Tent cities are now so common
that advocates are campaigning to make them semi-permanent settlements of micro-housing.
But is this a genuine solution or merely a quick fix?
CHRIS HERRING
DECEMBER 2015
Clearing of the Jungle, San
Jose, December 2014. [Karl Mondon/San
Jose Mercury News]
In December 2014, the city of
San Jose shut down what was then America’s largest homeless camp — a shantytown
that stretched for sixty-eight acres along Coyote Creek where a few hundred men
and women were living in tents, shacks, treehouses, and adobe dugouts.
Happening during the midst of the holiday season, the event captured widespread
media attention. News stories like “In
Wealthy Silicon Valley, 300 Evicted from Homeless Camp” and “Hanging
out with the Tech Have-nots” portrayed the camp, also know as “the Jungle,”
in terms of the polarized urbanization that characterizes contemporary Silicon
Valley, where the headquarters of some of the richest corporations in the
nation co-exist with rapidly growing homeless populations. As KQED News, a
local NPR station, wrote in its coverage
of the eviction:
Nearby companies like Google,
Apple, Yahoo, eBay and Facebook have amassed incredible wealth as the tech
sector roars back to life following the recession. The growth has driven up
home prices in the Bay Area, and many available units are unaffordable for low
and middle-class residents. “To not be able to house our people in the richest
place in the world at the richest time in its history shows us that something’s
completely broken about our city,” [housing advocate Sandy] Perry said.
This is, of course, the “tale
of two cities” narrative that has become depressingly familiar in what many are
calling a new
gilded age. But to view the camps simply in this light is to overlook the
deeper and more durable history of encampments for the homeless in the United
States, and of the campaigns both to dismantle and defend them. Like many
informal settlements across the country, the Jungle had existed for more than a
decade; it was a product of neither the Great Recession nor the uneven
recovery.
Homeless camps can be found in
cities rich and poor, big and small, liberal and conservative.
Indeed, mass encampments, with
fifty or more residents, have become increasingly common across America. Since
the turn of the millennium, more than three dozen cities have accommodated
camps of this scale for a year or more. 1 Homeless camps can be found in cities rich
and poor, big and small, liberal and conservative; they range from the tech
corridors of San Jose and Seattle, to the post-industrial outskirts of Detroit
and Providence, to the college towns of Ann Arbor and Eugene. The settlements
are diverse both socially and formally, including self-described eco-villages,
political occupations in city hall plazas, and makeshift campsites in church
parking lots. And if many cities have sought to remove the informal
settlements, often forcefully, others have responded with toleration,
sometimes legalizing the camps through zoning ordinances. 2
Bonus Army, Washington, D.C.,
1932. [Library of
Congress]
“Weed-thatched enclosures,
paper houses, a great junk pile”
To understand the resurgence
of mass encampments, it is useful to recall that homeless camps have been more
or less permanent fixtures within U.S. cities since the rise of modern
industrialism in the latter half of the 19th century. Before then vagrants
might be sent to the almshouse or penitentiary, or to police stations, which in
the 1840s began to provide overnight lodging for the destitute. Only after the
Civil War, with the expansion of the national rail system and the new markets
it opened up, did cities witness the emergence of large squatter camps on their
outskirts — so-called tramp colonies or jungles. 3 Often located near train stations or along
roads, many jungles became deeply rooted, serving as way stations for a new
proletariat of migratory and seasonal workers. Though camps usually had a
handful of longtime residents, or “jungle buzzards,” who took on the task of
running things, most of the hobos — including veterans of the Union and Confederate
armies — were passing through. Nels Anderson, who was not only a protégé of
sociologist Robert Park at the University of Chicago but also, in the years
before World War I, a hobo himself, described the transience of these
encampments:
Jungle populations are ever
changing. Every hour new faces appear to take the place of those that have
passed on. They come and go without ceremony, with scarcely a greeting or
“fare-you-well.” Every new member is of interest for the news he brings or the
rumors that he spreads. Each is interested in the other so far as he has
something to tell about the road over which he has come, the work conditions,
the behavior of the police, or other significant details. But … there is seldom
any effort to discuss personal relations and connections. Here is one place
where every man’s past is his own secret. 4
Starting around the turn of
the 20th century, during the Progressive era, migrant camps became places of
political action. 5 Some were hotbeds of radical and socialist
organizing, where representatives of the newly formed union, the Industrial
Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” sought to recruit members. Other camps
