A/HRC/56/68/Add.1 places that she could not visit, including Florida and New York City, and among Native American Indigenous communities. 14 People of African descent, who represent around 13 per cent of the general population, account for 37 per cent of people experiencing homelessness and more than 50 per cent of homeless families with children, according to some data. 15 Many unhoused people reportedly suffer from mental health problems and substance abuse. 26. State policy often exacerbates homelessness, excludes unhoused persons from public goods and accommodation and/or acts as a barrier to the protection and promotion of human rights. Many states with visible, intractable homelessness do not have right-to-shelter laws, rendering services and shelter initiatives voluntary and piecemeal. Many localities have passed laws banning and penalizing sitting, lying down, sleeping, using or maintaining personal property on a street or sidewalk, or in the vicinity of a school, day-care centre, park or library. The Special Rapporteur is shocked by such laws and policies, which criminalize homelessness, as well as by initiatives such as the targeting of encampments of unhoused persons, the banning of the sharing of food with unhoused people, and the disproportionate application of criminal sanctions for loitering, jaywalking or consuming alcohol among unhoused persons. Such practices unnecessarily and cruelly contribute to mass incarceration, obscure the State’s concrete obligation to prevent and address racial discrimination, and constitute a comprehensive status-based denial of social protection. 27. Gentrification policies were identified as a key driver of a lack of affordable housing and homelessness, despite states and municipalities having the ability to mandate affordable or free housing in communities as robustly as they subsidize and incentivize real estate developers’ investments. Some zoning laws ban so-called “tiny houses”, impose minimum size requirements on dwellings, or otherwise prohibit cost-effective initiatives to structurally target homelessness. The Special Rapporteur also received concerning information about spatial segregation along racial lines as a legacy of the racist practice of redlining. 28. Despite severe racially inequitable levels of homelessness, there has reportedly been a concerning shuttering of government services for unhoused persons, including in Los Angeles and Atlanta. Significant gaps and weaknesses in available support services persist, including a reported lack of appropriate services for unhoused lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons and unhoused women. The Special Rapporteur received information about very concerning cases that involved cessation of services because the service location was desirable to developers. G. Environmental racism 29. The devastating effects of the climate and ecological crises are disproportionately borne by those who face conditions of systemic inequality and racism, despite having contributed the least to the ongoing crises. The people affected are disproportionately concentrated in “sacrifice zones”, including “Cancer Alley”, which the Special Rapporteur visited in Louisiana. These are regions rendered dangerous and even uninhabitable owing to environmental degradation. The direct link from historical patterns of racial subjugation extending back to chattel slavery to state policy disregarding the health and other human rights of people affected in the relevant policymaking today is clear. 30. “Cancer Alley” is an area along the Mississippi River, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where many former plantations are located. The area is now inhabited predominantly by communities of African descent, including communities of descendants of enslaved people set up intentionally after emancipation. The acquisition of land formerly used as plantations by corporations and its use for extractive and harmful practices is deeply racially and culturally insensitive. Corporate activities reportedly take place in areas believed to be burial sites of those formerly enslaved persons. 14 15 GE.24-08027 National Alliance to End Homelessness, “Homelessness and racial disparities”, available at https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/what-causes-homelessness/inequality/. Ibid. 7