1 Origins of homelessness

The explosion in homelessness – or at least in the visible ranks of ‘street residents’ – in American cities in the past three decades has puzzled scholars in every social science discipline. Economists, anthropologists, sociologists and government researchers have disagreed on the definition and causes of homelessness.Footnote ² Many have focused on mental illness and drug abuse as explanatory factors; others on the dispersion of incomes in the American economy and the increase in rents.Footnote ³

Though it is difficult to attribute a single cause to homelessness, we do know that the social geography of the American city has changed rapidly. Amidst a reinvigorated ‘urban renewal’ movement – which we will discuss in a later section – low-cost apartment units have given way to luxury housing for high-income workers moving into the inner city since the 1980s.Footnote ⁴ All the while, the real wages of the lowest-income households fell in this period.Footnote ⁵ Against this grim economic background, family homelessness has been rising (US Conference of Mayors, 2004, p. 62; DePastino, Reference Depastino2003). Although commonly cited figures are extremely rough estimates – government studies in the 1990s show that every night, the number of homeless is estimated to be between 640,000 and 840,000 – they nevertheless have caused tremendous concern among scholars and advocates alike, as they show a substantial growth in homelessness since the early 1980s.Footnote ⁶ Non-profit organisations and media also often report on the figure of an estimated 2.5 to 3.5 million Americans who experience homelessness for some time during a year.Footnote ⁷ We will speak more about the methods of counting the homeless as well as the changing social geography of the city later, but first let us summarise some of the responses to homelessness.

2 Criminalisation as a response

The concern that I started out with in this paper was this: what is the process by which we have arrived at the passing of anti-feeding laws? These are, after all, of very recent occurrence. Let us now take a look at a very brief history of the predecessors of these laws. Local governments in the past have dealt with the homeless by funding, for example, emergency shelters and drug treatment programmes. Concurrently, however, municipal bodies adopted ‘quality of life’ ordinances that prohibit sleeping and begging in certain public spaces. Some prominent examples of officially sanctioned intolerance of begging are now well known by politicians and advocates alike.Footnote ⁸ In Eugene, Oregon, and Memphis, Tennessee, for example, beggars were required to obtain licences, a process that requires being fingerprinted and photographed. Beggars were required to carry their photo-licences at all times. In Berkeley, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, it became illegal to beg from anyone getting into or out of car, near an automatic teller machine, after 8 p.m., or within six feet of any storefront. Baltimore banned panhandling altogether after dark. Proponents of the law said the panhandlers disrupt people who want ‘to go to Little Italy at night to dine or to Fells Point to barhop’ (Baltimore Sun, 2001, quoted in Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2003, p. 163).

Even many politically ‘left-leaning’ cities have begun to use the harsh policing approach. They include: Seattle; New Orleans; San Francisco; Denver; Asheville and Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Santa Cruz, California; Austin, Teaxs; and Tucson and Tempe, Arizona.Footnote ⁹ In a cross-section of fifty cities in 1999, 86 percent already had anti-begging ordinances and 73 percent had anti-sleeping laws (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 1999). The homeless immediately became ‘spatial anomalies’ in the landscape of the rapidly developing American city that was keen on attracting corporate capital (Amster, Reference Amster2002). Denver, Colorado, enacted its anti-begging law, in the words of the president of its Downtown Partnership, because ‘panhandling makes [visitors] cringe, especially if they don’t know where they are’ (Denver Post, 2000, quoted in Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2003, p. 163).

In Cleveland in 1999, Mayor Michael White declared that the police would make the city safer by focusing on muggers and the homeless. Citing a need to ‘balance everyone’s rights’, the mayor wished, in his own words, to ‘move poverty out of sight so they [shoppers] will have a peaceful shopping season’ (quoted in Amster, Reference Amster2002, p. 108). The tendency has become, so it seems, one of the erasure of such glaring incongruities in downtown space. Commercialisation went hand in hand with criminalisation.

It did not just stop there. The newest ordinances, passed between 2003 and 2007, make the anti-homeless regulations even more stringent while also including prohibitions on feeding people. One very surprising development is the concept of ‘false or misleading solicitation’, as explained in the 2005 Atlanta ordinance.Footnote ¹⁰ It refers to the act of stating that one is homeless when one is actually not. The definition relies on an arbitrary understanding of what constitutes homelessness. Not only have some other cities also criminalised ‘false’ solicitation, national advocacy organisations also noticed (National Coalition for the Homeless and National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2006) that it is now common for ‘quality of life’ ordinances to put time and place restrictions on begging, with detailed lists of places where begging may not take place – for example, near ATM machines and telephone booths – such that begging is banned in virtually every place where homeless persons might meet pedestrians or greet passengers of a vehicle.

The stricter ordinances, like their progenitors in the 1980s and 1990s, continue unabashedly to privilege certain areas of the city, especially tourist meccas. Atlanta’s ordinance, for example, takes great pains to list all of the streets and intersections within the Tourist Triangle and the King Center Tourist Area where begging is not allowed; the extensive list of relevant streets takes up a full two paragraphs in the actual text of the law. In addition to outlawing ‘aggressive panhandling’, Atlanta promoted (and wrote into the law) the idea of having an Outreach Team Evaluator to engage with anyone in violation of the ordinance and to give advice on where the homeless person can be sent for help. Although the law indicates that the Evaluator cannot compel people to seek shelter or treatment of illnesses, the line between compulsion and care can become very blurred – not least because some cities allow such an Evaluator to be a police officer. I will discuss more specific police tactics in a later section.

