media post by close Navalny associate Leonid Volkov.
The news of Navalny’s disappearance instantly raised alarms about the 46-year-old’s safety, given that he is perhaps Vladimir Putin’s most prominent Russian critic. His challenge to the Kremlin’s repressions was seen as a threat even before the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine put the ruling regime into an acutely paranoid crouch.
In 2009 tax attorney Sergei Magnitsky was beaten and left to die in a Russian prison after exposing widespread Kremlin corruption. The dissident activist Ildar Dadin also described inhumane treatment of prisoners. “If I am again faced with torture, beatings and rape I am unlikely to hold out more than a week,” Dadin wrote in 2016.
Navalny survived an attempted poisoning by Russian security services in 2020. He recuperated in Germany but then returned to Russia last summer, where, as expected, he faced arrest on fictitious charges.
He received a nine-year sentence earlier this year, about a month after Putin invaded Ukraine.
Navalny’s attorneys try to visit him on weekdays, in large part to simply assure that he is alive and has not been tortured.
“Unfortunately, the rule of law doesn’t apply in Russia, and it especially doesn’t apply to Alexei Navalny,” said Anna Veduta, a close Navalny associate who serves as vice president of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, which Navalny founded.
“Of course, neither Alexei’s attorneys nor his relatives were informed about his transfer in advance,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter. “There were rumors that he was going to be transferred to the high-security penal colony IK-6 ‘Melekhovo’, but it is impossible to know when (and if) he will actually arrive there.”
Yarmysh wrote on Twitter that news reports of a transfer to the prison in Melekhovo had not been confirmed by the Navalny camp.
Melekhovo is farther east than Navalny’s former prison at Pokrov but not as remote as the penal colonies east of the Ural Mountains — a region that stretches into Siberia. During the Soviet era, prisoners filled Gulags, or camps, in the empire’s frozen outermost reaches, where abuses could be committed without any worry of oversight.
To this day, Russian penal colonies are notoriously brutal, especially for high-profile critics of the Putin regime.
“We don’t have any communication with Alexei right now,” Veduta told Yahoo News in a phone conversation. “He is in the hands of the same people who tried to assassinate him in the first place.”
The transfer of prisoners, known as etapirovanie in Russia, can be an especially ruthless and protracted affair, during which prisoners disappear in Russia’s physical and bureaucratic vastness.
“The very fact that a person disappears from the field of view of relatives and rights workers is scandalous, especially in modern times,” prison reformer Valery Sergeyev told Radio Free Europe in 2013.
“Sometimes people die on the road,” Veduta told Yahoo News. “Or get severely tortured. There is no oversight.”
Nor is a transfer to Melekhovo anything to cheer for Navalny’s supporters. “This penal colony,” Veduta said, “is known to be one of the very toughest and torturous in the whole Russia.”
The Ukrainian military has tactical successes in the Kherson region. (photo: Reuters)
“We are approaching Tomyna Balka, which is 20 kilometers away from the city of Kherson, where the invaders are. Currently, fighting is going on between Tavrijs’ke and Tomyna Balka.”
Hlan’ stressed that the Ukrainian army has achieved tactical victories, which should be utilized for counteroffensive momentum.
“No matter how hard the invaders try to recapture and regain their lost positions, they fail, and they roll back even more,” Hlan pointed out.
“Basically, we are gradually gaining an advantage.”.
When it comes to shelling, unlike the enemy, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are so accurate that they actually hit enemy equipment and ammunition, says Hlan, and, in contrast to the Russian military, not random civilian structures.
District attorney Joe Gonzales of Bexar county in Texas, Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, Virginia's attorney for Fairfax county Steve Descano. (photo: AP)
The end of Roe could usher in a complex legal landscape with different enforcement regimes in different states, and even within them
Nessel plans to protect that same right for residents of her state if Roe v Wade is overturned this summer, as a leaked supreme court draft opinion indicates is all but certain.
If the draft opinion stands, 26 states are likely or certain to ban abortion . In Michigan, a 1931 law would be triggered, making abortion illegal in almost all cases except to save the life of the pregnant person.
Nessel says she won’t enforce the ban in Michigan, along with at least a dozen law enforcement officials across the country – a bold statement that sets the US up for a complex legal landscape with different enforcement regimes in different states, and even within them.
These officials are likely to face swift backlash from the right, including, in some cases, retaliation from state authorities who will demand they enforce the law as written. But they are determined to press ahead.
“I don’t want to see politicians removing the rights I had during the course of my pregnancy for other women,” says Nessel. Her opponent in the race for state attorney general this November, Matt DePerno, has said he would not support any exceptions to an abortion ban, even to save the mother’s life.
Now, Nessel has a complex set of legal questions on her hands – even if she is re-elected, and despite having Michigan’s governor on her side.
“How do we make sure that if complaints are filed, physicians won’t lose their licenses to practice medicine? [How do we] ensure insurance carriers don’t drop [them]?” she asks.
“I don’t want to see medical emergencies, where women are literally left to die on an operating table, because of an ectopic pregnancy, or complications in a pregnancy. I don’t want the doctor saying, ‘I’m out. I’m not going to risk losing my license … or going to jail,’” she says.
So she is working in conjunction with Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who is bringing a lawsuit asking the Michigan supreme court to protect abortion in the state’s constitution, and to get a voter-backed referendum on the books that will protect other reproductive rights, such as the right to contraception.
“We’re not helpless. And this is not hopeless. That’s the message that I want to send,” Nessel says.
Steve Descano was thinking about his 10-year-old daughter when he pledged not to enforce abortion bans in his home county of Fairfax, Virginia. Virginia is not one of the 26 states that will automatically ban abortion if the supreme court overturns Roe, but access could become tenuous.
Descano is worried about comments made by Virginia’s governor, Glenn Youngkin, who has described himself as “pro-life” and anti-abortion with exceptions for rape, incest and when the mother’s life is in jeopardy.
“I don’t want [my daughter] to grow up in a world where she’s a second-class citizen, where she can’t make her own healthcare decisions,” Descano said.
In a post-Roe landscape, Descano says, women could be regularly criminalized – investigated for miscarriages, with state officials rifling through their trash to learn about their sexual history.
“Police officers can get search warrants, they can go into emails, they can go into text messages,” he said. “If we take this strong stand it disincentivizes them from doing any of that,” he adds – vowing to protect providers in his county as well as people who seek out an abortion.