were incubators of protest. In the midst of the depression that followed the
Panic of 1893, Coxey’s Army — several thousand laid-off rail workers from the
Midwest led by an Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey — marched to Washington to
petition Congress to create public works projects to put the unemployed to
work, camping along the way. In 1932, tens of thousands of jobless World War I
veterans formed the “Bonus Army” and marched to Washington to demand advances
on promised bonuses for their military service. Many camped in a self-governed
tent city on the banks of the Anacostia River, with makeshift streets and
sanitation facilities, that lasted for several months until they were forcibly
removed by troops commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. And as the Great
Depression deepened, throughout the ’30s, the seasonal jungles of transient
workers became entrenched shantytowns of the chronically unemployed,
widely known as Hoovervilles, after President Herbert Hoover, whom many blamed
for the financial crash.
Migrant farmer’s family,
Nipomo, California, March 1936. Photograph by Dorothea Lange. [Library of Congress]
Huts for the unemployed, West
Houston and Mercer Street, New York, 1935. Photograph by Berenice Abbott. [New
York Public Library]
Hoovervilles were found coast
to coast, often along rivers, which offered access to food and water, or near
soup kitchens. In New York the homeless set up camp in Central Park and in
alleys and along the rivers; in Los Angeles they occupied a vacant site near
Watts. “There was a Hooverville on the edge of every town,” wrote John
Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, his Depression epic about tenant farmers
who journey from Oklahoma to California. Here Steinbeck describes a camp in the
Central Valley:
The rag town lay close to
water; and the houses were tents, and weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, a
great junk pile. The man drove his family in and become a citizen of
Hooverville — always they were called Hooverville. The man put up his own tent
as near to water as he could get; or if he had no tent, he went to the city
dump and brought back cartons and built a house of corrugated paper. And when
the rains came the house melted and washed away. 6
To offer alternatives to the
“rag towns,” the new administration of Franklin Roosevelt set up the Federal
Emergency Relief Agency, which opened several hundred camps in rural counties
and “transient centers,” or lodging houses, in cities. But the funding was
insufficient; ultimately it was not social policy but military action that put
a real end to the Hoovervilles. With the entry of the United States into World
War II, and with the conscription of military-age men and the vast mobilization
of the economy, the homeless colonies faded away. 7 And they would not return for decades. For
the veterans of World War II there would be no need for bonus marches. During
the fat decades of postwar prosperity and low unemployment, tent cities largely
vanished from the American landscape. To be sure, there were occasional protest
demonstrations — like “Resurrection City,” the temporary tent colony of
the Poor
People’s Campaign, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and erected on the National Mall in spring 1968 — but these were
short-lived and exceptional.
The contemporary era of
chronic homelessness in America began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
Whether the long postwar boom
ended because of the oil embargo and recession of the mid 1970s, or because of
competition from rebounding European and Asian economies, is open to debate.
But few dispute that the contemporary era of chronic homelessness in America
began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Dedicated to lowering tax rates
and shrinking the size of government, and more broadly to deregulation and
privatization, the administration of Ronald Reagan slashed federal subsidies
for low-income housing and psychiatric health centers and deinstitutionalized
thousands of mentally ill patients. The all too predictable consequence was a
dramatic rise in the ranks of the homeless, and the return of encampments to
the streets and open spaces of American cities. 8 In 1982, to call attention to the growing
problem, the D.C.-based Community for Creative Non Violence pitched a group of tents
in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and called it “Reaganville,”
with a banner reading: WELCOME TO REAGANVILLE / REAGONOMICS AT WORK /
POPULATION GROWING DAILY. Around the same time, the Association of Community
Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, staged tent cities, called “Reagan
Ranches,” in cities across the country. 9
But most homeless camps were
not agit-prop; most were zones for bare survival. On Skid Row in central Los
Angeles, the Justiceville camp, consisting of plywood and cardboard houses and
even a few portable toilets, lasted for five months in 1985, sheltering several
dozen people until it was bulldozed by police. On the Lower East Side of
Manhattan, the notorious tent city in Tompkins Square Park lasted for several
years and sheltered hundreds in rough conditions before being removed by police
in riot gear in 1991.