This history of anti-homeless legislation still cannot fully explain, however, why there was a need, after more than two decades, to restrict the feeding of homeless people. I am interested in why the new prohibitions have been enacted – adding onto the existing anti-panhandling, anti-loitering laws – and why they are enforced ever more ferociously. In the most public of places – public parks – some cities are now prohibiting charitable organisations (or passers-by) from providing food to the homeless. Given America’s long history of religious piety and tradition of charity, this newest development is certainly puzzling. I do not doubt that part of the reason – at least a small part of the reason – might be that politicians are responding to the sentiments of citizens who are more and more concerned about the rising ranks of the destitute on the streets. They have in fact been at once heartached and fearful of the advances made by beggars, provoking debates in law about the appropriate response (Waldron, Reference Waldron2001). But then there must be a follow up question regarding the citizens and their relation to public space: why have they been fearful? Is the fear legitimate? We must put the pedestrian’s fears into context, questioning how they have arisen along with the ‘fortressisation’ of cities where the ‘social perception of threat becomes a function of the security mobilization itself, not crime rates’ (Davis, Reference Davis1990/2006, p. 224). Could it be that the entire architecture of the city has become an apparatus of fear? An apparatus that justifies continual punishment of the poor?

3 The changing city: urban design as implicated in gentrification

With those preliminary thoughts in mind, let us take a very brief tour through the changes to the American city in the past three decades, to tease out this process of ‘fortressisation’. As geographer R. J. Johnston articulated at the beginning of the 1980s, American urbanisation, over the decades, became a process of social reproduction through spatial manipulation, which essentially is a conflict regarding ‘benefits to be obtained from participation in the capitalist system’ (Johnston, Reference Johnston1984, p. 16). Post-Fordist production, as many commentators have recognised, has re-oriented the daily politics of the American city, and by extension, its very architecture (see MacLeod and Ward, Reference Macleod and Ward2002). Formerly the recipients of federal government aid, cities have been left to attract capital on their own since the 1980s (Smith, Reference Smith2002, p. 434). An obsession with creating the appropriate atmosphere for capital has spawned alongside a new ‘experience economy’ cultivating a particular kind of lifestyle: taste and conduct have become ever more standardised and promulgated by elite cultural intermediaries (Pine and Gilmore, Reference Pine and Gilmore1999). Space, moreover, has been shaped by the new demands of the consumer citizen. The joining of the city and the market – especially in the effort to combine indoor and outdoor spaces for consumer playgrounds (Goss, Reference Goss1996) – has re-oriented how we think about urbanity as city governments prioritise attracting shoppers to downtown areas. Aesthetics, geographers have warned us, have now been elevated to the highest level of urban planning, becoming the primary concern of city architects; city space is now designed as a theatre where a ‘critical infrastructure of consumption’ (Zukin, Reference Zukin1998) demands the closing off of public spaces to certain kinds of people, in the subsidised development of ‘racist enclaves’ that are the new urban utopic spaces (Davis, Reference Davis1990/2006, p. 227). The city, in an era of partnership with private capital, has initiated place-based image improvement at the expense of the poor.

As the recession of the welfare state everywhere drives the need for authoritarian controls to resistance (Swyngedouw, Reference Swyngedouw and Cox1997), something of a global form of urban governance emerges. Here I draw heavily from the work of geographer Neil Smith (Reference Smith2002) who argues that ‘neoliberal urbanism’ is focused, among other things, on the heightening of social controlFootnote ¹¹ as gentrification spreads across the world as a key strategy of urban development. And gentrification in the past three decades is actually quite different from what it was during the middle part of the last century, as Smith argues by way of referencing the work of Ruth Glass: ‘Whereas the key actors in Glass’s story were assumed to be middle- and upper-middle-class immigrants to a neighbourhood, the agents of urban regeneration thirty-five years later are governmental, corporate, or corporate-governmental partnerships’ (p. 439). Other authors have similarly pointed to the commercial nature of the urban development we see today. Michael Sorkin (Reference Sorkin1992) described the new neoliberal city as a city of simulations where particular areas of consumption and tourism are literally grafted onto every place you see, not least because, Margaret Crawford (Reference Crawford and Sorkin1992) argues, the shopping mall has been popularised and made ubiquitous in just less than twenty years in a rush to fill the entire American landscape with ‘palaces of consumption’ (p. 11). So successful is the shopping mall model, Crawford points out, that it has transcended the shopping mall, as museums and other public places simulate what the mall does.

4 Of blight and broken windows: public space and the post-Kelo politics of removal

Malls are heavily guarded places, however. They are also heavily standardised places, cleaned and sanitised for the consumer citizen. It is set against these themes of urban design that I begin my examination of homeless policy. I want to first look at public discourse on the homeless to understand how the newest round of regulations came to be passed. In the late 1970s and 1980s, exponents of urban revitalisation attacked Single Resident Occupancy Units (in common parlance, SROs) – very small, one-room, low-rent apartments that used to fill the streets of poor neighbourhoods – as sources of urban ‘blight’, and their gradual elimination coincided with the rise of homelessness that began at the very end of the 1970s (e.g. Metraux, Reference Metraux1999). Public attention back then was focused on property, or publicly built property that supposedly reproduced a culture of poverty. With the visibility of homelessness becoming an increasing concern, a new political discourse focused on the actual people on the street. Proponents of ‘quality of life’ ordinances became converts to the ‘broken windows’ view of local legislation, first advocated in a landmark article by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling (Reference Wilson and Kelling1982), who argued that visible signs of disrepair attract further disorder. People who behave in an inappropriate way on the street, the argument goes, attract further misbehaviour and more serious crime. The resulting wave of legislation that I described in an earlier section was meant to ‘clean up’ the streets. According to geographer Don Mitchell (Reference Mitchell1997), this was a new politics that reinvested in a language of deviance to justify the harassment of the ‘criminal’ poor living on the street. The use of broken windows theory effectively reframes human beings as things, as any other shattered piece of glass that ought to be cleaned up on a dirty sidewalk (Waldron Reference Waldron2001, pp. 386–87). In the new vision of the city, street people are not just criminal, they are subhuman.