Descano and other progressive district attorneys are basing their pledges on successes they have already had in the fight to decriminalize marijuana possession. In Texas, the district attorneys for Nueces, Travis and Bexar counties all promised not to prosecute possession cases that came to them. They intend do the same with abortion.
Descano’s own fight to decriminalize marijuana in Virginia wasn’t easy – he says judges who opposed him dragged out the battle, arguing Descano could not dismiss such cases – even though a district attorney’s dismissals are usually granted.
That fight does not offer a perfect roadmap. With marijuana, Descano had a nationwide trend toward liberalization on his side. Abortion is moving in the opposite direction. But Descano – who said he was prepared to go to jail in order to stick to his promise – says the precedent taught him how to win these fights.
“It became very clear we weren’t going to prosecute. [So] police officers stopped spending their time on it,” he said.
Council leaders in Austin, Texas, are putting forward a proposal to restrict city funds from being spent on investigating abortion crimes if Roe is overturned this summer. They will also make the investigation of abortion crimes the lowest priority for the police department.
In effect, that would mean officers have to investigate every accusation of littering before they investigate an abortion. Texas is one of the 13 states that has a “trigger law” in place, which means a clinician could be charged with a first-degree felony punishable by up to life in prison and a $100,000 fine for performing an abortion if Roe falls.
But non-enforcement obviously isn’t a silver bullet against abortion bans. Laws like Texas’s SB 8, which bans abortion at six weeks, allow individuals to sue abortion providers. Those aren’t criminal cases, so law enforcement officials have little power over them, making the law difficult to challenge in court.
Furthermore, in the event of a total abortion ban, many clinics will close – afraid of legal repercussions and strapped for cash without patients. And even if localities vow to protect individuals, that might not provide sufficient reassurance.
“The biggest issue here is whether or not any clinic will [exist in] San Antonio,” said district attorney Joe Gonzales, of Bexar county in Texas, who has also pledged non-enforcement.
“[A ban] is not going to make women any safer. What you’re going to see is a lot of backroom procedures being done, jeopardizing the health and possibly the life of the woman,” he said.
“Regardless of whether your local prosecutor says he won’t prosecute, it is going to have a major chilling effect,” Descano said. “With stances like ours, we’re playing for time, we’re limiting the damage – but we’re not undoing the worst parts of these abortion bans,” he says.
Rachel Rebouchét, the interim dean at the Temple University School of Law, recently co-wrote a paper about some of the legal quandaries that will arise over the enforcement of abortion laws if Roe v Wade is overturned. She raises a number of potential obstacles to those hoping to ignore future abortion bans.
The state might fight non-enforcement with all its might, punishing localities and overriding their sovereignty, she says. That might mean passing laws to ensure state enforcement trumps local control, neutralizing any local efforts to direct funds or priorities away from abortion cases. Or it could mean forcing counties to collect information on reported abortion “crimes”, therefore stymieing any efforts to forego investigations. It could even mean states appointing special prosecutors to enforce abortion laws if DAs refuse.
But Rebouchét says such measures would be time-consuming and costly and could result in further retaliation and stalemates – not to mention backlash at the ballot box – enhancing local prosecutors’ chances of success.
“You could envisage an uneasy truce, with [a total ban] being the state’s public policy, but with some pockets retaining limited access, because of the costs of trying to make a ban work,” she said.
This is to say nothing of the conflicts that may arise between states that ban abortion and those that choose to expand access. According to Rebouchét, we are in an unusual moment in American history, where basic principles of inter-state conduct – such as cooperation between states; the sovereignty of each state within its own borders; and a general willingness of states to comply with criminal extradition requests – are under threat.
“There haven’t been many instances in American history – the civil war would be one of them – where you will see as much interstate conflict,” she says. She points to a recent bill that was weighed and eventually blocked in Missouri , which would have allowed individuals to sue anyone attempting to help a patient travel across state lines to have an abortion. These sorts of attempts may become more commonplace, and possibly have more success, if Roe falls.
“Missouri, trying to apply its policy across its borders, is like Nebraska saying you can’t gamble in Las Vegas. We just don’t expect that’s how states work,” Rebouchét says.
But on the local level, officials are hopeful their pledges will make a difference. As Gonzales of Bexar puts it:
“For now, the way the present state of law is: I get the final say. I have the ability to make those calls. And until the law changes, that’s how it’s going to be,” he says.
Outreach workers for SEARCH - one of the many organizations that make up Houston’s homelessness services - interview people living in a tent encampment. (photo: Christopher Lee/The New York Times)
The nation’s fourth-largest city hasn’t solved homelessness, but its remarkable progress can suggest a way forward.
I had come to watch the process and, more broadly, to see Houston’s approach to homelessness, which has won a lot of praise. At first, I couldn’t figure out why this particular underpass had been colonized. The sound of trucks revving their engines ricocheted against the concrete walls like rifle shots; and most of Houston’s homeless services were miles away. But then Ms. Rausch’s team, and a few camp residents, pointed out the nearby fast food outlets, the Shell station with a convenience store, and the Planet Fitness, where a $10 monthly membership meant access to showers and outlets for charging phones.
It also wasn’t initially visible what distinguished this encampment clearance from the ones in cities like Los Angeles and Austin, where the number of homeless people has been skyrocketing along with frustrations. The difference couldn’t be seen because it had already happened. For more than a month, Ms. Rausch and her colleagues had been coordinating with Harris County officials, as well as with the mayor’s office and local landlords. They had visited the encampment and talked to people living there, so that now, as tents were being dismantled, the occupants could move directly into one-bedroom apartments, some for a year, others for longer. In other words, the people living in the encampment would not be consigned to homeless shelters, cited for trespassing or scattered to the winds, but, rather, given a home.
During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.
Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.
There are addiction recovery and religious conversion programs that succeed in getting people off the street. But housing first involves a different logic: When you’re drowning, it doesn’t help if your rescuer insists you learn to swim before returning you to shore. You can address your issues once you’re on land. Or not. Either way, you join the wider population of people battling demons behind closed doors.
“Before I leave office, I want Houston to be the first big city to end chronic homelessness,” Sylvester Turner told me. In late January, Mr. Turner, who is serving his final term as mayor, joined Harris County leaders in unveiling a $100 million plan that would use a mix of federal, state, county and city funds to cut the local homeless count in half again by 2025.