Hector A, Bushville, 1991,
photograph by Margaret Morton © OmbraLuce LLC [Fragile Dwelling, Aperture,
2000]
Brooklyn Bridge, 1993,
photograph by Margaret Morton © OmbraLuce LLC [Fragile Dwelling, Aperture,
2000]
Tompkins Park and Justiceville
were, in their size and prominence, exceptional; most of the encampments that
proliferated in the ’80s and ’90s were small, rarely larger than a dozen
people, and usually in out-of-the-way locations like highway underpasses,
vacant lots, or remote corners of public parks. 10 Increasingly the homeless sought to remain
out of sight, which is not surprising, given the violence with which urban
camps were dismantled. Describing the 1991 Tompkins Park raid, the New
York Times reported that
“more than 350 police officers, some in riot helmets, converged on the park
shortly after 5 A.M. in a show of force that gradually pushed out about 200
homeless people who had set up tents, lean-tos and shanties in the southern
portion of the park.” Little wonder that homeless people in New York have
sometimes sought shelter underground. Some of the most tenacious — and out of
sight — homeless colonies in New York are located in the rail and subway tunnels
that crisscross the metropolis. Journalist Jennifer Toth’s account of the “mole
people,” first published in the mid ‘90s, remains relevant:
New York City’s underground
homeless live in the secluded tunnels that run beneath the busy streets in an
interconnected lattice of subway and railroad train tunnels, often unused now,
that in some areas reach seven levels below the streets. Often shunned by the
street homeless, the underground homeless are outcasts in a world of outcasts.
… Some go down for safety, to escape thieves, rapists, and common cruelty. They
go down to escape the law, to find and use drugs and alcohol unhassled by their
families, friends, and society. Some, ashamed of their poverty and apparent
“failure” in society and impoverished appearance, go to escape seeing their own
reflections in passing shop windows. 11
Homeless man, Los Angeles,
August 2009. [Terabass/Commons]
“A world in which a whole
class of people have no place to be”
By the late ’90s, homeless
encampments were becoming semi-permanent, increasingly visible, and growing to
scales unseen since the Hoovervilles of the Depression. And so they remain;
they have persisted, no matter the cyclical fluctuations of the economy, no
matter housing costs or poverty rates, rising or falling rates of unemployment
or even homelessness. Indeed, to fully grasp today’s tent cities, we need to
dig into policies that date back decades. It was in the early 1980s that
homelessness — or to be more specific, the basic daily actions of people who
cannot afford to rent or own a place to live — began to be increasingly viewed
in criminal terms, and since then the trend has only accelerated. As the
authors of No Safe Place, a recent report on the criminalization of
homelessness in America, put it:
Imagine a world where it is
illegal to sit down. Could you survive if there were no place you were allowed
to fall asleep, to store your belongings, or to stand still? For most of us,
these scenarios seem unrealistic to the point of being ludicrous. But, for
homeless people across America, these circumstances are an ordinary part of
daily life. … Homeless people, like all people, must engage in activities such
as sleeping or sitting down in order to survive. Yet, in communities across the
nation, these harmless, unavoidable behaviors are treated as criminal activity
under laws that criminalize homelessness. 12
In the majority of U.S.
cities, it is illegal, in certain areas, to camp, rest, loiter, sit, lie, or
loaf in public places, or to share food or sleep in cars.