Broken windows theory did attract much attention in the literature (e.g. Waldron, Reference Waldron2001; Mitchell, Reference Mitchell1997), especially because it had very specific ideas about what a public space should look like. It has to be clarified that neither I nor other commentators are trying to defend some mythic ideal of a public space where citizens embrace each other. In many ways what is accessible to the public – and also what is public space – has always been up for negotiation. In a recent publication, geographers Lynn Staeheli and Don Mitchell (Reference Staeheli and Mitchell2008) upset the assumption, common in liberal political theory, that public space is for public activities and private space is for private ones. In fact, they argue, there is a continuum of public and private activities that enters both realms. What is allowed in public space and who belongs to ‘the public’ therefore says something about the power relations that operate in a given space:

Amidst this struggle, Staeheli and Mitchell (p. 127) say, ideas of community are used to include or exclude (see also Hyde, Reference Hyde2000, p. 78). We see echoes here of some debates in legal philosophy. In his critique of modern communitarianism, law professor Jeremy Waldron (Reference Waldron2001, p. 374) argues against the ‘premise of complementarity between public and private’ that shapes much of communitarian writing, which, Waldron maintains, focuses on ideas of community but imposes a vision of a community. He advocates for changing our understanding of what a community is under our current political context: ‘So long as people live among us in a condition of homelessness, our normative definitions of community must be responsive to their predicament’ (p. 406).

Unfortunately, urban politics has not been leaning on the side of inclusion. In my discussion earlier on blight and broken windows, it was my contention that the latter, with its powerful imagery, conjured up the horrors of anarchic city streets full of thieves and beggars and successfully captured the imagination of politicians and the public alike. But I do not want to suggest that a focus on ‘quality of life’ completely replaced the old preoccupation with blight. In fact, blight never disappeared from our rhetorical landscape. It maintained its place at the tip of our collective tongue, constantly appropriated as a justification for development projects: from the tearing down of public housing in New York (Santos, Reference Santos2006) and Chicago (O’Connor, Reference O’connor2008), to the selling of public parks in Detroit (Saulny, Reference Saulny2007a), to condo building in San Francisco (White, Reference White2006). The politics of blight took centre stage, furthermore, in a recent US Supreme Court case, Kelo v. New London,Footnote ¹² in which a slim majority of the Court affirmed the ability of local governments to appropriate ‘blighted’ private property for ‘public use’ even if such appropriation is on behalf of private interests. In reaction to this controversial decision, some states have passed state constitutional amendments to limit the scope of their own municipal governments’ use of eminent domain. However, consistent with dissenting Justice Thomas’sFootnote ¹³ warnings about a return to the ‘urban removal’ of the 1950s, many other municipal governments have been encouraged by Kelo, condemning whole neighbourhoods as blighted to produce rapid gentrification.Footnote ¹⁴

5 New discourses: delinking housing and homelessness

It is against this backdrop of the tremendous resolve on the part of cities to reform their image that official rhetoric on homelessness and America’s affordable housing crisisFootnote ¹⁵ also changed. Since the 1970s, the Section 8 Voucher Program (or ‘Housing Choice Voucher’) has been the main feature of the federal government’s affordable housing efforts (Orlebeke, Reference Orlebeke2000). Although it does not have an entitlement structure like the Food Stamp Program and it does not promise funding for all eligible households, it provides rental assistance to extremely low-income households.Footnote ¹⁶ The programme has grown over the years, but has now come under attack. In 2003, the Bush administration proposed completely changing the structure of the programme, to convert it into what is called a block grant programme to be administered by individual states (Sard, Reference Sard2003). In 2004, the proposed federal budget contained deep cuts to the funding level of the programme (Sard and Fisher, Reference Sard and Fisher2004). Under the administration, there has been a steady erosion of the number of families assisted in the programme.Footnote ¹⁷ Affordable housing was de-prioritised both in policy and rhetoric.

The agenda described above contrasts sharply with the Bush administration’s striking activism on the issue of homelessness. Amidst the flurry of activity I will describe below, there is no mention on the part of the administration that the national housing crisis is related to homelessness. At the very beginning of the first Bush term, the administration proposed to upset the traditional system of homeless care: the administration wanted to end homelessness for good. The new argument was that there was a tiny minority of the ‘street population’, around ten percent, who were ‘chronically homeless’ because of mental illness and drug/alcohol habits and who consumed a disproportionate share of public resources (50 percent) in the form of shelter space and emergency hospital care (Shea, Reference Shea2007). Armed with fresh evidence from psychologists that permanent housing had beneficial effects in patients’ outcomes in drug treatment programmes (see, for example, Tsemberis et al., Reference Tsemberis, Gulcur and Nakae2004), the administration and its allies hailed permanent housing as an immediate saviour for the most desperate people on the street; this philosophy is commonly known as ‘housing first’. The argument, therefore, was that the long process towards ‘housing readiness’ should be abandoned: give permanent housing to the ‘chronically homeless’ and we will see an end to homelessness. To be sure, the view was consistent with the claims of experts such as University of Pennsylvania Professor Denis Culhane, who has argued since the 1990s that permanent housing can serve people better than emergency shelters.Footnote ¹⁸ And I am not doubting here that permanent housing does deliver significant benefits. What I am interested in, however, is the redefinition of the ‘homeless’ that occurred in this short period of time.

In an earlier period, government and non-profit agencies across the country operated with the long prevailing paradigm of ‘continuum of care’, the philosophy that a spectrum of services need to be provided in every locality to ensure that homeless persons of all types (for example the mentally ill, youth, single women with children) would have their needs taken care of. A corollary of this view is that some clients of homeless services, especially those with certain illnesses, must participate in a step-by-step process of care until they are ‘housing ready’. Such a process may involve, for example, completing a drug treatment programme, then staying in an emergency shelter, then enrolling in a transitional housing programme, and finally registering into subsidised housing when the client is deemed self-sufficient. This whole paradigm, of course, was entirely problematic, as it was a disease model of looking at homelessness: homeless people, once they entered into shelters, had to be diagnosed and examined to determine why they became homeless (Lyon-Callo, Reference Lyon-callo2000).

