In his essay, The Inevitable Revolution, the literary titan Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Land, suitable for cultivation and accessible to people, is so plentiful that all men could, with a surplus left over, use it for a prosperous life for everyone.” This is as true in the twenty-first century as it was when Tolstoy wrote these words over a century ago in the first decade of the twentieth.
Under all great social problems, real or perceived, is always a mistake and our agreement to act in accordance with the mistake. Once a mistake takes hold, social justifications become more important to us than bare facts. From the 1980s on, due to successive cuts to social service funding, economic stagnation for all but a thin sliver, and the proliferation of retrograde attitudes, homelessness has spiked in the United States, now reaching some of its highest ever levels. In the United States today, there are 771,480 experiencing homelessness (as of January 2024), a record yearly increase of 18 percent from the previous year. This followed on the heels of another record-breaking increase the previous year, when the 12.1 percent increase represented the highest year-over-year increase since the data were tracked.
This uptick is consistent with a broader trend going back decades, whereby the ever-increasing concentration of wealth and property has driven hundreds of thousands of Americans onto the streets. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the number of Americans experiencing homelessness skyrocketed. While data from the period is less than perfect, most available information suggests that homelessness as much as doubled during this period, from around a quarter of a million people annually during most of the ’70s to a half a million or more by the middle of the ’80s. Indeed, some estimates suggest that this doubling occurred in a few years spanning from 1984 to 1987. Prior to this dramatic upward shift, many scholars had seen the declining homelessness rate in previous decades as heralding the end of homelessness in the U.S.
Unsurprisingly, federal government expenditures on affordable housing declined significantly during this period, with the Department of Housing and Urban Development budget dropping from about $29 billion in 1976 to about $17 billion in 1990. One consequence of this budget reduction was a decline “in the budget authority for housing assistance (from almost $19 billion in 1976 to about $11 billion in 1990) and in subsidized housing for poor Americans.”
Between October 2021 and November 2022, the University of California, San Francisco conducted “the largest representative study of homelessness in the United States since the mid-1990s.” The California study found more than 170,000 people experiencing homelessness in the state alone. Black Americans are dramatically overrepresented among the homeless population throughout the country. In Los Angeles, for example, Black people represent over a third of all homeless people though they are just 8 percent of the population. Many Americans experiencing homelessness—and a disproportionate number of the Black portion—came directly from prisons and jails where they were subject to abuse for years. A third of the people surveyed in the California study had a suicide attempt behind them. Substance use disorders and mental health issues are a separate category of problems; they are health problems that require stable housing as predicate for successful treatment. It is also important to understand that most people with these conditions are housed, not unhoused. From an empirical perspective, getting people safely housed is the best chance for helping them in their treatment for alcohol and drug use problems.
Any comprehensive theory of the crisis must include an analysis of the social and psychological aspects of the ways homeless is perceived. Our cultural system treats being poor as being lesser and being homeless as being socially invisible. Now on the outside of society’s boundaries, homeless people can be treated as pests or trash, and it will be perfectly acceptable socially.
American society polices class through the issue of homelessness. Research has shown that Americans view homeless people with more disgust and as somehow less human than other groups. Because social judgements and practices have made them such an unsympathetic group in the popular imagination, the rights of the homeless can be ignored with few consequences. As the small group holding wealth in America continues to shrink, controls placed upon the lives and movements of surplus populations like the homeless must become increasingly strict. The position of the capitalist is vulnerable as scarcity and hunger find more victims and fewer can afford the necessities of life.
The best available research on homelessness shows that people experiencing homelessness are some of the most vulnerable in the country, more likely to be victims of violent crime, and to have untreated health issues and disabilities. In fact, the vast majority of addicted homeless people acquired their addictions only after they became homeless, suggesting that the homeless are using alcohol and other drugs to cope or to self-medicate. Though crime does not actually increase because of homeless people, the perception of crime is nonetheless associated with their presence.
Taking a step back, it becomes clear that the U.S. approach to homelessness is a deliberate strategy for maintaining class power and difference, the state ensuring that workers remain compliant, fragmented, and politically powerless. Homelessness looms over the American economic system like a threat. That system is designed to redistribute massive amounts of wealth steadily upward to the owners of capital, institutional and individual, calibrated to reduce the masses to poverty and dependence. The homeless population are punished and criminalized with an almost obsessive fervor in the United States.
The carceral and punitive infrastructures impose a system in which poverty and the precariat are managed brutally through social and economic insecurity. The criminalization of the homeless population, making their bodily placement itself illegal, is connected to several underlying phenomena. Vagrancy laws, “hostile architecture,” and aggressive policing are part of a social and legal environment that systematically abuses the homeless. It is a system attempting to use brute force to manage the obvious consequences of extreme inequality without addressing its roots. The criminalization of homelessness thus has a position within an overarching class system, as well as being deeply entangled with other social and health issues.
The homelessness crisis is among the many negative social repercussions of a system that demands ever larger accumulations of money even as the real amount of real production remains relatively flat. In the United States, real property ownership—and therefore housing—is extremely concentrated in a system of hyper-speculation and hyper-commodification, ensuring that the social crisis will go unaddressed and will intensify.
