In North Carolina, the powers that be have sustained an all-out assault on poor and working people in the state. Even before the recent ruling on Grants Pass v. Johnson, where the US Supreme Court ruled it legal to criminalize homelessness, our local governments, including the capital Raleigh, have been rolling out laws that forcefully exclude houseless folks from so-called public property. Even during daytime hours, families and individuals are being threatened and harrassed by city employees while enjoying parks, while housed families are left undisturbed. In a state with 4.2 million poor and low-income people who are one paycheck or health crises away from being homeless, this is an alarming trend for our class. We say: Fight Poverty, not the Poor.

For many in North Carolina, there is great pride for our people and accomplishments. Our license plates say “First in Flight”, referring to the Wright Brothers who built and flew the first working airplanes in Kitty Hawk, NC. Here, there is an ethos of revering research and its shared benefit from the technology it helps to advance. The way it’s usually told, this technological progress is reflected for the whole population, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. And now, those firmly entrenched in power want to hide their locally-grown poverty, rather than be held accountable for increasingly impoverishing North Carolinians.

Steeped in a history of tobacco and cotton plantations, lumber mills, mining and textiles, North Carolina, like much of the South, has long been a refuge for the uber-rich. Wielding enslaved labor, poor white and Black sharecroppers, and immigrants – the planter class, the field, mine and factory owners, have historically paid as little as possible for the labor that make them so rich. These poor working conditions are still used today as a bludgeon against working people all over the nation, used to curtail unionization and inflame the national racial rift that has not been allowed to heal.

A shift in the State’s economy in the 1960’s started with a focus on retaining research-producing workers, who until then went to our well-funded state universities and would leave in order to find gainful employment. Sixty years later, the Research Triangle is a nexus of the state’s economy, attracting capital-intensive industries like electric vehicle and biotech manufacturing from around the world. How was it done? Lots of PR – but also through ruthless dismantling of worker protections and selling off of our resources and communities to the highest bidder. For example, state officials in 2021 secretly crafted an enormous tax benefits package called “Project Bear,” a honey pot for Apple’s desired East Coast HQ. Officials promised $1.2 billion taxpayer dollars to the mega corporation for building their extravagant campus. Meanwhile, nearly 200 of our rural hospitals have closed since 2005. It couldn’t be clearer the direction we are headed as a state.

Like many other parts of the country, North Carolina has sustained a huge increase in housing costs. We are a prime destination in the ongoing “reverse migration” back to the South. Land owners are frothing at the mouth, able to charge criminally high rents from the people leaving parts of the country with significantly higher living expenses. Municipalities, which enjoy a majority share of their tax base from property values, have done little to stop the rampant housing prices – not that they have many options. Local organizing has long been a fierce force in NC’s politics, but one of the biggest roadblocks lies at the state level.

These direct assaults on our class have gone hand-in-hand with a strategic takeover of our state’s most powerful institution: the state legislature. Holding the power of the purse, corporate-funded legislators have dramatically shifted socially necessary and constitutionally guaranteed spending to big business giveaways. For two years now, Oxfam has ranked NC the #1 state for businesses and #52 for workers, behind Puerto Rico and Washington DC. The legislature has continued to decimate public school funding and expand toxic gambling to pay for a 0% corporate income tax. As a “Dillon Rule” state, the NC legislature actively blocks municipalities from exercising democracy specifically around certain effective policies like setting minimum wage, establishing affordable housing or taxing the wealthy in order to fund the 30+ year public education fund gap. As a “right to work” state, workers have little rights for joining together in unions and consequently has the second lowest union membership rate behind South Carolina. On top of all this, Republican party leadership likes to brag about the multi-billion dollar budget surplus – what they call our “rainy day fund.”

But can it be called a surplus when 52% of our children live in poverty? When over 300,000 North Carolinians are being purged from the Medicaid rolls, despite a long overdue expansion of the program? When 1 of 5 children are food insecure? It is not a surplus when there is an overwhelming, immediate need to use it.

All of these factors are intentional decisions to enrich a small number of people while impoverishing most North Carolinians - pushing them towards homelessness, especially as economic conditions worsen. Local anti-homeless laws in Raleigh, our financial center Charlotte, Wilmington, and elsewhere are an attempt to hide the results of short-sighted policies and the very structure of our economy. Most importantly, these laws are killing people. Now is the time to fight back! We are organizing in North Carolina and across this death-dealing nation to take back Healthcare, Housing, and our Dignity. If you are houseless, one healthcare crisis or paycheck from homelessness, or know your liberation is entangled with ours, you can connect with us at NCHomelessUnion@gmail.com.