Define the terms worthy poor and unworthy poor Identify an example of a population that may be viewed as worthy and one that may be viewed as unworthy. Analyze the effect of being desig

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Urban Geography

ISSN: 0272-3638 (Print) 1938-2847 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurb20

Homelessness, American Style

Don Mitchell

To cite this article: Don Mitchell (2011) Homelessness, American Style, Urban Geography, 32:7, 933-956, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933

Published online: 16 May 2013.

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Urban Geography, 2011, 32, 7, pp. 933–956. DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933 Copyright © 2011 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE1

Don Mitchell2

Department of Geography Syracuse University

Abstract: This study traces the historical geography of homelessness in America. It provides a synoptic overview of the production of homelessness in the United States and the varying urban and national responses to homelessness that have resulted (both cultural responses generally and policy and legal responses more particularly). Surveying changing policies and practices from the colonial period to the present, the author explains how homelessness in the United States has developed and changed, and why it has taken the specific social form that it has. Focusing not on homeless people themselves, and not on the experience of homelessness by those people who are un-housed, but rather on how the societal condition of homelessness—the discourses, practices, laws, and events that shape the nature of homelessness as a social fact—has evolved in the United States, this article suggests that there is a specifically American “style” to homelessness. It con- cludes by raising the question of whether, with the globalization of neoliberal modes of economy and regulation, such a style is now beginning to appear in other national contexts.

INTRODUCTION

To call homelessness in the United States a “crisis” is to abuse language. Homeless- ness is a permanent and necessary part of the U.S. political economy (Marcuse, 1988), even if its specific form, its intensity, and the way it is managed has been historically and geographically variable.

“Homelessness” is not the experience of being homeless. Nor is it a word that specifi- cally refers to the qualities of people who are un-housed. Rather it names a social condi- tion, a set of social relations that are as much about the structures of housed society as they are about how society understands those who lack shelter. In other words, to speak of “homelessness” is to speak of how social relations are organized. The goal of this article, therefore, is to examine those sets of social relations—the discourses, acts of charity and other practices, modes of regulation, laws, and so forth—that shape the societal condi- tion we call “homelessness.” In these terms, the constitution of the societal condition of homelessness must be understood as an evolving, contested “project,” not a once-and-for- all thing. To define “homelessness” in the abstract, then, is a fool’s errand. Rather, what

1Thanks to Jürgen von Mahs for his patience and good ideas—the entire special issue has been a great collabora- tion through and through. Innumerable conversations with Katie Wells have improved my thinking about the social condition of homelessness. Thanks especially to three groups of ace undergraduate students in my Geography of Homelessness class who have helped me to figure out how best to describe the long arc of homelessness—as condition and ideology—in American history. Elvin Wyly has been humorously tolerant of my quirks, and for that especially has earned my appreciation. 2Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Don Mitchell, Department of Geography, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, 144 Eggers Hall, Syracuse, NY 13210; telephone: 315-443-3353; fax: 315-443-4227; email: [email protected]

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constitutes “homelessness” (and thus how those people labeled “homeless” are understood by larger society) changes as the social conditions that produce homelessness change.3

The recent evolution of “homelessness” in the U.S. can be quickly surveyed: Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, the nature of homelessness in the U.S. altered significantly, leading to a more diverse, and much larger, street population than in the previous decades. The seemingly sudden explosion of street populations in the early years of the Reagan era led to a great deal of activism, often in the face of a hostile national government, a rapid expansion of emergency shelters, experiments in what became the “continuum-of-care” approach to housing the homeless, and eventually the McKinney- Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. With the deepening of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, however, the U.S. witnessed what many commentators referred to as “compassion fatigue.” The expansion of the shelter system and the various programs of the McKinney Act seemed to do little to lessen the presence of visible homeless people in cities. As cities were struggling to remake themselves as more “competitive” in the markets for footloose capital, tourists, suburban visitors, and gentrifiers, homeless people, and the facilities that served them (shelters, drop-in centers, halfway houses, etc.), were seen more and more as liabilities.

The response was a criminalization of homeless people in many cities. Laws were passed that outlawed everything from sleeping outdoors, to sitting on sidewalks, to free food giveaways. A traditional division between “deserving poor” (women, children, and those who behaved themselves in ways dominant society deemed sufficiently grateful to charity) and “undeserving poor” (men of working age, those who lived on the streets or in encampment and refused to enter shelters or rehabilitation programs) was reasserted— with a vengeance.

While anti-homeless laws were somewhat successful in pushing the most visible street people out of the most prominent public spaces, and while the boom-times of the Clinton era encouraged the sense that those who remained homeless were somehow themselves at fault, thus turning attention away from structural analyses of homelessness, the current economic crisis has led once again to a rapid increase in the population of the new home- less, increased strain on the always-inadequate emergency shelter and food systems, and a return of visible street homeless populations in most cities. Despite the development in recent years of a new ideology of “housing first” for homeless people, the public hous- ing sector and broader low-income housing markets have been eviscerated by 40 years of underinvestment, gentrification, and outright destruction, suggesting that possibilities for quickly addressing the latest manifestation of homelessness in the United States are extremely limited.

