In the early morning hours of April 18, Hugo Alfredo
Tale-Yax, a homeless and undocumented day worker, came to the rescue of a
woman being assaulted, and was left for dead in the middle of the streets of
Jamaica, Queens. Tale-Yax witnessed a man attack the unidentified woman, and
immediately rushed to her help. He was stabbed several times by the assailant,
and collapsed on the street while dozens of people passed by. No one called for
assistance. After an hour and a half of being ignored by pedestrians,
firefighters responding to a non-life-threatening injury in the area found Hugo
lying dead in a pool of his own blood.
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Soon after the news broke throughout the country, the
corporate media began to use this tragic incident as an example of how people
“no longer care for one another.” They claimed that New Yorkers have become too
jaded and “their behavior may be a symptom of city living.”
It is easy to berate the characters of the people who
ignored Tale-Yax’s body on the sidewalk and blame it on the effects of living
in a city such as New York. What the media failed to address is that New
Yorkers may not have responded in part due to constant exposure to homelessness
in the city. Every year, about 100,000 New Yorkers experience homelessness, and
daily sightings of people sleeping in the streets are not uncommon for those
who live here.
Year after year, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration has failed
to lower the percentage of homeless people in New York, even though there are
tens of thousands of empty units in vacant buildings throughout the city—enough
to house every woman, man and child sleeping on the streets and obliterate
homelessness in the city altogether. So why are these empty units not being
rented out for an affordable price to homeless families?
Many of the profit-hungry landlords of these vacant
buildings hold off renting to poor families because they are speculating on the
future gentrification of these communities. It is more profitable for them
to wait until these areas become gentrified so they can then charge more
than double what they would have charged poorer families before the
neighborhood changed.
Under capitalism, these procedures are simply business as
usual. The bottom line will always come down to how much money can be made,
instead of addressing the actual needs of people in these poverty-stricken
communities.
Tale-Yax immigrated to the United States six years ago in
search of work. As an undocumented worker in this country, the job
opportunities were slim, and all he could find were various odd jobs. He
continued taking these jobs as often as they surfaced, but after a couple of
years of struggling, he was no longer able to pay for all of his living
expenses, and lost his home. Although Tale-Yax was still working whenever
he could, he had nowhere else to stay but out in the streets of Queens.
It is an absolute abomination that hard-working individuals
like Tale-Yax, who come to this country solely for employment and to add to the
already massive wealth of the United States with their labor, have to resort to
the sidewalk for shelter. Under socialism, housing is a right, not a privilege,
for all workers. No one should have to sleep on the streets while there are
countless vacant apartments, simply because it is more profitable for
landlords. In a socialist society it would never be “typical” to see a person
lying on the streets, and tragedies such as the death of the heroic Hugo
Alfredo Tale-Yax could be avoided altogether. It is time to put people over
profits!