Mr. Turner chose his words with care, and it’s important to parse his phrasing. “Chronic homelessness” is a term of art. It refers to those people, like many in the Houston encampment, who have been living on the streets for more than a year or who have been homeless repeatedly, and who have a mental or physical disability. Nationwide, most of those who experience homelessness do not fall into that narrow category. They are homeless for six weeks or fewer; 40 percent have a job. For them, homelessness is an agonizing but temporary condition that they manage to resolve, maybe by doubling up with relatives or friends.
There are at the same time many thousands of mothers and children, as well as couch-surfing teenagers and young adults who are ill-housed and at risk. These people are also poor and desperate. Finding a place to sleep may be a daily struggle for them. They might be one broken transmission or emergency room visit away from the streets. They’re in the pipeline to homelessness. But they are not homeless according to the bureaucratic definition. They are not sleeping on a sidewalk or in their cars or in shelters. Houston can offer these people a hand, but Mr. Turner is not promising to end the precariousness of their lives.
“We are not here to solve poverty. We aren’t here to fix the affordable housing problem” is how Ms. Rausch puts it, adding, “Think of the homeless system in America as an emergency room for a triaged slice of poverty. What Houston has achieved is to get itself far enough along in addressing the challenge that we can hope to begin to think about the pipeline to homelessness.”
Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.
The goal in Houston and among other cities attacking the problem is different: to make homelessness only “rare and brief,” to cite Rosanne Haggerty, the housing advocate. Five states — California, New York, Florida, Washington and Texas — now account for 57 percent of the people experiencing homelessness. Not coincidentally, it is worst in those big cities where affordable housing is in short supply, the so-called NIMBYs are powerful, and the yawning gap between median incomes and the cost of housing keeps growing. Houston fits that description. The scale of its woes does not approach what is happening in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles. But the progress it has made in housing people is instructive and replicable. It constitutes a fragile, compelling success.
By midafternoon on that July day, Ms. Rausch’s team had transferred those living in the encampment to their new residences. Among the people relocated was a shy, 39-year-old woman named Terri Harris. Ms. Harris had leaped at the prospect of an apartment when outreach workers approached her in the camp. She was tired of living on the streets, but, above all, she was desperate to reunite with her three-year-old daughter, Blesit, whom she had had to leave with her sister.
Two outreach workers packed Ms. Harris into a white van, along with a Hefty trash bag stuffed with household supplies and a Bible. Ms. Harris looked nervous but smiled as the van drove off.
At the end of the ride was a one-bedroom apartment.
“We Started Talking to Each Other”
Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.
The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.
During the 1980s, back-to-back recessions, combined with the Reagan administration’s severe federal cutbacks targeting low-income housing and poverty assistance programs, forced more and more Americans — including large numbers of families — into homelessness. At the same time, well-paid manufacturing jobs moved overseas, and steelworkers had to start pushing brooms at McDonald’s. An oil crisis drove up fuel prices, which bumped up rents, as did a new generation of gentrifiers discovering the architectural pleasures of historic neighborhoods.
On top of all that, Reagan-era tax reforms encouraged the construction of high-end, single-family homes but not of affordable multifamily rentals. There were 515,000 multifamily homes built in America in 1985, but just 140,000 built in 1991. As people began competing for fewer and fewer apartments, the affordable housing market turned into a game of musical chairs played by low-income Americans. Someone always lost.
A decade ago, Houston had one of the highest per capita homeless counts in the country. Its homeless response system was in shambles. The city was squandering millions of public dollars and police officers’ time by jailing homeless Houstonians for intoxication. Residents living on the streets, under bridges and along the bayous were using ambulances to get basic medical care because they had no other way to do so.
And, as in other cities, dozens of local aid organizations, public and private, were operating in silos — competing for federal funds, duplicating services, not sharing information or goals, housing precious few people.
Jessica Preheim, the vice president for strategic planning at Houston’s Coalition for the Homeless and one of Ms. Rausch’s colleagues, remembers that every five or six years the Houston Housing Authority would announce a lottery for anyone hoping to get on the waiting list for federal housing vouchers. As Ms. Preheim recalls, if you wanted to enter the lottery, you needed first to hear the announcement, then submit an application in writing within a few days, before the lottery closed. If, by some miracle, your name were drawn, you would receive notification by snail mail, which, of course, required a street address.
It was a recipe for not housing homeless people.
Thao Costis, who runs a homeless service provider in Houston called SEARCH, said that back then her organization, like many in the city, was trying to do everything: outreach, case management, child services, employment training, paying rent to landlords to house clients. “SEARCH was $1 million in the hole,” Ms. Costis remembers, “and the people who most needed help weren’t getting it.”
What started to bring about change was the passage in 2009 of the Hearth Act, which stipulated that, in order to receive federal dollars, cities had to adopt a “housing first” policy and, crucially, that homeless organizations had to work together in “continuums of care” under a single lead agency, coordinating their programs and sharing data. The federal government had recommended these continuums of care since 1994, but not until the Hearth Act was funding tied to specific metrics of effectiveness.
With the new regulations set to take effect in 2012, the Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development offered money and expertise to 10 cities where homelessness was a particular problem. Houston was among them.
Annise Parker was Houston’s mayor at the time. I went to see her earlier this year. She lives with her wife, Kathy Hubbard, in a three-story gabled house built in 1904 on a pretty, tree-lined street in the Montrose neighborhood. Hanging in Ms. Parker’s foyer are framed photographs of the three daughters she and Ms. Hubbard adopted out of foster care, as well as of a teenage boy, now a man in his mid-40s — “a runaway from grandparents who tried to force the ‘gay’ out of him,” Ms. Parker says — who was living on the streets when they took him in.
Ms. Parker is the opposite of a slick politician: blunt, wonky, unassuming. A software analyst in the oil and gas industry for 20 years, she became city controller, managing Houston’s money, before being elected America’s first openly lesbian, big-city mayor in 2009.
She won with bipartisan support as a Democrat on a centrist platform of fiscal responsibility. “Through our son, I had an up close and personal look at what life was like for somebody on the streets who was treated as disposable,” Ms. Parker told me. “Different organizations were all working in their own lanes, according to their own rules and procedures, doing what they wanted to do. There might be 100 open shelter beds on a given night designated for mothers with kids, but we didn’t have mothers with kids who needed beds.”
The White House offered an expert on homeless aid, Mandy Chapman-Semple, to help Ms. Parker herd the cats. They invited dozens of the city’s homeless-service providers to a meeting. “We started talking to each other” is how Ms. Preheim remembers that moment. “Sometimes it is as simple as that.”