It is this model that the administration was set on changing, beginning with defining ‘chronic homelessness’ as the condition of being homeless for more than one year. Bush also revived in 2002 the Interagency Council on Homelessness to eliminate this ‘condition’ (Shea, Reference Shea2007). Its director, Mr Mangano, started travelling all over the country to convince municipal governments to formulate ‘ten-year plans to end chronic homelessness’ (Vitullo-Martin, Reference Vitullo-martin2007). As of 2007, more than 285 counties and cities drafted these plans with his help and his appeal to ‘stakeholders’ as diverse as business associations and homeless advocates, an appeal that has been successful because, by his own admission, ‘it’s the economic reasons that drive the political will’ (quoted in Shea, Reference Shea2007). What exactly are these economic reasons? The administration has certainly pointed to cost savings that would come from shifting to permanent housing away from expensive shelters. This movement would help the federal and local government alike.

Savings usually have invisible costs, however. The new policy, unveiled nationwide, basically targets one particular type of homeless person – the most visible type, most often begging in downtown business districts – for immediate housing, and does not pay attention to others living in extreme poverty who are unable to find affordable housing and who have been depending on shelters for periodic help. There is another element to the new programme that has broad appeal: this housing first model also emphasises eventual employment for those who can find jobs; those who become employed are then expected to pay rent for their supportive housing (Shea, Reference Shea2007). So the new vision for ending homelessness actually saves money twice: first by focusing on the most visible of the poorest citizens, then by asking the able-bodied among them to help defray the costs of the ‘solutions’ to homelessness.

6 New calculations: classification and counting to ‘end’ homelessness

The official vision of the homeless problem – pathologising the homeless into drunken or mentally disturbed people – turned out to be quite convincing and self-legitimising. Non-profit agencies slowly warmed to the idea of targeting a certain population. ‘Ten-year plans to end chronic homelessness’ have been drafted and adopted by local governments in a few short years. Most significantly, with federal funding for homeless services now contingent upon an annual count of the homeless population in any given city (Jordan, Reference Jordan2005), municipalities across the country have been actively involved in creating and implementing a ‘census’ for their own ‘street people’. Their methodologies diverge significantly: San Francisco, for example, uses citizen volunteers; Hollywood uses actual homeless people to do the counting, and subcontracts the process to a private company (Jordan, Reference Jordan2005). Note here that this is the first time that municipalities have been required to do an actual head count to qualify for federal funding through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Before this, cities only had to estimate their homeless population, usually depending upon the knowledge of charities. The new requirement does not include instructions on methodology of counting, so each city adopts its own.

Doing a head count is no easy matter, however, and indeed involves inventive productions of ‘data’. We see two major deviations here from a normal census: a homeless count is usually done at night; and usually it does not involve any participation on the part of the ones who are counted. What comes out of this context, then, is a very peculiar set of classifications that census takers make up: a much-publicised Los Angeles County homeless street count, for example, involved forms with categories such as ‘number of cars with sleeping occupants’ and ‘number of undetermined gender’, instead of information about race, religion and education (Jordan, Reference Jordan2005). Consequently, this kind of census abounds with inaccuracies. Criticisms of the San Francisco head count, executed with the help of 250 volunteers (Jordan, Reference Jordan2005), revolve around the puzzlingly rapid decrease in the official tally of the homeless year after year. Matt Gonzalez (in Coalition on Homelessness, 2005), former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, provides a detailed critique of the decline from 4,535 to 2,655 homeless people in just two years: ‘volunteers were asked to subjectively decide, without engaging anyone in conversation, whether an individual was homeless or not. They were told, apparently for safety reasons, not to go into parks or abandoned buildings’, in which many homeless people reside.

Anthropologists have long cautioned us that report making and census categories, in their objectifications of data and people, are indeed not objective accounts. As Carol Heimer (Reference Heimer and Riles2006, p. 96) warns us, ‘we know that we cannot take organizational records as objective accounts; they are instead accounts that are locally produced and used. Both the universal and the local are present simultaneously’. Record making has been implicated in the very making of ideology and the formulation of colonial sociological categories (Riles, Reference Riles and Riles2006, p. 10), and continues to be a crucial component of what Foucault (Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991) called ‘governmentality’, the whole complex of techniques, tactics and knowledge creation of modern government aimed at managing ‘populations’. For these reasons I have, in the above discussions, given great detail about the new documentary practices on the streets of American cities in the hope of shedding light on the process of a new kind of knowledge in the midst of developing. I believe that the census making process in the homeless counts tells us a great deal about the purpose of these counts. Here I want to draw some inspiration from law professor Annelise Riles (Reference Riles2000), for she suggests that collaboration can be both a means and an end to documentary practices. For Riles, collaborators in her ethnographic work were NGO activists in the international women’s rights regime. By contrast, the collaborators in our present story are diverse groups of people. In any given city the form for filling out the numbers of homeless people would be different, the census counting contractor would be different, the spaces of the streets would be different, and furthermore the census takers themselves – the foot soldiers in the unfolding politics of urban development – would be different.

In the case of using citizen volunteers and non-profit sector staff as census takers – a widespread practice – the process has the effect of pulling everyone into the creation of a new understanding of homelessness. The diversity of actors and census design shows how a homeless census can be morphed into different types of political projects, enabling its activation onto a broadly agreed upon agenda. In this way I would like to think of the housing first agenda as actually unfolding on the streets; I am drawing on linguist Lorenza Mondada’s (Reference Mondada, Latour and Weibel2005) ideaFootnote ¹⁹ of understanding of political context, as she implores us towards:

Classification, in the case of homeless counts, becomes a process that is not just imposed from above but involves the hard work of the citizenry. It is, in the end, unsurprisingly used for specific bureaucratic goals, in shaping the allocation of resources and in focusing attention on some features of a situation rather than others (Heimer, Reference Heimer and Riles2006, p. 109).

