The Increasingly Inhumane Gimmicks Cities Are Relying on to “Solve” Homelessness
The Increasingly Inhumane Gimmicks Cities Are Relying on to “Solve” Homelessness
From cutting down trees to running intimidation campaigns to proposing an internment camp, city leaders are pushing “solutions” to homelessness with new variations of cops and cages.
As the homelessness crisis gets manifestly more urgent and acute in almost every major city, the “solutions” to this crisis are, in proportion, becoming more cruel, pseudo-scientific, and cynical. And more importantly, they almost always involve anything but more permanent, safe, and secure housing—the only actually proven solution to homelessness.
Either due to a genuine lack of resources, cynical pandering, capture by real estate interests, cowardice, racism, or—as is typically the case—some combination of all the above, city leaders and mayors are increasingly resorting to cheap gimmicks to look like they’re “doing something” about “the homelessness problem.”
Here are some of the most recent empty, mean, P.R.-driven gimmicks, and examples of how the media is assisting them.
New York City and Los Angeles' cruel, carceral shell game with their unhoused populations
On Monday, New York Mayor Eric Adams said he had “won” the “fight” against homelessness on New York’s subways. Local media, including the nominally liberal Daily News, criticized Adams not for using police to “clear out” the unhoused while failing to provide them with any shelter, much less housing, but for not acting aggressively enough to remove unhoused people, and then lying about it.
Local Los Angeles media has been praising a “clean up” effort by CalTrans, the state’s department of transportation, that removed unhoused people from the side of highways such as the 101 by “cleaning up” the areas and replacing them with thousands of large stones that make camping there difficult, if not impossible.
So where did all these homeless people go? Did they magically find housing? Did they simply disappear?
No, they just went somewhere else to encamp. As Gwenn Hogan at The Gothamist documented in June, Mayor Adams’ plan—like almost all homeless “cleanup” plans—is simply a shell game of displacement and distraction. The police are arresting and rearresting the same homeless people over and over again.
The goal, as I laid out in March, is to simply harass and arrest unhoused people from important areas into less important ones, while scooping up many for petty crime so they can languish in jail. This way electeds look like they’re Doing Something about “the homelessness problem,” but the underlying issue isn’t meaningfully addressed, much less solved. But police are kept busy and further legitimized while wealthy areas are less and less likely to have to look at the logical result of runaway inequality and soaring housing prices.
Corporate media, pandering to the all important “angry homeowner,” is concerned entirely with the aesthetics of “cleaning up” “homeless encampments,” not the long-term housing status and fortunes of the human beings who actually live there. Notice in the above reporting how there is zero curiosity about where the unhoused populations being “swept” and “removed” went, what their status is, what their condition is. The media doesn’t care. The point is to move Visible Poverty out of the sights of people who matter.
To the “sweep”-cheerleading local media, the basic concept of displacement doesn’t occur to them:
A New Jersey town cuts down trees to “deter” homeless population.
Lakewood, New Jersey is addressing its “homelessness problem” by cutting down dozens of trees that line the city’s main square in an effort to “deter” people from camping in these areas.
On the advice of the local police force’s “Quality of Life Unit,” Lakewood Mayor Ray Coles decided on the plan because the unhoused population was allegedly defecating in the streets. The move has outraged homeless advocates who have correctly pointed out that this will simply displace the unhoused to other parts of town while doing nothing to address the underlying cause of homelessness.
The mayor and police officials insist that the homeless are simply not taking advantage of the Section 8 housing vouchers which, as advocates point out, are extremely difficult to use since most of the unhoused don’t have the technology or identification to even apply.
So, rather than making it easier for the unhoused population to access public services, or—god forbid—increasing the funding to these public services, the mayor and police decided it was easier and more politically convenient to just engage in low-grade terror tactics aimed at the unhoused population, while ruining the walkability and aesthetics of the town for everyone.
Miami City Commission votes to build homeless internment camp on nearby island.