The continuum was given a name, The Way Home, and the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County was appointed its lead agency. Some food banks and religious and other service providers that made prayer or sobriety conditions for housing did not join. But more than 100 local and regional organizations eventually signed on.
Houston started collecting real-time data, as opposed to relying solely on a once-a-year census. At first, the goal was to house 100 homeless veterans in 100 days, and after that was achieved, 300 more in another 100 days. “Then we thought, if we can do that, we can do something really big,” Ms. Parker told me.
It may seem surprising that, of all cities, Houston — built on a go-it-alone oil business culture — decided to tackle homelessness by, in effect, collectivizing its homeless relief system. Houston is a business-friendly city in a purple county in a red state, with more than its share of neighborhood housing covenants. But Houstonians will tell anyone willing to listen that they are nothing if not pragmatic.
The Houston Housing Authority joined the continuum. It agreed that 250 homeless clients a year could jump to the top of the waiting list for vouchers. Since that change, thousands have received vouchers and been housed.
SEARCH also joined. Coordination meant that Ms. Costis’ group could focus on case management, leaving job training, child care and other services to fellow continuum members. That, in turn, allowed it to avoid financial collapse and to hire more case managers, a critical need.
“People were suddenly being housed with lightning speed,” Ms. Costis recalled. “It was a phenomenal difference.”
It helped, Ms. Parker says, “that back then we still had slack in our housing market and reasonably priced land. It also helped that we created a center for sobriety, stopped arresting 20,000 people a year for public intoxication and started handing out taxi vouchers to homeless people so they wouldn’t use ambulances as personal taxis. All that saved us a fortune and made sense. But the bottom line is that nearly everybody in Houston involved in homelessness got together around what works. That’s our secret sauce.”
I struggled with this explanation. Housing first is not a new idea, after all. Other cities receive federal funds and have continuums of care. They don’t achieve the same results.
“You can meet the letter of the law without embracing its true intent” is how Ms. Chapman-Semple put it to me. San Diego, for example, another of the 10 cities targeted by the Obama administration, created a continuum; but unlike Houston, which cut its homeless count by nearly two-thirds, San Diego was able to reduce the number by only 19 percent, a 2020 city audit concluded, because of a piecemeal approach to housing first and “ineffective” strategic planning.
Atlanta, too, was adrift until neighboring counties dropped out of a joint continuum and the city set up its own, modeling its approach on Houston’s. Atlanta has since cut its homeless numbers by 40 percent and gained increasing corporate support — a vital source of additional funding. “When you get the public sector aligned, it becomes much easier to go to the private sector and say, ‘Join us,’” Cathryn Vassell, who runs Atlanta’s continuum, told me.
Getting businesses squarely behind solutions to homelessness, beyond their usual token contributions, is clearly a challenge in other places. In 2020, city councilors in Seattle approved a tax on businesses to support homeless housing. But the councilors rescinded the tax less than a month later in the face of opposition from big employers, including Amazon, which temporarily halted construction of a downtown tower in protest. Corporate leaders explained that they didn’t trust the city to spend the money effectively. As a consequence of Houston’s more united front, city officials were able to channel private money and federal emergency relief dollars in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, in 2017, to help supercharge the housing of unhoused Houstonians. And now Covid money, which other cities have spent on temporary shelters and hotel rooms, is paying the rent for thousands of apartments for the continuum’s homeless clients.
A Reprieve, and the Clock Starts Ticking
The apartment to which outreach workers drove Terri Harris from the underpass in July was in a low-rise, garden-style development from the 1980s. Brenda Salinas, a case manager from a service provider called Baker Ripley, helped Ms. Harris sign a lease in the front office and walked her to a ground-floor one-bedroom with a red front door. Ms. Salinas then captured a video of Ms. Harris, in flip-flops and a blue tank top, taking a couple of deep breaths, rising excitedly onto her tiptoes and turning the key.
Just a week earlier, the outreach team had found Ms. Harris in her tent under the highway. Now, as if by magic, here she was, shellshocked after five years on the streets. Opening the apartment’s door revealed an empty, white-walled living room with a tidy galley kitchen, which the outreach workers began to stock with basic supplies. The coalition would send furniture and other household items in a few days. Ms. Harris pulled open one kitchen drawer, then another. Her expression recalled Tom Hanks’s character in “Cast Away,” when he’s finally back home, staring with disbelief at the simple sight of ice in a glass. The walk-in closet in the bedroom was bigger and nicer than any place Ms. Harris had lived with her daughter, Blesit. Ms. Harris hugged the caseworkers. Then she collapsed onto the carpet and wept.
She was lucky. The vast majority of the 50,000 people in the Houston area who sought some type of homelessness service in 2021 did not qualify for an apartment. Most were “diverted”: they received rental assistance, or were given help signing up for food stamps or Social Security benefits. Part of the job of the continuum is to identify and assess people according to a federal “vulnerability index,” which uses a series of standard questions to determine who on the streets is most vulnerable. Meant to systematize a selection process historically rife with discrimination and random decision-making, the index has its own racial and gender biases, critics say. One study, for example, showed that while white and Black women have the same odds of experiencing homelessness because of trauma, white women are much more likely to report trauma and thus score higher on the index. Houston has cooked up a version that aspires to be more sensitive and tailored to conditions specific to the city.
Those who receive the highest scores on Houston’s index — the chronically homeless — become eligible for what is known as permanent supportive housing. “Supportive” means that, in addition to receiving housing, the person is given money for rent, utilities, bus fare and other necessities, and is assigned a case manager who helps with access to employment programs, psychiatric and substance abuse treatment.
That housing first gets people off the street is undisputed. Critics do question whether it does a better job than programs mandating substance-abuse treatment or other behavioral interventions at improving the long-term health of chronically homeless individuals. Some skeptics argue that, in a universe of limited resources like vouchers, prioritizing the most challenging cases can disadvantage housing-insecure families, those in substandard housing and others who need help. But these arguments miss the point of housing first, proponents respond.
“The homeless guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is always spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the world, so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” Ms. Parker, the former mayor, says. “But you can’t complain about him being on the street and also complain about getting him off it.”
Economists disagree about how to measure the costs of housing first to taxpayers. Estimates point to significant savings — from $4,800 to more than $60,000 per year per person in supportive housing. But advocates contend that programs to reduce homelessness should not be measured by whether they save taxpayers money, particularly given that government subsidies are heavily tilted toward homeowners.