7 Producing a population: high-technology accounting and the process of making legible

In this context, what I have described in earlier sections is a new movement gathering storm, a desperate attempt at control over the jarring disparities unfolding on the sidewalks. It is the beginning of the systematic documentation, or the forced documentation, of an undocumented (and undocumentable) population. Neoliberal governance, kicked into high gear, features calculation as a primary means of mapping its agenda onto the population. As anthropologist Aihwa Ong (Reference Ong2006) demonstrates, neoliberalism presents a new form of governmentality through calculation of various types to justify its claims about what the population needs, what it wants, what it ought to be and what it will be in the future. In the process, political decisions have the effect of including as well as excluding different types of citizens:

The two logics map onto each other (p. 4), as we can see with our present study, in which city governments enumerate residents of the street to include them in a particular population but effectively excludes many other homeless and housing secure from view.

Geographer Nigel Thrift (Reference Thrift2007), likewise, points to a broader movement to render the world more calculable. In Thrift’s estimation, we have entered a new stage of history and knowledge. It is a ‘qualculative’ world in which calculations of various types are done with unprecedented speed and are believed to be reflections of the world, as they ‘decompos[e] and recompos[e] the world in their own image’ (pp. 90–93, 99–101). We can see concrete effects on the actual practices of government. Many authors have written on the emergence of audit culture in Britain (Power, Reference Power1994; Reference Power1997) . There is abundant evidence of similarities elsewhere, manifesting an ideological push towards transparency and what is labelled as ‘information’, pushing scholars of various social science disciplines towards a ‘renascent consideration of classification as a central practice in contemporary society’ (Brenneis, Reference Brenneis and Riles2006, p. 46). The new controls on the homeless, for example, can be argued to have reached a level that borders on fetishism. The Coalition on Homelessness (2005) in San Francisco reported, for example, that the city has, along with passing new anti-panhandling legislation in 2003, implemented a state-of-the-art computerised homeless shelter intake system for biometric imaging. According to their survey, there is overwhelming opposition amongst the homeless to the mandatory fingerprinting of shelter clients. Most disconcertingly, 30 percent of those interviewed had at some point decided not to use the shelters because of the finger-imaging system.

These inventive ways of accounting illuminate the impulse to control and account for a specific population, as cities remake their urban fabric. Anthropologist Yael Navaro-Yashin (Reference Navaro-yashin2007, pp. 80–81) has pointed to the ‘performative and phantasmatic quality’ of documentary practices as they ‘incit[e] affective energies when transacted or put to use in specific webs of social relation’. Likewise, I would like to suggest that the counting and documentation that is taking place here is a process of ‘making legible’ (Goldman, Reference Goldman, Peet and Watts2004, pp. 166–92) a newly accountable population and making the homeless feel and understand the expectations placed on them.

To be sure, this is a complex endeavour, and involves multiple layers of activity. The documentation is done to justify and to produce the rhetoric on the chronic homeless, the redefinition of the homeless problem. It is another way of demonising those who are on the streets and to focus/structure attention onto substance abuse and illness, providing fertile ground for the individualisation and scapegoating that have often occurred in the past (Hyde, Reference Hyde2000, p. 75). All of the above technologies of ‘knowing’ the target population have effectively coincided with the spate of anti-begging, anti-camping and anti-feeding legislation issued by the same local government bodies. What used to be the residents of blighted housing projects and SROs became the criminal homeless, and are now becoming the critically ill needing urgent, immediate housing. The new regime of control basically only counts a small portion of the homeless – those who are most readily visible – and then clears them off the streets using the police. It is no surprise that the new solution to homelessness has ‘succeeded’: after ‘record funding’ of $4.2 billion just for 2007 (Shea, Reference Shea2007), the Interagency Council on Homelessness cites impressive declines in homelessness from 2003 to 2007; recently, the White House issued a press release hailing the success of this programme, proclaiming that ‘from 2005 to 2006, local communities across our country have experienced a nearly 12 percent decrease in the number of chronically homeless individuals’ (Office of the Press Secretary, 2007). The Council also often cites successes such as these: since 2002, homelessness in San Francisco is down 28 percent; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 50 percent; Portland, Oregon, 20 percent; and Asheville, North Carolina, 26 percent (Shea, Reference Shea2007). Local governments also seize the moment to declare success: Washington, DC, for example, just announced that 400 of the chronically homeless will get apartments, consistent with the housing first philosophy (Moreno, Reference Moreno2008).

These successes, however, come from the inventive accounting we have been examining. The new classifications indeed make visible one particular aspect of homelessness while ignoring the overall housing crisis and the population who are periodically homeless. The manager of the 2005 Los Angeles head count, for example, was sure that the actual head count would put the population at over a decades-long estimate of 84,000 (Jordan, Reference Jordan2005) because of the lay-off of lower-tier jobs in the area and the shortage of shelter space. But it did not. The 2005 census takers counted 82,291, and the number has been going down ever since.Footnote ²⁰ As former San Francisco Supervisor Gonzalez pointed out in his critique (earlier), we must start paying attention to the politics of counting: previously, mayors inflated the numbers of homeless to obtain more federal funding, now they are rushing to deflate the numbers as much as possible. It is a troubling reversal, one that certainly confirms that another logic is operating here.