No Safe Place documents
the rise of so-called “quality of life” laws that push well beyond the more
typical vagrancy laws, which prohibit panhandling. The majority of U.S. cities
have now passed ordinances making it illegal, in certain areas, to camp, rest,
loiter, sit, lie, or loaf in public places, or to share food or sleep in cars.
Citywide bans of these activities increased sixty percent in the past five
years, the fastest growth since the early 1980s. Another recent study focuses on
the criminalization of “efforts to feed people in need.” In Share No More,
the National Coalition for the Homeless describes municipal laws that “restrict
or eliminate food-sharing” — for instance, by prohibiting individuals or
organizations to share food with homeless people without a permit, and by
requiring that groups that distribute food meet strict safety regulations. Such
laws against sharing food with a destitute person — surely one of the most
basic acts of civic compassion — constitute the fastest growing anti-homeless
campaign in the country. 13 The urban geographer Don Mitchell has
characterized such policies as the “annihilation of space by law.”
The anti-homeless laws being
passed in city after city in the United States work in a pernicious way: by
redefining what is acceptable behavior in public space, by in effect
annihilating the spaces in which people must live, these laws seek simply to annihilate
homeless people themselves. … We are creating a world in which a whole class of
people simply cannot be, entirely because they have no place to be. 14
To a significant degree
today’s tent camps are a response to these intensifying efforts to rid streets
and parks of the evidence of homelessness — the evidence of our collective
social failure. And since these efforts are usually enforced most vigorously in
prime downtown areas, by both metropolitan police and private security forces,
the illegal camps usually crop up on the edges of town. During visits to a
dozen West Coast cities, I invariably found that encampments were set up
following laws banning sitting or lying on sidewalks or camping in public
parks. In Fresno, California — one of the poorest cities in the U.S. — the
sidewalks and railyards near the rescue mission had long been the site of small
camps. It was not until the city passed aggressive laws to crack down on
loitering and panhandling — laws designed to safeguard the central business
district and its investment in a new minor league baseball stadium, and which
required offenders to serve six months in jail or pay fines of up to $1,000 —
that a tent city of over 300 emerged on the edge of downtown. 15
If downtown vagrancy is a
police problem, the illegal camps are to some extent viewed as police solutions. 16 A few years ago I lived for a summer in
Fresno’s tent camp, and as the city’s homeless policy manager explained to me,
“The tent city has taken pressure off the downtown parks and pedestrian mall.
Since the police stopped chasing homeless people around, which is ineffective
and inhumane, we’ve gotten fewer complaints from business owners and
residents.” On my second day at the camp, I met Alan, a thirty-seven year-old
white man from Merced, who was surviving by selling recycled scrap metal. He
explained how he came to live in the tent city:
I don’t naturally gravitate to
large groups. My first night I slept out in Courthouse Park and a number of
spots near downtown, but I could never stay anywhere longer than a few nights.
Then I hooked up with a couple of guys who I recycled with. We wanted to avoid
the craziness of the tent camp, and set up camps behind abandoned shops — I
mean really out of the way. Still the police would roost us out every week. One
night an officer woke me up with his boot. I had no idea he was a cop and drew
a knife on him, just instinct you know, which ended me up in jail. After that,
I wasn’t gonna mess around anymore and just did what the officers had been
telling us for months — “go south of Ventura and no one will bother you.” 17
I heard similar stories in the
other tent colonies where I’ve done field research. But most people didn’t need
any official guidance to find the local encampment. It was well understood that
the laws that applied downtown wouldn’t be enforced on the edge — that you
could (illegally) construct a shanty or put up a tent without citation while
also (illegally) warming yourself by a fire, cooking a meal, having sex,
urinating or defecating, and drinking alcohol and taking drugs — all the usual
activities of people who live in houses.
