Home Dispossession is an Atrocity. We can Start to End it Once We Stop Blaming the Victims.
We are looking at a social failure, not a series of personal failures.
It begins in different ways. For many teenagers, they are turned out onto the street when their parents discover they’re LGBT. For many adults, it can come with economic hardship. For women, it can happen as an extra-cruel byproduct of being abandoned by a husband or partner they had thought they were secure with.
Homelessness in the US is not just one issue. It reinforces other brutality.
It is a threat against all workers: work hard or this will happen to you.
It is a condition that keeps abused people from fleeing their abusers.
It is a racist, ableist reality that deems certain people worthless.
It makes people vulnerable to pimps and human traffickers.
What Concentration Camps are like
In her book One Long Night, Andrea Pitzer takes the reader through the history and experience of concentration camps. In many of our minds, the term concentration camps immediately conjures up images of the holocaust. However, the use of concentration camps has a much longer history. They were first created by the Spanish Empire as a method of suppressing insurgency in Cuba. The practice was soon adopted by the US in the Philippines, by Britain and Germany against one another’s emigres during World War One and in their African colonies. Britain continued to use concentration camps in Kenya after World War Two and after it had signed on to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The typical conditions in concentration camps are as follows:
- Lack of sanitation (resulting in disease)
- Lack of adequate food (resulting in malnutrition)
- Lack of protection from the elements
- Constant, intentional mistreatment
These are the same exact conditions faced by unhoused people, but rather than forcing people into physical concentrations, the police break up self-sustaining camps and tent cities, forcing people back into atomized competition for basic necessities. Another difference is that the mistreatment that comes with being unhoused comes not only from those “just following orders,” but also from people who’s only motivation is an unhinged, elitist hatred of the dispossessed.
The Brutality
People unlucky enough to lose their housing are, first and foremost, blamed for their predicament by default. Even people supposedly working to solve the problem hold assumptions that people living on the street need to be fixed as people; that the problem is them, not the way others are dehumanizing them.
Police mistreat unhoused people constantly. They spend countless hours telling unhoused people to “move along” from where they have been staying. They destroy and confiscate their belongings, including vital and expensive survival gear like tents and sleeping bags. When unhoused people form small camp communities and begin to cooperate (rather than compete) for resources, the state comes in to break up the camp and force them all back into atomized misery. Police also commonly wake unhoused people up in the middle of the night to tell them to move, denying them even their sleep.
The dehumanization is near-total. People walk by unhoused people and pretend they don’t exist. They are treated literally as living ghosts, as people merely waiting to die. And many of them do die. Of dehydration and heat exposure in the summer, and by freezing to death in the winters, of treatable disease and vulnerability to attack in all seasons.
Obviously, these are horrible ways to die.
They are the ways people die in concentration camps.
Police-Enforced Atomization
Often unhoused people will attempt to congregate and take care of one another’s needs as a community. This works much better than camping and wandering the streets alone. It also allows people to begin to build mutual trust and create a cleaner, safer space for one another
Unfortunately, local governments obsessively use police to break up these encampments. Politicians see communities learning to become self-sustaining and self-governing outside the formal economy as a threat.
During the Great Depression, tent-cities became known as “Hoovervilles,” in dry mockery of President Herbert Hoover’s inept economic policies. They were places where dispossessed people congregated and came to see their woes as connected; as one struggle for justice rather than many isolated struggles for “success.”
In those days, less militarized police still tried to break up camps, but would often be driven away by angry residents. Today our local governments spare no expense to make sure police are capable of dispersing any gathering that is deemed unlawful or threatening.
The forced dispersal of self-run camps reinforces all the worst aspects of life without a home. By suppressing efforts at mutual aid and cooperation, local governments force unhoused people back into competition with one another. Another byproduct of this forced dispersal policy is that unhoused people are denied basic sanitation and forced into closer proximity with tenants and homeowners, fueling the cycle of resentment and marginalization.