Because she didn’t have a disability, Terri Harris didn’t qualify for permanent supportive housing. But she did score high enough on Houston’s version of the index for what was called rapid rehousing, which is what most people who qualify for housing in the city — 4,233 of them in 2021 — are offered. The continuum pays for an apartment leased in a client’s name for a year and for help from a case manager. The client has that year to get on his or her feet and find either the means to pay the rent or some other place to live. It’s a respite, a chance, not a guarantee. There are critics of rapid rehousing who contend it’s just kicking the can down the road. In Houston, nearly three-quarters of those who have been rapidly rehoused remain housed afterward — a lot, albeit not everyone.
When I first encountered Ms. Harris, following the encampment’s dismantling, she responded to questions only with yes or no answers. Six months later, I visited her again, in her apartment. It was a blustery morning. She curled up on a dark gray sofa that now occupied a corner of her living room. Blesit slept under a sheet on a mattress in the bedroom. With Ms. Salinas, her case manager, and another worker from Baker Ripley on hand, Ms. Harris seemed more at ease.
She told me that she was born in Decatur, Ill., and that her parents were drug addicts and alcoholics. At age 12, while her mother was visiting relatives in Texas, she was abused by her father and uncle. Her mother brought Terri to Houston.
There, a high school counselor helped her get therapy. She graduated and enrolled in a community college but had to quit to care for a wheelchair-bound relative and started spiraling toward “a whole new level of depression.” Twice, she said, she tried to kill herself: “When I looked in the mirror,” she told me, “I saw my father’s face.” Her tragedies multiplied. Her mother lost a job in a warehouse, and Ms. Harris’s meager wage as a caretaker was all that sustained them. Unable to pay rent, the two were evicted. They moved into their car. Then the car broke down.
Eventually, Ms. Harris ended up on the streets, where a relationship left her pregnant. After Blesit was born, Ms. Harris and the baby lived in a tent until someone living in a house nearby threatened to call child services. That’s when Ms. Harris left her daughter with her sister and found the encampment under the highway.
A manager in one of the nearby fast food restaurants gave Ms. Harris something to eat now and then. In search of a bed, she trekked a few times to Star of Hope, a first-come-first-served women’s shelter on the other side of town. She was willing to take Bible lessons, as that shelter required, but there was never an open spot.
She had been welcomed in the new apartment complex, Ms. Harris told me. One neighbor offered her a ride to a grocery store. “But I have nothing to give her back, so I don’t like to ask for help,” Ms. Harris said. She had not told anyone she had been homeless. “My neighbors are upscale people. I want them to see me like a regular person. People look at you with disgust when they think you’re homeless.”
It was January, and she was scraping by on $443 a month in food stamps.
“They Didn’t Want to Rent to Us Anymore”
Not far from Ana Rausch’s house in a leafy, middle-class suburb northwest of downtown Houston, a community of people camped for years unnoticed. Then an AutoZone arrived and cleared away the brush that hid them. “Suddenly, my neighbors complained about homeless people moving in,” Ms. Rausch recalled. “They talked about the ‘dangerous tent people,’ as if these people hadn’t been living there quietly, and without trouble, all that time.”
This is one reason Mayor Turner, who has gradually leaned into his predecessor’s homeless agenda, has prioritized clearing encampments while also proclaiming his commitment to housing the unhoused. Perception shapes policy. Homelessness nationwide has been rising since 2016, mostly because of a few big, affordable-housing-starved, shelter-dependent coastal cities. Before then it had been declining, and the number of people experiencing homelessness across the country was still lower at last count, in 2020, than it was a decade earlier. But decline is not what many people perceive, even in places like Houston. The grinding, day-to-day efforts to interview unhoused people, find them suitable apartments, help them get food stamps and bus fare, happen largely unnoticed, easily overshadowed by the sight of even one person sleeping on a sidewalk or beside a busy highway. And sentiments have changed. “Housing the homeless used to be something everybody agreed on,” Ms. Chapman-Semple says. “But there’s something new in America — an intolerance, a cultural shift.”
That shift is partly fueled by violence like the killings this year of Christina Yuna Lee in her apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown and of Michelle Alyssa Go, who was shoved from a Times Square subway platform into an oncoming train. In each case, the police arrested a homeless man with a history of mental illness. Ms. Rausch understands why people fear someone who appears mentally ill or out of control. She was raised by a single mother who struggled to pay the bills, and she sometimes wrestles with what is owed to, say, an unhoused man who rejects a spot in one of Houston’s new single-room-occupancy projects because he says he wants to hold out for a one-bedroom.
“There was a time my mom struggled to buy food,” she recalls. “Some of the places where my mother and I lived are where we now place homeless clients. ”
The Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.
“Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”
Jeremy Sanders, a caseworker whose job is to help homeless people, told me that he has struggled to stay housed. Married, with two children, Mr. Sanders earns $43,000 a year. “For a while, when my wife wasn’t working, I needed grace from our landlord,” he said. “It was tough coming to work every day, smiling with my colleagues and the clients, because I really wasn’t sure whether we would have a place to live next month.” As it happened, Mr. Sanders’s wife found a job the day before I met him. “It was a good thing,” he said, “because we had spent our last savings.”
Mr. Fulton says that this compression at the lower end of the housing market means that rent-burdened Houstonians — people like Mr. Sanders — are competing with “the homeless for a shrinking stock of deteriorating apartments that are charging increasingly higher rents.” Housing vouchers from the federal government barely make a dent in the problem. In 2010, some 220,000 people in Houston qualified for 20,000 vouchers. Today, 600,000 people meet the requirements for just 40,000 vouchers.
“For most of my life, Houston was a place where anybody could find an affordable home if they were willing to drive far enough from downtown,” says Lance Gilliam, the chairman of the Coalition for the Homeless. “Partly, we’ve become victims of our own success. Because the coalition was filling these sorts of places with tenants, they became more attractive to investors,” Mr. Gilliam said. “Some started saying they didn’t want to rent to us anymore.”
I met with a landlord whose buildings house some 200 formerly homeless clients of the continuum. She asked to remain anonymous so as not to stigmatize her company’s properties in the minds of other tenants or potential renters. She explained the calculus that landlords now make: During the last year, she said occupancy rates in the city reached 95 percent, and rents rose by 17 percent. Government rental vouchers guarantee monthly payments, but there is often more money to be made — and less red tape — when renting to unsubsidized tenants.
I learned this spring that 200 formerly homeless clients were told they might have to move from a complex run by a different landlord. The complex was sold last year, and the new owners were reconsidering the relationship with the continuum. The same was happening at six other properties in the area.