In what follows, I will fill out this all-too-brief survey of the changing nature of home- lessness and responses to it, both extending that history back in time and placing it in its political context. In doing so I will introduce an argument about the how the co- evolutionary relationship between political economy and its social regulation—especially in the realm

3As will become evident, the approach taken in this paper runs contrary to the dominant discourses of contempo- rary homelessness, which are largely concerned with the question of who the homeless are, and what it is about their personal characteristics that has led them to the condition or status of homelessness. Critics call this focus on characteristics the “medicalization” of homelessness and show that one of its primary effects—and often a primary goal—has been to depoliticize the discourse of homelessness (Lyon-Callo, 2000; Snow et al., 1994).

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE 935

of law—must be carefully parsed if we want to understand the evolution of an American- style societal condition of homelessness. Such an analysis will provide something of a historical and geographical point of comparison for the other papers in this issue, which seek to understand if there is something of an Americanization of the “style” of homeless- ness in other national settings.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMELESSNESS IN THE UNITED STATES

It is customary, in both academic and policy circles in the U.S., to base analyses of homelessness on the question, “Who are the homeless?” (e.g., Blau 1993; Erickson and Wilhelm, 1986, Part IV). This question is answered at the aggregate level by seeking to determine the percentage of homeless people who are mentally or physically ill, addicted to drugs or alcohol, have criminal records, or suffer from some other moral impairment or form of deviancy; such analyses typically parse the homeless by race, gender, age, and other characteristics. Homelessness is understood in this discourse as a problem of “impaired capacity,” and those who suffer from this malady are themselves often seen not so much as symptoms, but as causes of “structural problems in the economy” (Hopper et al., 1985, p. 189; cf. Tier, 1998). Homelessness is argued to be a characteristic of persons rather than a condition of society.

The Deserving and Undeserving Poor

Such an argument reinforces a traditional divide in American society (and the West more broadly) between “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In Colonial America, this distinction was subsumed under a broader one differentiating between “neighbor” and “stranger,” a distinction that “weakened but never disappeared” as it was supplemented in the “early nineteenth century with the distinction between the “‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ poor” (Rothman, 1987, pp. 11–12).4 The characteristics of the poor—are they neighbors or strangers, Americans or immigrants, able-bodied or infirm, young or old?—determined their moral standing, and thus both the cause of their poverty and the appropriate response (the provision of shelter, incarceration in jail or workhouse, or being driven out of town). As Hopper et al. (1985, p. 189) summarize, “Despite stubborn implications to the contrary, homelessness has traditionally been viewed as a problem of troubled—and troublesome— individuals. The terms of accusation may change, but the logic does not.”

The logic is an ideological one that hides an economic one. The process of what Marx called “primitive” or “original” accumulation in England, involving the engrossment of land, enclosure of commons, together with the breaking down of feudal and guild bonds, violently uprooted whole armies of “masterless men”: “beggars, robbers, vagabonds” (Marx, 1987 [ed.], p. 686). To control these new classes of dispossessed there developed “a bloody legislation against vagabondage” that sought to control movement, compel labor, and punish those who resisted (Ribton-Turner, 1887; Hill, 1972; Beier, 1986). Both the problem of “masterless men” and the solution were imported to America with the colonies—for example, poor laws that prescribed “pillorying, branding, flogging, or ear

4There is now an excellent literature on the history of homelessness in relation to poor law in the U.S.; among others, see Cresswell (2001), DePastino (2003), Hopper (2003), Kusmer (2002), and Piven and Cloward (1971).

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cropping … those migrants who could not give ‘a good and satisfactory accounting of their wandering up and down’” (DePastino, 2003, p. 6, quoting Jones, 1984, p. 39), enforced labor in the workhouse, on the rock pile, or in the harvest for those who could, or the simple expedient of “warning out” (that is, forcing back on the road) those who showed up in town with no visible means of support, and were undeserving of local sympathy (Rothman, 1987, p. 12).

Vagrancy laws were a key means of controlling both the “wandering poor” and freed or escaped slaves, and they reinforced a sharp divide between insiders in society (including those who might be deserving of some charity) and outcasts who threatened the stability of society (Monkkonen, 1984; Cresswell, 2001; Schweick, 2009). Yet, “the poor of the nine- teenth century city were everywhere apparent. Begging was commonplace. Rag-pickers foraged through garbage for discarded and scrap food. ‘Wild children’ roamed the streets” (Hopper, 2003, p. 30). Behind this visible façade of poverty lay “a huge reservoir of sickly, poorly paid, badly housed, and frequently unemployed people,” a “disreputable poor” that “charity did little to ease … preferring instead to pioneer new disciplinary techniques for their edification” (Hopper, 2003, pp. 30–31).