Authorities are only okay with unhoused people congregating when they are in “shelters” or other prison-lite facilities run either by non-profits or by the government itself. These facilities regulate what people can do with their bodies, often even banning prescription medication. Sometimes shelters will kick whole families out without even telling them which rule they broke. Many of those who staff these facilities have the above-mentioned neoliberal mindset that unhoused people are to blame for their own dispossession. They view their role as not just helping unhoused people, but also correcting their supposed moral failings. Most so-called “shelters” are so abusive that few unhoused people wish to go to them. This refusal of “services” is often cited by politicians to further paint unhoused people as “irrational” and incapable of making decisions about their own lives.
All of this and more is documented by scholar Chris Herring, who was interviewed by KPFA’s Against the Grain in 2016.
Social Death, Class Democide
The denial of housing to hundreds of thousands of people in the US doesn’t “look like” historic atrocities we may be familiar with, but it is similar in its level of neglect and dehumanization. People are socially shunned and literally spat upon because of their lack of money. There are strong racist and abileist inflections to who becomes unhoused and how they are mistreated, but it can happen to almost anyone.
In most city neighborhoods, there seems to be a small minority that cares for and aids unhoused people, and an opposed minority that vehemently hates unhoused people and constantly seeks to sic the police on them. Then there is the majority, who usually don’t care enough to get involved in either way.
Because of de-facto employment discrimination and the many other barriers to re-enfranchisement placed in front of unhoused people, it can feel impossible to get “back on your feet.”
A “complex,” “intractable” problem?
Despite what your snobbiest neighbors might have you believe, unhoused people are perfectly capable of living normal lives if given a helping hand. Yet, many government and private charity programs continue to be built around the assumption that unhoused people themselves are the problem, they have “failed,” they need to be “fixed” in one way or another, and they are too incompetent to be in charge of their own recovery. This elitist and inefficient way of organizing things also ensures that those “helping” the unhoused as a career will never work themselves out of a job.
Policymakers like to frame the systematic denial of housing as a “tough problem to solve,” but this is a lie.
Even in the most absurd housing market in the country, the San Francisco Bay Area, there are enough empty housing units to house all unhoused people.
The “YIMBY” narrative that we just need to increase housing supply is false. What we need to do is secure existing and future housing for unhoused people.
To be clear, ending homlessness through bottom-up social movements will be complex and challenging. However, for those who already have control over enormous “public” resources, it is a complete lie to say that they are incapable of ending this atrocity.
As long as housing is created primarily to make a profit, and not primarily to house people, denial of housing will continue. Helping unhoused people recover and become housed through hard work is admirable, but it is essentially akin to mopping up water when the dam is still leaking.
How can we end this social crime?
Bringing food and other supplies to unhoused people is kind and helpful in the short term, but these community aid efforts are rarely part of a larger plan to end the suffering altogether. Similarly, it is brave and compassionate to try to block (or at least document and publicize) the destruction of camps and tent-cities by police. However, small groups of activists cannot route a modern urban police force.
Ultimately, we must challenge and dismantle the power of the Real Estate State. This can be done effectively through Tenant Unions and Community Land Trusts.
Find out if there is one near you, and how you can support their work.
The Oakland Community Land Trust is what enabled four dispossessed Black moms to take possession of a vacant home which had previously been only a commodity for speculation.
In Philadelphia, organizers pressured the city’s corrupt housing agency relentlessly with takeovers of vacant city-owned homes and other direct actions. After keeping this up for a year, they won 100 homes for the dispossessed. Asking nicely would not have worked.
As both workers and customers, we can improve public health and sanitation by demanding that businesses let unhoused people use their restrooms.
Building trades workers and their unions play a pivotal role in the continuation and potential solving of homelessness. Along with community coalitions, construction workers could assert their labor-power to demand resources be put towards public housing rather than the new luxury condos we are all so used to seeing.
Our governments could end homelessness by investing in public housing, as was done by the socialist / labor government in Austria, but they choose not to. They will keep choosing not too until we threaten to solve the problem without them, then they’ll rush to catch up to preserve the illusion that we need them.
Housing dispossession exists because we do not have a strong enough mass movement to challenge profit in the name of the common good. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
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