In response, Marc Eichenbaum, the mayor’s special assistant for homeless initiatives, starting holding weekly meetings with the continuum and with local housing authorities and county commissioners. They pondered converting derelict motel rooms into apartments as well as building new, subsidized properties, so that the continuum would not always be beholden to private landlords. But doing those things would take years.
To address the immediate problem, Mr. Eichenbaum reached out to landlords and, as he put it, “let them know that finding one-bedrooms for homeless Houstonians was a top priority for Mayor Turner.” Then “we organized a handoff to Mike Nichols and his team at the coalition to close the deal.”
Mike Nichols is the president of the Coalition for the Homeless. A former corporate executive who served two terms as a Democrat in Georgia’s House of Representatives, Mr. Nichols picked up the story: “I asked the landlords, ‘What do you need?’” Landlords, he said, complained about the maze of agencies they had to navigate when there was a problem with a tenant. “Now we’re meeting with the owners of properties about providing better service and moving out the few troublesome residents.”
Instead of losing apartments this year, Mr. Eichenbaum told me, “we’re hopeful we may gain up to 1,000 more than we had.” It’s not nearly enough to solve the city’s one-bedroom shortage but enough to stanch the bleeding and inch forward.
This was Houston’s homelessness story in a nutshell, I realized. “Housing people is a slow, extremely complicated, incremental process that requires all hands on deck, all the time, if you don’t want to settle for the status quo, much less go backward,” Mr. Eichenbaum said. “Everyone has to come together around the table.”
Nearly a year after watching people being moved out of the encampment in the underpass, that was still the city’s message and I still had a lot of questions. I wondered about the uncounted couch-surfing families and youth; about the underpaid, overtaxed caseworkers who cannot provide enough help; about the landlords refusing to house tenants with vouchers, and people like Ms. Harris and her daughter, Blesit, judged not quite desperate enough for more permanent housing.
But mostly I wondered what individuals would extract from Houston’s example. Homelessness is a calamity millions reckon with each day — a calamity provoking a mix of rage, fear and powerlessness in the housed and unhoused alike. For me, the big reveal after a year was not that Houston had solved the problem. It hasn’t. There is no one-time fix to homelessness.
The reveal was something different. It was that in broken America it’s still possible for adversaries to share facts and come together around something contentious and difficult. Public and private, county and city, businesses and nonprofits, conservatives and liberals, the housed and unhoused: In Houston, enough of them have agreed on a goal that seems worth striving for. Working in concert, they have made genuine progress in housing previously unhoused people. And, so far, the benefits of collaboration have fended off the usual forces of entropy. That was an eye-opener and a sign of hope.
Two Months to Come Up With $886 for Rent
The other day, I talked to Ms. Harris on the phone. After several months, she had finally come up with the $12 to replace her Texas identification card that had been stolen while she was living on the streets, as well as a Social Security card. With her new IDs, she could apply for jobs. A job listed at a Whataburger paid $9.53 an hour. But after dropping off Blesit with her sister and traveling across town, she was told by the restaurant manager that the position had been filled. A human resources firm was offering to help her with child care, but Ms. Harris hadn’t gotten around to arranging it, she told me, because it required she register online and only recently had she gotten access to a computer. Blesit’s father had found work at a Family Dollar across town, and, when he could, he took the bus to lend Ms. Harris a hand. Ms. Harris is now waiting to hear back about a job as a janitor.
She can’t sleep some nights out of fear of losing the apartment. “It’s the first time I have had my own place,” she said. “My neighbors watch out for me. I’ve learned how to save money, how to be an adult — how to be a mother. I want to finish college and watch my baby go to school and graduate.” But she has no housing voucher, and her lease will expire at the end of July unless she can come up with the $886 a month the continuum now pays in rent.
Anticipating that Ms. Harris may need to move, Ms. Salinas has reached out to a program called Shelters to Shutters, which provides an apartment and job training in return for work.
Ms. Harris is housed. But she isn’t home yet.
At a memorial in Washington, white flags represent the hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths in the U.S. (photo: Yasin Ozturk)
The numbers of lives lost and dollars spent would have been significantly lower if coverage had been extended to everyone, a new study says
A new study quantifies the severity of the impact of the pandemic on Americans who did not have access to health insurance. According to findings published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, from the pandemic’s beginning until mid-March 2022, universal health care could have saved more than 338,000 lives from COVID-19 alone. The U.S. also could have saved $105.6 billion in health care costs associated with hospitalizations from the disease—on top of the estimated $438 billion that could be saved in a nonpandemic year.
“Health care reform is long overdue in the U.S.,” says the study’s lead author Alison Galvani, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at the Yale School of Public Health. “Americans are needlessly losing lives and money.”
People who do not have insurance usually do not have a primary care doctor, which means they are more likely to suffer from preventable diseases such as type 2 diabetes. They also tend to wait longer to see a doctor when they fall ill. These two factors already contribute to higher mortality rates in nonpandemic years, and they compounded the impacts of COVID-19. Comorbidities exacerbate the risk of the disease, and waiting to seek care increases the likelihood of transmission to other people.
Prior to the pandemic, 28 million American adults were uninsured, and nine million more lost their insurance as a result of unemployment because of COVID-19. “Many Americans feel secure in having good health insurance from their employer, but employer-based insurance can be cut off when it is needed most,” Galvani points out.
In the new study, Galvani’s team compared the mortality risks of COVID-19 among people with and without insurance, as well as their risks of all other causes of death. The researchers compiled population characteristics of all uninsured Americans during the pandemic, taking into account things such as age-specific life expectancy and the elevation in mortality associated with a lack of insurance. They calculated that 131,438 people in total could have been saved from dying of COVID in 2020 alone. And more than 200,000 additional deaths from COVID-19 could have been averted since then, bringing the total through March 12, 2022, to more than 338,000.
The researchers also estimated the cost to insure the entire American population—and the savings that measure would produce. They found that a single-payer health care system would generate savings in three ways: more efficient investment in preventative care, lowered administrative costs and increased negotiating power for pharmaceuticals, equipment and fees. This would ultimately produce a net savings of $459 billion in 2020 and $438 billion in a nonpandemic year, the authors found. “Medicare for All would be both an economic stimulus and life-saving transformation of our health care system,” Galvani says. “It will cost people far less than the status quo.”