Ella, F Street encampment,
Fresno, California. [Chris Herring]
Fresno’s tent camp, like most,
was an adaptation to anti-homeless laws. But in some cities homeless
communities have formed in resistance to the increasingly punitive
regulations. In Seattle, in the early ’90s, a local non-profit called
Share/Wheel established a tent city to help people who’d been displaced as a
result of an anti-camping ban; today the group runs Tent City 3 and Tent City 4
(the names reflect the group’s successive efforts). 18 More recently, in 2008, homeless people
and advocates pitched 150 bright pink tents in an industrial zone and dubbed it
“Nickelsville,” to protest the policies of then Mayor Greg Nickels. Today
Nickelsville is a 501(c)3 with a website, mailing list, and PayPal account. As
one Nickelodian explained to me, “We’re not simply homeless here, we are
activists for the entire population of homeless in this city.”
Seattle is not alone. Dignity Village and Right 2 Dream Too, in Portland,
Oregon; Quixote Village, in
Olympia, Washington; Safe
Park, in Tucson, Arizona; and Occupy
Madison Inc., in Madison, Wisconsin — all have emerged in reaction to the
criminalization of destitution. All have tight connections with local advocacy
groups and, like Nickelsville, articulate their agendas and organize their
activities via websites or Facebook. And unlike the squatter camps on the urban
edges, the protest camps sometimes stake out central and symbolic spaces. 19
Informal community, Right 2
Dream Too, Portland, Oregon. [Street Roots]
The new tent cities have been
shaped by anti-homeless laws; but their growing ranks are the results as well
of a long-term crisis in shelter policy and management. The Reagan
administration’s deep cuts to federal assistance for low-income housing (from
$32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion in 1988) and its deinstitutionalization of
thousands of psychiatric patients led not only to a dramatic rise in
homelessness but also to intense new pressures on the social service agencies
that offer short-term assistance, from meals to beds to showers to medical
check-ups. 20 These pressures continue to this day, and
many observers point to unmet shelter needs — to underfunded and understaffed
facilities — to explain the emergence of illegal encampments. But the
dysfunctions of the system go well beyond questions of capacity. In dozens of
interviews, homeless campers — diverse in age, race, gender, and class
background — told me again and again that the problem with municipal shelters
wasn’t simply lack of available space but rather the strict and often
depersonalized atmosphere they so often encountered. Here is Geoff, a
forty-four-year-old African American at Sacramento Safe Ground:
The shelter is just a jail
that you can leave. I was in the pen for twelve years before getting out. I
spent the first week out in the shelter, but never again. The way the staff can
talk down to you. The schedule, like curfew, dinner, wake-up call, showers. You
got people trying to prove themselves, like they all tough so not to try to
steal anything from them. Hell, I swear the bunk beds and food are made by the
same freakin’ companies. Out here in the camp I at least have a bit of the
freedom I’d been waiting for those twelve years.
Tony, a thirty-seven-year-old
white man, described the differences between his experiences at a city shelter
and at Seattle’s Tent City 3:
It may only be a tent, but
this is the only privacy I can afford. When I first became homeless it drove me
crazy, being out in public in parks or café’s all day, and then coming back to
the shelter to sleep in public with no privacy. When I zip up my tent, I can
read, watch a movie, do whatever. I can store my things here, so I don’t have
to lug around a cart of stuff all day, and I know it’s safe. It’s my last piece
of space, and the shelter doesn’t give you that.
And Carol, forty-nine, a white
resident of F-Street Camp in Fresno, put it this way:
I camp here because it’s the
only way I can stay with my family. My social worker wanted me to go into the
shelter, but if I did that I’d have to give up my dog who I’ve had for seven
years, and me and my boyfriend would have to stay at different places. These
guys are all I got.
Almost everyone I talked with
emphasized these kinds of contrasts; but for most homeless campers the really
crucial difference had less to do with personal comfort than with the more
ineffable matter of dignity. To this point, consider the names of the legal
encampments: “Dignity Village,” “Village of Hope,” “Community First!,” “Right 2
Dream too,” “Opportunity Village.” In describing why they preferred camps to
shelters, some deployed the right-wing rhetoric of “self sufficiency” and “no
government handouts,” while others used vaguely anarchist terms like
“autonomous rule.” In the Village of Hope, in Fresno, Brad, a longtime truck
driver before becoming homeless at age sixty, explained to me that “in the
shelter you’re forced into dependence. You’re served food, people clean up
after you, and you have no control over your day-to-day schedule. In the
Village, we’re not a burden to anyone.” Many of those I interviewed referred to
fellow campers as their family, and some emphasized that it was the first time
they’d ever lived anywhere with a sense of community.