8 Hobo or homeless? Race and gender in the history of vagrancy

These new bureaucratic methods raise a crucial question. Is it really possible at all to count homeless persons? Anthropologist Anthony Marcus (Reference Marcus2006) has provocatively argued that in many ways it is impossible to define the ‘homeless’, a word which does not have an agreed-upon definition across government bodies despite decades of attempts by researchers (p. 14). For Marcus, the term has become difficult to connect with lack of housing because it is full of racial undertones (p. 17) and is used in a way that, in the minds of the poor, is tied to the ritual humiliation of dealing with the state and charity bureaucracies (p. 20). In this section I would like to pay extensive attention to Marcus’s argument and think about its implications for my study. To think through the racial politics regarding the ‘new homeless’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century I shall look briefly into the literature on American history. I will build on Marcus’s work by suggesting that the new tactics of accounting for the ‘chronic homeless’ is very race specific.

I will begin by highlighting the changing racial make-up of the American city. The continual in-migration of the white upper-middle class into the city since the early 1980s has been a surprising turn of events to urban theorists (e.g. Sassen, Reference Sassen2001; MacLeod and Ward, Reference Macleod and Ward2002). But what we also have, in the past ten years or so, is the continued out-migration of not only the black middle class (The Economist, 2008) but also of poor blacks, producing a suburbanisation of poverty (see, for example, Katz and Lang, Reference Katz and Lang2003). More specifically, it is the suburbanisation of black poverty, just as upwardly mobile white youth, the type attracted to luxury housing and a particular type of urban ‘lifestyle’, are moving into the city (Roberts, Reference Roberts2007; see also Belkin, Reference Belkin2007). As mega cities like New York continue to attract international elites (e.g. Haughney, Reference Haughney2007), they are also at risk of becoming completely economically polarised spaces (Scott, Reference Scott2006).

Given this changing environment, the counting of the visible street homeless has the effect of singling out minorities – and black males in particular. A closer look at American urban history suggests that street homelessness has changed significantly in form over time. Several historical trends are worth noting here. First, men have always been more visible than women because they have been ‘hobos’ and ‘tramps’ on the road for decades, especially after the Great Depression (Cresswell, Reference Cresswell2001; Higbie, Reference Higbie2003; Kusmer, Reference Kusmer2002). Although women and children have been part of the landscape of poverty since America’s early history (see Herndon, Reference Herndon2001), they have always been hidden from the chaotic streets – and from public view – in various ways (see Broder, Reference Broder2002), not least because they have always been positioned differently (from men) in relation to the state bureaucracy and welfare systems in general (Gowan, Reference Gowan2002). Furthermore, women are perceived differently when they are destitute and living without housing (Golden, Reference Golden1992). They are not often thought of as threatening the social order as homeless men might be.Footnote ²¹

A second trend in homelessness that is relevant to our reflections is that currently, it is people of colour in particular who are the most visible on the street. In earlier historical periods, the visible men of the road were whites who actually intentionally excluded blacks (DePastino, Reference Depastino2003). This is where I want to put Marcus’s (Reference Marcus2006) groundbreaking work into conversation with the historians referenced above. Marcus argues that, although there is indeed a housing crisis in America’s cities and there are beggars on the streets (p. 142), ‘the homeless’ as an object of public panic was forged out of a particular set of ideological battles. In the early 1980s, politicians of every stripe used for their political agenda the figure of the poor black man, who became, by turns, the Republicans’ ghetto predator in need of control and the Democrats’ hungry pauper in need of assistance (p. 143). In this historical investigation, Marcus chose not to focus so much on the politics of incarceration, which I believe also to be a significant part of the story here.

This brings us to our third point, on the relationship between incarceration and homelessness. As black men are also overrepresented in the nation’s prisons (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2007), these institutions are intimately tied to our story on the criminalisation of the homeless. Sociologist Teresa Gowan’s (Reference Gowan2002) recent work is particularly instructive here, as she argues that incarceration is implicated in the process of creating and reinforcing homelessness (p. 501). Her ethnographies focus on entire groups of men who bounce from the streets to prison – due to ‘quality of life’ ordinance violations – and then back onto the street due to lack of employment opportunities as an ex-prisoner. In her formulation, this cycle of poverty is an ‘exclusion/punishment nexus, a racialized space which germinates, isolates, and perpetuates lower-class male marginality’ (p. 503). Although neither she nor Marcus refer to each other’s work, we see echoes here of Marcus’s reminder that poverty in advanced industrial countries is not so much about lack of resources than about isolation ‘by a regime of penalty and social denial’ (Marcus, Reference Marcus2006, p. 145). This regime of denial has been perpetuated throughout American history, of course. Insofar as it is relevant to recent trends of street homeless, Gowan points our attention to the erosion of state provision of social housing in the form of the SRO units (Reference Gowan2002, p. 505) I described earlier, and the state’s imprisonment of record numbers of people of colour in the ‘war on drugs’ (p. 507; see also Painter, Reference Painter2006). Gowan reminds us that in the public perception poor black men have become synonymous with criminality (Reference Gowan2002, p. 525), underscored by the fact that ‘quality of life’ ordinances are only enforced in certain parts of urban areas and not in ‘rabble zones’ where there is a congregation of poor people of colour (p. 522). Quality of life ordinances therefore push poor black men to move to other parts of the city where an environment of petty crime might contribute to further arrest (p. 522).

9 Medicalising the marginal: mental illness and urban (dis)order

The above illustration of the punishment and politics of race brings us back to the main topic of the present study: the continuing, unabated push to pass anti-feeding legislation in the rush for attaining ‘quality of life’. Although their enforcement brings about racialised effects, the rhetoric justifying them can actually be quite sanitised and focused on caring for the people of the streets and consistent with much of the discourse of urban development in the US. Forcing homeless people off the streets so that they seek professional help is good for them, or so goes the logic that officials explain to reporters time after time. Care, however, blends easily with coercion. In advocating for his reform programmes denying the homeless welfare cash payments (in favour of providing certain services), San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom talked about the progress that would come from providing programmes that can adequately care for homeless people rather than giving welfare cheques (Fagan, Reference Fagan2005). He has dubbed the reform ‘Care Not Cash’, just as he galvanised homeless census volunteers by saying that the very act of counting someone on the street would make them feel cared for (Cote, Reference Cote2007). These comments epitomise what Nigel Thrift warned of as the ingenuity with which the political process now presents ‘affective messages that convey a “mass intimacy”’ (Thrift, Reference Thrift2007, p. 252). These affective techniques have indeed sharpened, as brutality and neglect is converted, through redefinitions, into good governance.