Galvani and her colleagues’ findings are “very convincing,” and “the methodology strikes me as exactly right,” says Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. “The savings estimates are consistent with every other estimate I’ve seen.”
Ann Keller, an associate professor of health policy and management also at U.C. Berkeley, suspects, however, that the new study likely underestimates the deaths that could have been avoided through universal health care because it does not consider the lower rates of chronic disease that often accompany single-payer systems. “Having consistent access to care can prevent chronic disease from occurring and can ensure that patients who develop chronic disease have it better managed,” says Keller, who was also not involved with the research. “I would think that, if one took that into account, the estimates of avoided deaths would be greater than the numbers reported here.”
Whatever the exact figures, Galvani says the message that comes out of the new study is clear: “Universal single-payer health care is both economically responsible and morally imperative.”
A child from a rice farming community in Jacobabad, Pakistan, keeps an eye on his family's water buffaloes as they bathe in record-breaking heat. (photo: VICE News)
Jacobabad, a city of 300,000, is ground zero of a warming planet. Scientists say it could be unlivable in a few decades.
Jacobabad, a city of 300,000, is ground zero of a warming planet. It is one of two cities on Earth that has passed heat and humidity thresholds that are hotter than the human body can handle. But it is arguably the most vulnerable to climate change. Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are a daily obstacle the city’s largely poor residents navigate, in addition to a water crisis and power outages that last 12-18 hours a day. Most save up to buy a single solar panel to cool their homes with a fan. But the city’s policy makers are not prepared, nor are they planning for a large-scale heatwave.
The private water station that VICE World News visited is run by a businessman who sits in the shade while watching the sellers squabble for their turn. He didn’t want to share his name because his business falls into a grey area of regulation. The city administration turns a blind eye to the private water sellers and water station owners, because they are meeting a basic need, but technically they are exploiting a water crisis. Pakistan is the third most water-stressed country in the world, and the situation is much more dire in Jacobabad.
The station owner said that at night, he sleeps in air-conditioning, while his family lives 250 miles away. “It’s too hot for them to live here,” he told VICE World News while claiming the city’s piped water is unreliable and filthy that’s why people buy from him. He said his take home is $2,000 a month. On good days, the water sellers, who buy from him and sell to locals, make enough profit to keep them right above Pakistan’s poverty line.
“I’m in the water business because I don’t have a choice,” an 18-year-old water seller who preferred not to share his name because of privacy concerns, told VICE World News as he filled his blue water canisters from a pipe at the water station. “I am educated. But there are no jobs here for me.” He said he often sells water canisters for 5 cents or 10 rupees, half the price of other sellers, because his customers are poor like him. A third of Jacobabad’s population lives in poverty.
In many ways Jacobabad seems stuck in the past, but the makeshift privatisation of basic utilities such as water and power here, provide a peek into a future where heatwaves will become more common across the world.
The city is currently experiencing an unprecedented 11-week-long heatwave, with temperatures averaging 47°C. Its local weather station has already recorded 51°C or 125°F a few times since March.
“The heatwave is silent. You sweat, but it evaporates and you don’t feel it. Water is being severely depleted from your body, but you don’t feel it. You don’t really feel the heat. But it suddenly makes you collapse,” Iftikhar Ahmed, who is a weather observer with Pakistan’s meteorological department in Jacobabad, told VICE World News. “It’s never been this hot for this long. It’s 48C right now, but it feels like it’s 50C (or 122F). And it will stay like this till September.”
No one knows Jacobabad’s weather better than Ahmed. He’s been recording the city’s temperature every day for more than 10 years. Ahmed’s office has a hundred-year old British barometer, a relic from this city’s past. For centuries, the Indigenous Peoples in this arid part of southern Pakistan, retreated from the brutal summers here and only came back in winter. Geographically, Jacobabad falls under the Tropic of Cancer, and the Sun is directly overhead in summer. But 175 years ago, when this area was under the British empire, an administrator named Brigadier-General John Jacob built a canal. A perennial rice farming community slowly developed around the water source. The city built around it is named after him: Jacobabad means Jacob’s settlement.
The city wouldn’t have attracted the global attention it did without the 2020 ground-breaking research of Tom Matthews, a leading climate scientist who teaches at King’s College in London. He observed that Pakistan’s Jacobabad and UAE’s Ras al Khaimah had already experienced lethal humid heat or wet bulb temperatures of 35°C a few times. That was decades before scientists had predicted the planet would break the 35°C threshold – exposure to which, for a few hours, is fatal. The human body cannot sweat fast enough or drink enough water fast enough to recover from that kind of humid heat.
“Jacobabad and its surrounding Indus Basin is an absolute hotspot for climate change impacts,” Matthews told VICE World News. “When you look at some of the things to worry about – from water security to extreme heat, you lay on top of that a vulnerable population – it’s really on the frontline globally.”
But Matthews also warned that the 35°C is a fuzzy threshold in reality. “The impact of extreme humid heat manifests well before that threshold is crossed,” he said from his home in London. “Many people won’t be able to dissipate enough heat depending on what they are doing, in wet bulb temperatures well below that threshold.”
Matthews said the kind of humid heat Jacobabad has recorded is very difficult to deal with without turning air conditioning on. But because of Jacobabad’s power crisis, he said underground cold refuges are another way to weather extreme heat. However, this comes with its own risks. Heatwaves often end with heavy rain that could flood underground refuges.
There are no easy solutions to Jacobabad’s future humid heatwaves, but according to climate projections they are imminent. “By the end of the century if we get to 4C of global warming then there will be areas in the South Asia region, the Persian Gulf region, and the North China Plain region that would cross that 35 C limit. Not every year, but a bad heatwave would take quite large regions across it,” warned Matthews.
Extreme weather isn’t a new story in Pakistan. But the frequency and scale of it is unprecedented.
“The difference between day temperatures and night temperatures is lessening across Pakistan, which is alarming,” Dr Sardar Sarfaraz, Pakistan’s Chief Meteorologist, told VICE World News. “Secondly, the rainfall patterns are changing. Sometimes you get heavy rain like we got in 2020, with massive urban flooding in Karachi. And sometimes you get drought-like situations. For example this year, February to May, four consecutive dry months, were the driest months in the history of Pakistan.”
This year’s dry heat has been bad for crops but less lethal for people. In 2015, a humid heatwave killed 2,000 across Pakistan’s Sindh province, which Jacobabad belongs to. In 2017, climate scientists from MIT, built simulations based on current weather patterns and greenhouse emissions that predicted “deadly heatwaves in the densely populated agricultural regions of South Asia,” by the late 21st century. Jacobabad isn’t mentioned by name in their report, but the city pops a hazardous red in their maps.