Village of Hope, Fresno,
California. [Chris Herring]
San Jose’s Jungle was not
exceptional; most mass camps are eventually dismantled and their residents
evicted. Tent City in Fresno, Camp Hope in Ontario, American River in
Sacramento, the Slough in Stockton, the Bulb in Albany — these are a few of the
camps that have been torn down, just in California, in the past few
years. 21 Yet at the same time alternatives are
emerging. Throughout the country, grudging toleration of the squatter camps is
giving way to efforts to legalize them — and also to sustained campaigns to
create better, more substantial, and sometimes even permanent alternatives.
Grudging toleration of
squatter camps is giving way to efforts to legalize them, and to create more
substantial and even permanent alternatives.
In Seattle, Share/Wheel has
maintained Tent City 3 and Tent City 4 for more than a decade by arranging for
the encampments to be sited in church parking lots. In Eugene, Oregon, housing
advocates mobilized to create Opportunity Village, which
describes itself as a “transitional micro-housing” pilot project. Built on an
acre of land donated by the city, and with approximately $200,000 in cash
donations, labor, and materials, Opportunity Village consists of thirty tiny
houses with communal spaces for cooking, sanitation, and laundry, and with
shared wi-fi and computer facilities. In central Florida, on several acres of
industrial land outside St. Petersburg, a Catholic charity runs Pinellas Hope;
started in 2007 as a five-month pilot program, the community has endured as a
cluster of tents and sheds that can house approximately 300 people. In Fresno,
the Village of Hope and Community of Hope, both run by a local
soup kitchen, house several dozen formerly homeless people, including
some families, in prefabricated Tuff Garden Sheds; nearby tents offer
facilities for cooking and watching television.
Community First! Village, in
development by Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Austin, Texas. [Mobile Loaves &
Fishes]
Opportunity Village, Eugene,
Oregon. [Opportunity Village]
The most ambitious effort to
date is in Austin, Texas, where a Catholic group called Loaves and Fishes has
been developing a “master planned” cluster of micro-homes, RV’s, and large
canvas tents on twenty-seven acres of donated land. Scheduled to open this
fall, the Community First! Village will enable a few hundred homeless people to
rent tiny dwellings for modest sums (averaging $200 per month). The village
already has a community garden and raises chickens and bees; earlier this year
an outdoor cinema opened with a showing of The Karate Kid. In the works
are a medical clinic and even a columbarium — the latter perhaps underscoring
the ambitions of the village to be more than a short-term or transitional
place. You can see a similar ambition — a scaling up from camp to campus — at
River Haven, in Ventura, California, which consists of Buckminster
Fuller-inspired U-Domes, and at the Cottages at Hickory Crossing, in Dallas,
where residents live in smartly designed single-room cottages. River Haven is
classified by city officials as “transitional,” and the Cottages as “permanent”
support housing; both benefit from HUD funding and, unlike municipal emergency
shelters, both communities require residents to pay rent.
These new villages are
undoubtedly improvements over the illegal camps. For the most part conforming
to local building, health, and safety codes, many feature on-site toilets and
showers, laundry facilities, shared kitchens, communal gardens, propane
heating, electricity, wi-fi, real beds, and personalized decor; some even have
computer labs and libraries. Most of the new communities maintain websites
detailing their various amenities. 22 Yet somehow, much like the evolving squatter
cities of the developing world, these new quasi-formal communities seem not
quite fully legitimate — and as such they raise uneasy questions. 23
Should the new and improved
encampments be viewed as innovative housing models to be added to the existing
policy menu of shelters and transitional housing like single-room-occupancy
hotels? In some cities, officials have been eager to take credit for what can
seem a flexible and low-cost expansion of the municipal shelter system. In
Fresno, the mayor held a press conference at the ribbon-cutting for the Village
of Hope, hailing it as a “demonstration of our government’s determination and
capability to take responsibility for the homeless.” A couple of years ago,
Seattle planners acknowledged the tent cities run by Share/Wheel as a “viable
temporary living option” and “lower cost alternative to more permanent and
costly housing options.” 24
Should the new and improved
encampments be viewed as innovative solutions? Or as regressive forms of
affordable housing?