The continued neglect of homelessness as a structural, political issue and a consequence of state-enforced deprivation is rendered more palatable to the public through cultural and political narratives that stigmatize homelessness as some kind of personal moral failure. It would be bad enough if neglect were the extent of the failure, but governments in the U.S. have undertaken an attack on homeless people, criminalizing their mere existence. Homelessness is a crisis that the ruling class does not want to solve, as it reflects the overall logic of managing and subduing a large pool of reserve or surplus labor, which helps to suppress workers’ pay and calibrate their demands.
This must be thought of and treated as the criminalization of vast swaths of American life, as the specific activities being subject to criminal penalties are the essential activities of survival for people without a permanent place to live. To tell these people that they can’t sleep, panhandle, or store their belongings, for example, in public places is tantamount to making their very existence a crime. The past several decades have witnessed a disturbing proliferation of laws and ordinances used to target and harass homeless people. The National Homelessness Law Center surveyed such laws across 187 American cities, finding “that city-wide bans on camping have increased by 92%, on sitting or lying by 78%, on loitering by 103%, on panhandling by 103%, and on living in vehicles by 213%.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these destructive and inhumane policies have found the endorsement of the Supreme Court. Last summer, the Supreme Court decided the case of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which confronted a question about the application of the Eighth Amendment to local ordinances in the city of Grants Pass, Oregon. The city’s public camping laws prevented sleeping outdoors and thus effectively banned the homeless from the city limits. It was a constructive banishment, as homelessness more generally functions as social exile. The policy was a policy specifically calculated to make it impossible for homeless people to live and survive, designed to expel them or push them further into the social margins.
In a previous case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit determined that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment applied to a similar local law that banned camping in public. The Ninth Circuit’s test said that where the number of homeless people in a jurisdiction “exceeds the number of ‘practically available’ shelter beds,” the government cannot enforce such a ban against them.
While the Court’s majority insisted that the city’s ordinances “do not criminalize status,” they certainly have the practical effect of criminalizing the homeless by making it impossible for them to have a legal existence within the jurisdiction. As the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ruth Botstein said, Grants Pass “is a bleak and cruel decision that will allow cities to punish people who are just trying to survive while living unhoused.”
Most Americans have an extremely underdeveloped picture of the reality of homelessness and the incredible bravery and endurance people without homes exhibit every day. As Kevin F. Adler and Donald W. Burnes write in their book When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America, “We are not confronted with the mental and physical resilience that our unhoused neighbors must exert to survive days, weeks, months, years, or even decades of relational poverty and housing insecurity, almost always amid chronic illness, untreated injury, and ongoing trauma. The experience of homelessness is foreign and incomprehensible to most of us, and frankly we prefer to keep it that way.”
Widespread acceptance of this system requires intense acculturation. We are socialized to regard people experiencing homelessness as a frightening, subversive other, rendering invisible the class character of the deprivation and artificial scarcity underlying it. We are not meant to draw a connection between the basic structure of society and economic relations and the crisis of homelessness.
Once the ownership of land and real property are decoupled from actual possession and use, speculative buying and selling serves to aggravate the existing crisis of violent, state-enforced deprivation and monopoly. Strictly speaking, it will not do to place the blame on property in theory—while in practice, to do so is perfectly accurate, property rights have a dual character, as Proudhon pointed out. If private property is theft, as the sum of its abuses, then it is also freedom in the sense that the existing system constitutes a breach of property rights for all but the privileged ownership class. Speculative wheeling and dealing start a positive-feedback process in which those with power, political influence, and wealth accumulate more and more. When ordinary people, to say nothing of the very poor, approach the market for land and housing, they do so only under duress, compelled to accept unconscionable terms and conditions.
Our society allocates shockingly large amounts of wealth to warfare and weapons, but society’s security and safety are much better served when everyone has a place to live. Yet even where an overwhelming majority of experts agree that the “housing first” model—finding people safe, secure housing before addressing other problems—the commitment to this approach has failed its promise.
The idea of direct action, as applied to the homelessness crisis, provides an opening for an appeal to an ethical law that is superior or anterior to the law of any government, meaning that people need not wait for either permission or help from the state. Through direct action, communities can anticipate a future in which everyone is housed by working to bring that future about today. The anarchist scholar Benjamin Franks has said that this kind of prefigurative direct action is synecdochic, in that “it contains elements of the object it is representing. It stands both as a practical response to a given situation, but also as a symbol of the larger vision of societal change.”
Squatters’ nonviolent reoccupation of unused land and real property subverts the ruling class conception and schema of private property rights: the notion that land or property is wasted or unused has been among the primary rationales of capitalists when they want to claim arbitrary ownership and control over it. Squatting merely extends the capitalists’ own principle, making it consistent and therefore subverting property as theft in favor of property as freedom.
Capital’s self-expanding character inevitably creates homelessness, its limitless accumulation gathering together all means of survival and fencing them in for the private gain of the idle rich. There is nothing of political or economic freedom in such a dynamic: it proceeds from state violence and has its protection in the same. The state is an unreliable source of aid in the homelessness crisis not only because its aid is inadequate and unpredictable, but because the state is itself the source of the monopolization and artificial scarcity that creates the problem.