The brutality of the climate crisis hits you in the face in Jacobabad. The dangerous summers coincide with peak rice harvest season and maximum power outages. But for many, leaving is not an option.
Khair Bibi, a rice farmer, lives in a mud house that could be from a few centuries ago, but has a solar panel running a fan. “Everything is harder because we are poor,” she told VICE World News as she rocked her malnourished six-month-old baby in a cloth hammock in the shade.
Khair Bibi’s family also knows that Jacobabad’s canal system that irrigates their rice fields and bathes their cattle has also polluted their ground water supply over time, so they venture out to buy filtered water from small-batch sellers for daily use.
That is just one of many health risks of living in this city.
“The more heat and humidity here, the more our bodies sweat and become vulnerable. If there is no humidity, we don’t realise we are sweating excessively, and we start to feel sick,” a 25-year-old rice factory worker named Ghulam Sarwar told VICE World News, as he was taking a five-minute break after carrying a 100 kilogram bag of rice with another worker. He works in brutal heat without a fan for 8-10 hours a day but he considers himself lucky because he works in the shade. “This rice bag here is 100 kilograms, that bag over there is 60 kilograms. There is shade here. There is no shade there. No one works in the sun out of pleasure, they do it out of desperation, to run their homes,” he said.
Children living near Khair Bibi’s rice farm can only play outside in the early morning before it’s boiling hot. They make play doh out of mud while their water buffalos cool down in a pond. A massive electricity tower looms behind them. Their city is connected to Pakistan’s power grid, but the country is in the middle of a power shortage, and the poorest cities, such as Jacobabad, get the least electricity.
The power cuts have a cascading impact in this city. Many in the city complained the constant power outages didn’t even allow for them to charge their battery-powered electricity sources or their mobile phones. This reporter’s iPhone overheated multiple times – with the city’s temperature consistently a few degrees more than Apple products can handle. Heat sickness is a lurking threat and without air conditioning, most plan their days around the power outages and having access to cool water and shade, especially during the most brutal heat hours between 11am and 4pm. The markets in Jacobabad are lined with ice blocks from ice factories and stores with battery-powered fans, cooling devices and single solar panels - which recent price hikes have made difficult to buy.
Nawab Khan, a solar panel seller in the market, has a sign behind him that translates to “you seem very nice, but being asked for a loan doesn’t feel nice.” He said the price of solar panels has tripled since he started selling them 8 years ago and many ask to pay in instalments which becomes difficult to manage.
And then there’s its impact on the water plants. The U.S. government spent $2 million to upgrade Jacobabad’s municipal water plant, but many locals say their lines are dry and authorities blame the power cuts. “The current population’s water demand is 8 million gallons a day. But we only manage to supply 3-4 million gallons from our water filtration plant because of the constant power interruptions,” Sagar Pahuja, a water and sanitation officer with Jacobabad city, told VICE World News. He added that if they ran the plant on power generators that use fuel, it would cost them $3,000 a day – money they don’t have.
Like the private water station owner claims, some locals VICE World News spoke to also complained that the water from the plant is not drinkable. A USAID report from last year also confirms complaints about the water. But Pahuja blames illegal connections with iron clamps that rust and contaminate the water supply.
There is currently another USAID water and sanitation project running in Jacobabad, that’s part of a larger $40 million programme in Sindh, the single largest U.S. investment in Pakistan’s health sector, but its impact is barely felt, given the extreme poverty pervading the city. American money has been visibly spent on a massive hospital that doesn't have an Emergency Room, which is what this city really needs with increasing heatwaves and people frequently dropping from heat stroke.
USAID in Pakistan did not respond to VICE World News’ repeated requests for comment. Their website says the money being funneled from the American people into Jacobabad is to improve the lives of its 300,000 citizens. But Jacobabad is also home to the Pakistan military’s Shahbaz Airbase, which is where American drones have flown from in the past and where U.S. aircrafts flew during Operation Enduring Freedom. Jacobabad has a 20-year-old history with U.S. marines, who never stepped foot off the airbase. U.S. troop presence in Pakistan has been a major source of contention over the years, although the Pakistani military denies their presence in Jacobabad.
Despite all the challenges of living here, Jacobabad’s population is increasing. The public schools and colleges have been a major attraction for years. The city is educating for jobs of the future even if most are scrambling to manage water and power needs and fighting heat exhaustion.
“We have a lot of crops here. I am studying insects that can survive in extreme heat and ones that attack rice crops. I want to study them to help farmers save their crops. I am hoping to discover a new species in my region,” Natasha Solang, an entomologist who teaches Zoology at one the city’s oldest colleges and the only college for women in the district, told VICE World News. “We have over 1,500 students. If there is a power outage, we can’t run fans. It gets very hot. We don’t have solar panels or alternate power sources. Students are giving their exams right now in extreme heat.”
Jacobabad is poor, hot and neglected, but this city’s community comes together to help itself. The camaraderie is evident in the city’s roads which have free volunteer-run shaded areas with water coolers and glasses and in rice factories where workers take care of each other. “When a worker gets heat exhausted, he collapses, then we take him to the doctor. If the factory owner pays for it, great. But if he doesn’t, we pay for it from our pocket,” said Sarwar, the rice factory worker.
Jacobabad’s road-side markets sell ice blocks for 50 cents or 100 rupees for people to take home, and they sell salted fresh seasonal fruit juice to cool down and electrolyte up for 15 cents or 30 rupees.
But the efforts of the community will not be enough for the future, especially if the government remains uninvolved.
Within South Asia, Pakistan’s Indus Basin communities are particularly vulnerable, but they fall under four different provincial government jurisdictions and the federal government does not have an overarching “extreme heat policy,” nor does it plan on building one.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s federal minister for climate change, told VICE World News that federal interference in provinces is not possible because they have no jurisdiction over them. All they can really do, she said, is issue “clear guidance SOPs for heat management” keeping the area’s vulnerability and water stress in mind.
But Jacobabad’s city’s administration or its provincial government is clearly not ready for a massive heatwave. The heatwave centre VICE World News visited had a dedicated doctor and nurse team, but only four beds.
Yet the locals here have too many battles to face in their present, to worry about their future.
“There is no support from the government but we support each other,” said Sarwar. “If no one asks about our health, that’s not a problem either. God gives the poor protection.”
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