In a sign of the changing attitudes on the homeless issue, an antiques store owner in Manhattan recently sued four homeless persons – whom he named John Smith, John Doe, Bob Doe and Jane Doe – for $1 million in damages for disrupting his business by occasionally sitting outside his store window, taking pains to explain that the store is in an exclusive world-class shopping district from which he wants to ban the homeless.Footnote ²² Even though he previously asked his landlord to redirect the heating ducts in the building so that the homeless people would not even be able to take advantage of the hot air coming out, Mr Kemp, the store owner, told a newspaper reporter, ‘My concern is the health of the man’ (Lee, Reference Lee2007). It is the unprecedented nature of this type of lawsuit that poses urgent questions about how the new attitudes have been developed.

Many historical forces have converged in the development of this new language of care for the new ‘illness’ of homelessness, not least the failure of the deinstitutionalisation of mental health hospitals for the mentally ill. The dismantling of large hospitals in the 1970s released onto the streets a large population of previously sequestered patients (Sassen, Reference Sassen2001), who have then been slowly absorbed into prisons, with their populations soaring from the 1970s; in fact, the numbers of mentally ill people in prisons skyrocketed along with the general prison population (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2007). But there is one major twist in the story: whereas previously the asylums disproportionately absorbed women, our prisons now disproportionately host young black men (Harcourt, Reference Harcourt2007). Certainly this suggests that mental illness, perceptions of street ‘disorder’ and homelessness are intimately entwined with the race and gender issues we discussed in the previous section.

It is here that I part company with Marcus and Gowan. The two authors are among a very few, outside of the discipline of history, who have explicitly and rigorously dealt with race as it relates to homelessness. They have both largely suggested that race politics has figured prominently in the making of a marginalised denizen of the streets. I will argue, however, that in my study of anti-begging and anti-feeding ordinances as they coincide with new census taking methods, we must add another dimension to our understanding of the issue – the continued medicalisation of the homeless in official discourse.

The trends in deinstitutionalisation gave city governments a great weapon, starting in the 1980s, for explaining to their citizens why there was an explosion of beggars. As medical anthropologist Arline Mathieu (Reference Mathieu1993) explains, New York City during this time linked homelessness to mental illness in public discussions, an ingenious tactic since it was the mentally ill who were the most visible homeless. Families of women and children, on the other hand, were mostly hidden in shelters and doubling up with relatives and friends in temporary arrangements. With this argument, Mathieu maintains, the city government was able to engage in a policy of the forced hospitalisation of the homeless and to use the police – not health workers as the government claimed – to clear people off public areas. Although the policy was supposed to make sure the homeless did not freeze in the winter in outdoor areas, it was indoor public spaces (such as Grand Central Station) that were most often cleared. It is not just in public campaigns against the homeless that they are medicalised. Anthropologist Vincent Lyon-Callo (Reference Lyon-callo2000) sees shelters as sites of the ‘production of self-blame’. In this ethnography, he takes us through a tour of the ‘continuum of care’ approach I mentioned earlier. It is this ‘disease model’ of caring for homeless persons that perfectly depoliticises the issue of homelessness through medicalisation (p. 331).Footnote ²³ The homeless, when stepping into the shelter in Lyon-Callo’s story, immediately become subjects of diagnosis – to tease out the reasons behind their ‘disorder’.

As it turns out, in our current political climate, the concern over the ‘disorder’ of homeless persons has been easily hinged to panic over the (dis)order of urban space. The label of ‘chronic homelessness’ that I have already described at length specifically refers to individuals with drug/alcohol addictions or mental illness. These problems inhibit them from moving off the streets, so goes the argument, and as a result American cities are full of streets that must be cleaned up.

10 Cruelty in the camps: new tactics of bureaucracy and policing

As it turns out , ‘cleaning up’ is not figurative. Neither is it simply government-speak. There is also more and more evidence of common citizens being more hostile to the homeless. Attacks on the homeless are now a regular feature of urban crime, and they have been steadily on the rise for some time (Green, Reference Green2008; National Coalition for the Homeless and National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2008). I would like to build on the arguments of advocates who explain that this is happening because of a culture that legitimises violence against street people (see Saulny, Reference Saulny2007b) by way of first reflecting on the constituent elements of the law and legal tactics themselves.

We have thus far, throughout Part II, talked about new discourses and the calculations used to justify them and to produce new populations, new categories of governmentality. Although we have already described the ‘quality of life’ ordinances in detail in previous sections, in this part I shall attempt to dissect the regime of control that the laws and administrative tactics built. As Annelise Riles (Reference Riles, Merry and Brenneis2004, pp. 192, 205) has recently illuminated, the law has expressive and instrumental functions:

In her formulation, law-making takes on an expressive form in the marking of groups, such as in the invention of ‘chronic homelessness’ in our story. The term effectively collapses illness with destitution because the two words ‘draw their force. . .from the indexical roles that they play in articulating – or suggesting the articulation of – different discursive fields’ (Brenneis, Reference Brenneis and Riles2006, p. 44).Footnote ²⁴ This creation of a new object in the law, to follow Riles, constitutes an expressive side of law-making.

