Your Profit Is Our Pain

By Crystal Sanchez, Western Regional Co-Director for The National Union of the Homeless, President of Sacramento Homeless Union

3/24/2025

Taken By Crystal Sanchez

Count the dollars that you make

From each tent that you forsake—

Eighty bucks per empty bed

While we sleep on concrete, dead.

Your shelter-industrial scheme

Profits from our broken dream.

Million-dollar contracts flow

To "fix" the crisis that you grow.

Empty offices reach highWhile your "programs" pass us by.

You build your empires on our backs,

Then label us the ones who lack.

Ten years of "emergency"—

Your business opportunity.

Each "sweep" brings funding to your door

While we get beaten, blamed, and more.

You call it "services provided"

While human rights remain divided.

Your "navigation centers" rise

Like prisons touching troubled skies.

Two toilets for a hundred souls,

While you collect your payroll rolls.

You say there's "shelter" when we call,

But waiting lists become our wall.

We see through your bureaucracy,

Your forms of new hypocrisy.

While billions flow through city halls,

Our people freeze behind your walls.

Your "housing first" became last place,

Your "help" a mask on profits' face.

But we're not numbers in your game,

Not statistics you can tame.

We're humans rising from these streets,

Our Union growing with heartbeats.

Your industry of homeless pain Won't break our will to fight again.

From Sacramento's burning ground

To every profit-poisoned town,

We stand together, proud and strong,

Exposing every systemic wrong.

Your complex built on others' grief

Will fall before our disbelief.

So count your dollars while you can,

Your "homeless services" grand plan.

Our power grows with every lie,

With every budget you deny.

The truth breaks through your money wall:

United people cannot fall.