Chris Herring
Dec. 2015
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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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