New classifications are more than discursive, however. For Stephanie Lysyk (Reference Lysyk, Goodrich, Barshack and Schutz2006, p. 128), ‘the task of the law is to imprint itself on the individual, to mark the subject’s very body with the sign of its normative power’. Law-making can also transform subjectivities through policy implementation, which is what we consider in this essay to be the instrumental side of law-making. As a new kind of cruelty has arrived to manage city space, as the bulldozing of homeless encampments and the confiscation of homeless persons’ property become commonplace, administrative practice is also more hostile through new bureaucratic innovations and experiments on the poor that border on the absurd. In a new policy of streamlining the homeless shelter process in New York (Kaufman, Reference Kaufman2007), for example, many families with children are now being denied emergency shelter space because they have relatives with apartments in the city and are judged not to be among the most needy. The result is a camp of single mothers with children, much like the camps of homeless that have been built up elsewhere (Kaufman, Reference Kaufman2007):

Many changes have led up to this new phenomenon (Kaufman, Reference Kaufman2007): Mayor Giuliani had begun a ten-day review process for eligibility rather than giving people emergency shelter immediately, and Mayor Bloomberg set up this new intake process at the end of 2004. In 2005, the city won a lawsuit in which the city was given the right to deny shelter to homeless persons. And deny them the city did: the emergence of this camp existence for homeless women and children is intimately related to a wholesale redefinition of ‘the homeless’. Recall, it is only the ‘chronic homeless’ that deserve attention now.

Cities have also intensified their use of police force to dissuade the homeless from using certain spaces. Specifically, a pattern all over the country of arrests and dismantling homeless camps has emerged. Recently, for example, the police began to confiscate the belongings of people in a fifty-block area of downtown Los Angeles (Skid Row) where 10,000 to 12,000 people live, using a thirty-seven-year-old ordinance banning sitting on sidewalks that was rarely enforced until now (Archibold, Reference Archibold2006). After a lawsuit that prompted the Court of Appeals to strike down the ordinance, the Los Angeles city council was still not able successfully to negotiate a deal with the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the homeless (Archibold, Reference Archibold2006). Such police tactics are becoming common, concerning many advocates: in a very recent activist forum for the state of Maryland (Farmer, Reference Farmer2007), advocates expressed dismay at the continued and intensified movement towards arresting, jailing and prosecuting homeless people for nuisance crimes. This is counter-productive, the advocates said, especially because having a criminal record – even for arrest – impedes homeless people from successfully applying for subsidised housing. The Maryland advocates came to one conclusion regarding the reasons behind this kind of law enforcement: the value of real estate has gone up exponentially in certain parts of big cities and local governments cannot ‘afford’ to have the homeless roaming around and ‘devaluing’ the image of the city.

Certain people have turned to expert help, in their desperation, and we see a resulting rise in litigation against the police. After the police bulldozed the tents of homeless people settled in a wooded part of Elkton, Maryland, behind a strip mall, the former camp residents decided to file a lawsuit.Footnote ²⁵ ‘I asked to get my. . .grandfather’s ring’, Donnie Brewer, one of the camp residents told a reporter. ‘He’s been dead for years and the only thing I had was that ring. And they just bulldozed it and took it to the dump.’ One year later, Mr Brewer and seven other homeless men and women sued the town council, asking the court to strike down the town’s loitering law, to prohibit future seizures and to award damages.

But here I draw again from Nigel Thrift (Reference Thrift2007), who has given us some insights about the importance of paying attention to objects with persons, persons with objects:

In our story regarding the bulldozing of the homeless camps, the taking of belongings – of blankets, sheets, photographs, tents – is a distinct form of violence enacted in public space. The taking of possessions is co-terminous with the neglect/violation of the body of the homeless. The two aspects are part of the same performance, the same statement made in public space about public space – that it is a place for the consumer citizen to the exclusion of others.

11 Co-opting community organisations: recategorisation as an instrument of control

Statements of power can also be made in more subtle ways. Certain ordinances mandate that community organisation staff, alongside the police, evaluate violators of ordinances to suggest services to which to send people living on the street; others actually let the police fill this role for the evaluator.Footnote ²⁶ During the encounter between the police and the street person, therefore, the police becomes caretaker, the caretaker becomes police. Furthermore, when the homeless arrive at nonprofit emergency shelters, their relationship with the nonprofit caretaker has also changed, as more and more reporting requirements are laid upon community organisations in an effort to make sure their activities fall into line with government policy. The case of the above-mentioned fingerprinting is one such example. The heavy handed, high-technology controls that come with the re-categorisation of the homeless, to follow Brenneis (Reference Brenneis and Riles2006), makes auditors out of nonprofit actors in the very process of refining bureaucratic terms and procedures. For him, this is how ‘institutions are made auditable, actors are made into audiences, and often the very same actors are also made into auditors’ (pp. 66–67).

The law, therefore, also targets the NGOs, through blurring the line between service, surveillance and security. This is what Riles means by the expressive and the instrumental side of law-making. On the expressive side, a new category is created. On the instrumental side, the policy implementation process involves a whole complex of bureaucratic changes that propel the new discourse forward. Community organisations are in this sense co-opted into an accelerated urban development project. It is not hard to see how they were forced into this relationship. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a new relationship with civil society was spawned alongside a new politics of ‘the war on terror’. As human rights theorist Sue Kenny (Reference Kenny2007) warns us, the discourse on terror has legitimised not only war and a politics of fear in the democratic public sphere, but also a neo-authoritarian control over civil society. Furthermore, in the ‘new political alignment between consumerism and politics’ (Thrift, Reference Thrift2007, p. 248), we see cities creating the space and justifying the need for innovations both in the consumer playgrounds of the city and in the nonprofit sector interfacing with the city’s poorest residents. Atlanta, for example, makes space for inventive capital in the form of tourist zones where begging is banned, amidst a process of comprehensive commodification of the legacy of the civil rights era, of the memory of Martin Luther King and of African-American history more generally (Dewan, Reference Dewan2008). In other words, calling for more effective marketing of the city’s space is now part of the same logic of calling for more effective accounting.