Advocates argue that providing
the homeless with legal, organized, and self-sufficient spaces will improve the
public’s perception of a population often perceived as disorderly or dependent.
Yet some view these new settlements as little more than coping strategies —
regressive forms of affordable housing. Most legal encampments are situated in
undesirable zones on the urban margins. Portland’s Dignity Village is bordered
by a compost dump and state prison. The tiny cottages of Olympia’s Quixote
Village are clustered in an industrial park near a truck depot. After an effort
to locate in central Austin, Community First! settled for a parcel of land
bounded by a fence marking the city limit. The tent cities of Seattle relocate
every three months, from one parish to another, a practice that eases the anxieties
of property owners even as it heightens the stress of homeless campers.
Proponents of the tiny house movement argue that city regulations are being
wielded by wealthier residents to prevent the development of affordable,
easy-to-construct shelter. Others counter that the micro-units represent a
lowering of the standards of affordable housing. Describing the Tuff Garden
Sheds of the Village of Hope, each of which is occupied by two residents, one
of Fresno’s homeless advocates was dismissive. “These are not homes, these are
tool sheds,” he said. “When I show friends the site of the Village, the initial
reaction is that these things are more like doghouses than people’s homes. Many
are more disturbed by the sheds than the tents.”
The reaction is understandable,
and speaks to the growing concern that the new forms of legal encampment
constitute a quick-fix, low-cost solution to the immediate problem of relieving
homelessness that largely ignores the more fundamental problem of ensuring
decent housing for all citizens. As such, it’s all too clear that the
encampments, in whatever form they take, are becoming semi-official
institutions of social welfare and poverty management — depoliticized
components of the growing shadow state in which private entities are assuming
responsibilities once defined as public.
Notes
For an overview, see Tent
Cities in America: A Pacific Coast Report (National Coalition for the
Homeless, 2010); Welcome Home: The
Rise of Tent Cities in the United States (Allard K. Lowenstein
International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, 2014); and tentcityurbanism.com. ↩
For a legal perspective on the
sanctioning of mass encampments see Zoe Loftus-Farren, “Tent Cities: An Interim
Solution to Homelessness and Affordable Housing Shortages in the United
States,” California Law Review, 1037–81, 2011. ↩
See Mark Wyman, Hoboes:
Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West (New York:
Macmillan, 2010). ↩
Nels Anderson, The Hobo:
The Sociology of the Homeless Man (originally published 1923; Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1961), 20. See also Donald F. Roy, Hooverville:
A Study of a Community of Homeless in Seattle (Masters Thesis, University
of Washington, 1935). ↩
For a history of the political
role of U.S. tent cities, see Don Mitchell, “Tent city: Interstitial spaces for
survival,” in Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial
In-Betweens(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 65-85. ↩
John Steinbeck, The
Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin,1939), 234. ↩
See Georg Rusche and Otto
Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2003), which traces how vagrants were coerced into
slavery in the mercantilist era and conscripted from poor houses and jails
during the industrial era; and how more recently, in the age of monopoly
capitalism, homeless men were drafted into military service during the World
Wars. All too many veterans return to lives of homelessness; in 2009, before
the Obama administration prioritized housing for veterans, over 75,000 were
counted during a biannual survey. See Meghan Henry, et al., The
2013 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress (U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development). ↩
See Jennifer Wolch and Michael
Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an American City (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994) and Joel Blau, The Visible Poor:
Homelessness in the United States(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), for
overviews of the structural causes underlying the rapid growth of homelessness