In a rather dystopian escalation of Out of Sight, Out of Mind cruelty, in July the Miami City Commission voted 3-2 to approve a plan to create a homeless camp of “tiny homes” on a nature preserve island, Virginia Key.
It’s since been put on hold but could very well still happen. While advocates insist the Homeless Camp Island would have mental health and social services, advocates counter that this is window dressing, and the fact that the plan would put hundreds of unhoused people miles from then nearest grocery store and a two hour walk to the closest public transportation made this plan look very much like a prison or internment camp.
To compound the griminess of the proposal, objections from local media thus far have not centered on the abhorrence of creating an island of unwanted people—that would be heavily policed and monitored—but on the project's potential harm to natural wildlife and the property values of nearby wealthy beachfront neighborhoods.
As many have pointed out, creating homeless encampments separate from the main population zones of the wealthy is literally the plot line of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Past Tense” (1995) that takes place in San Francisco in 2024. It’s also very similar to a recent plan laid out by Donald Trump as he ramps up to this likely 2024 run.
Not included in the list are the classic mainstays: paying homeless people to leave, mass shipping them elsewhere, building anti-homeless architecture. There is no limit to the creative capacity of city leaders to do everything to rid themselves of Visible Poverty other than pursue the actual solution—which is permanent, secure housing. In their defense, for the most part, states, much less local municipalities, don’t have the resources to achieve this goal. But they could use their collective political power and bully pulpit to lobby Washington to spend tens of billions to build free housing for America’s estimated half a million unhoused people. But they don’t. Because this would call into question more existential questions about our social arrangement and, under our current inflationary regime, social spending has rapidly fallen out of fashion.
Thus, having foreclosed on any robust social spending to solve the homelessness crisis by building houses, what city leaders are left with is increasingly cruel, liberal-sounding gimmicks to simply remove Visible Poverty from sight in hopes voters reward them so long as there exists verisimilitude that something is “being done” about the problem. Meanwhile, the majority of energy for advocating for solutions goes to vague YIMBY dogma about “building more housing,” without a clear indication as to who this housing is for or what the timetable would be for how these “build first” localized campaigns would trickle down to the poorest who are currently dying on our streets.
It would be pollyannaish to not point out that the argument for free housing as a right fundamentally runs into an ideological, unmovable wall in this country—namely, that Visible Poverty and homelessness serve a core function in our capitalist system, which is the constant threat of destitution to workers, a key element in suppressing wages, reducing worker power, and maintaining worker discipline. A fact liberal-left economists have hinted at or suggested for years, but since the 2020 pandemic has been proven to be true. It is now the explicit policy of neoliberal and conservative pundits, politicians, industry Groups, and CEOs alike that we cannot have long-term enhanced unemployment (a form of backdoor Basic Income) or stimulus checks because these aid programs produced a lazy, mouthy, unionizing-prone workforce that simply didn’t want to work. The same logic applies to why we can’t have free healthcare, and there’s little reason to think it wouldn’t also apply to any notion that housing should be a human right provided by the government. The looming threat of being made homeless, just as the threat of having a catastrophic disease or not being able to afford food and diapers, is essential to low-wage labor that is driven by precarity. If people are entitled to housing, it eliminates one of the main incentives to keep workers toiling at low wages. The sizable increase in worker power during the pandemic—since being curtailed by leaders from both parties—has shown what happens when the government is too generous with aid. Thus, the idea of a $100 billion federal housing program is simply off the table, not being discussed in any mainstream media, and just not an option. Instead, all we get is one half-assed press release from the White House with virtually no media campaign or coverage.
As housing prices continue to rise, the homelessness crisis will get worse—and the gimmicks, relying on accounting tricks of “sweeps,” arrests, and raids, will only get more carceral and commonplace. Since there is no institutional reason to actually solve the problem (see: actually give people homes), and so many fortunes and careers are made in maintaining a poor, precarious underclass, our reliance on displacement P.R. shell games—assisted by more cops and cages—will only grow stronger, more cynical, and more bleak in nature.