in the United States during the 1980s. ↩
See The
Homeless: Growing National Problem, CQ Researcher, October 29,
1982. ↩
See Neil Smith, The New
Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge,
1996); and Talmadge Wright, Out of Place: Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities,
and Contested Landscapes (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997). See also the short
video directed by Gary Glaser, Justiceville. ↩
Jennifer Toth, The Mole People:
Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City (Chicago: Chicago Review Press,
1995), Chapter 4. See also Teun Voeten, Tunnel People (Oakland: PM
Press, 2010); Margaret Morton, The Tunnel (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1995); and the 2000 documentary Dark Days, by Mark Singer. ↩
National Law Center on
Homelessness and Poverty, No Safe Place: The
Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities (Washington, D.C.,
2014), Executive Summary. See also California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The
growing enactment and enforcement of Anti-Homeless laws in the Golden State (UC
Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, 2015), which points out that many of these
laws have been passed since 2000. ↩
National Coalition for the
Homeless, Share No More: The Criminalization of Efforts to Feed People in
Need (Washington D.C., 2014). ↩
Don Mitchell, “The
Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws
in the United States,” Antipode 29: 3, (1997), 303–35. ↩
See Chris Herring, “The New
Logics of Homeless Seclusion: Homeless Encampments in America’s West Coast
Cities,” City & Community 13: 4 (2014), 285–309. From 2009
to 2011, I did a comparative study of twelve encampments in eight cities along
the Pacific Coast, from which I draw the bulk of evidence for this article. See
also Welcome Home: The Rise of Tent Cities in the United States. For more
on Fresno, see Mike Rhodes’s coverage at
the Community Alliance. The initial growth of a much larger encampment in
Fresno, starting in 2002, was also confirmed through interviews with long-time
residents, homeless people, and service providers. ↩
See Sharon Chamard, “The Problem of
Homeless Encampments,” Guide No. 56, Center for Problem-Oriented
Policing, (2010). A study by the Los Angeles City Administrator found that
fifty percent of the city’s $100 million budget for homelessness was spent on
policing. See “Homelessness
and the City of Los Angeles,” Office of the City Administrative Officer,
April 2015. ↩
All interview quotes have been
edited for length and clarity. ↩
See Tony Sparks, As
Much Like Home as Possible: Geographies of Homelessness and Citizenship in
Seattle’s Tent City 3 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington,
2009). ↩
In Madison, Wisconsin, and
Tucson, Arizona, the homeless encampments that grew out of Occupy have endured,
and provide safety and shelter to the homeless while also serving as centers of
community organizing. See Zoltan Gluck and Chris Herring, “The Homeless
Question of Occupy,” Occupy! (New York: Verso and N+1, 2012). ↩
See David Wagner and Jennifer
Barton Gilman, Confronting Homelessness: Poverty, Politics, and the
Failure of Social Policy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012).
See also Teresa Gowan, Hoboes, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homelessness in
San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Chapter
3. ↩
See Chris Herring “Evicting
the Evicted,” Progressive Planning, November 2015. ↩
See, for instance, Dignity Village, Tent City 3, Camp Unity, Quixote Village, Opportunity Village, Second Wind Cottages, Occupy Madison Inc. ↩
See Peter Ward, Colonias
and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1999), in which he describes how a two-tier system
of housing regulations was gradually codified by the state in Mexico, leading to
the legitimization of sub-optimal informal housing for the poor. See also
Ananya Roy, “Paradigms Of Propertied Citizenship Transnational Techniques of
Analysis,” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (2003): 463–91. ↩
See Department of Planning and
Development, City of Seattle, Director’s report relating to Council Bill
117791 (Seattle City Clerk’s Office: Legislative Information Service,
2013). ↩
Cite
Chris Herring, “Tent City,
America,” Places Journal, December 2015. Accessed 20 Apr 2018.https://doi.org/10.22269/151214
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