Tramping and the Rise of Skid Row

Nonetheless such outcasts were, many of them, an economic necessity. Not just Marx’s lumpenproletariat, “tramps” were a vital source of flexible and seasonal labor in both ante- and postbellum America, harvesting bonanza wheat crops, building canals and railroads, felling trees in the forests, and so forth (Monkkonen, 1984; DePastino, 2003; Higbie, 2003). The rapid industrialization of the U.S. after the Civil War, and the rapid engross- ment of land that accompanied it (complicated, but by no means eliminated by, the various homestead policies), created a massive demand for mobile labor. As Kusmer (1987, p. 23) writes, “The increasing number of homeless men during the very period when the United States was emerging as an industrial nation was no coincidence. The new vagrancy was an indigenous aspect of a country in rapid transition from an agricultural and small-town society to one centered on great cities.”

Three crucial results of the rise of this massive “reserve army” of migratory and often homeless men (and some women) are particularly important for understanding contempo- rary homelessness in America. First, it generated a serious moral panic among the emerging bourgeoisie, especially in times of economic crisis (e.g., 1873–1878; 1893; 1912–1913) when the bourgeoisie’s own precarious social stability was at risk (Cresswell, 2001).5 As a result, vagrancy laws were reinforced and new policing methods—sometimes quite violent—were introduced to contain and corral the wandering poor while separating the worthy from the unworthy (who were not infrequently labeled “agitators”) (Monkkonen, 2004). These “tramp scares” expressed themselves as “struggles between the propertied and unpropertied over the use of public space, fears about the growth of a propertyless pro- letariat, and anxieties about the loss of traditional social controls in America” (DePastino, 2003, p. 8)—all struggles, fears, and anxieties strongly revived in the current era of homelessness.

5At times of economic crisis, the number of homeless women among the tramping poor increased greatly, though vagrancy remained largely a male preserve (Weiner, 1984; Cresswell, 2001).

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE 937

The second, not unrelated, result was the development of a specific geography of home- lessness in the United States. On the road, this geography took the form of hobo jungles or encampments at the edge of cities, in disused spaces along rail lines, and so forth. For workers between jobs, jungles often served as spaces of community (not without hier- archy and internal forms of exploitation and domination among hobos),6 places where the sting of the police baton was less frequent, and zones of safety from a deeply hostile settled society. In cities, skid rows—entire districts of single-room occupancy hotels (SROs), flophouses, municipal lodging houses, labor agencies, cheap bars and cafes, missions, whorehouses, and other businesses and services geared toward poor and migra- tory workers—developed at the edges of downtowns. Migratory workers “wintered over” in skid row, and returned to it between short-term jobs in the harvests, mines, and woods. A “home-guard” class of relatively immobile, frequently unemployable (because of age, infirmity, or addiction) “bums” found cheap housing—or at least a bed in a mission— and a relatively benign police presence in skid row (Bahr, 1970, 1973; McSheehy, 1979; Schneider, 1984; Kasinitz, 1986; Hoch and Slayton, 1989; Groth, 1994).7 “Unfit mothers,” prostitutes, and other poor women also found shelter on skid row, though boarding houses in working class neighborhoods housed many working women, while settlement houses in various districts provided a home for the most “deserving” of the others. Skid rows thus developed in most American cities as specialized districts for housing, maintaining, and managing the massive reserve army of labor, an army that expanded and contracted with the economic fortunes of the nation.

The third result, concomitant in part of the “discovery” of this emerging geography, was the development of an extensive social science literature on the phenomenon of vagrancy, tramping—and homelessness. Economic crisis always brought with it a significant rise in the number of those (including large numbers of women and children) seeking shelter in the lodging houses, police station basements, or shantytowns erected in parks or on waste- land, but the phenomenon of wandering men, and the perceived disaffiliation from society that marked them, never disappeared. Skid row was, by the beginning of the 20th century, apparently becoming home to a permanent class of the unemployed and semi-employed. Researchers in the emerging social sciences sought to parse out just who it was that habitu- ated skid row (see, e.g. Solenberger, 1911), and to explain their disaffiliation from family and the comforts of a settled home as a sort of perversity or personal defect (Parker, 1919), or even as a way of life chosen by men divorced from the norms of society (Anderson, 1923). Homelessness—a condition now defined not so much by a lack of shelter, but rather by a lack of tight ties to bourgeois family and society—was increasingly seen as a function of individuals’ characters (Hopper et al., 1985; Cresswell, 2001; Hopper, 2003), as politi- cal economic analyses of the role of hobos and other marginalized workers in society were downplayed. The effect was to classify homeless people as external to society, rather than as integral to its functioning.8 The preferred intervention, therefore, was typically charity

6There was a quite specific language of male homelessness at this time: hobos wandered in search of work; tramps wandered but did not work; bums neither wandered nor worked (Cresswell, 2001, pp. 48–49), though in practice these terms were frequently used interchangeably. 7“Relative” is the important word. Policing on skid row could at times be impressively violent (Bittner, 1967; McSheehy, 1979). 8Such a positioning was obviously a hallmark of the Chicago School of urban sociology. But work associated with that school should not be so easily homogenized. Significant exceptions to this overarching way of understanding

938 DON MITCHELL

and moral instruction (as with the Salvation Army and the thickets of Christian “rescue” missions that sprouted in skid rows across the country) that sought to reintegrate those who could be saved.

Whatever the theories of the social scientists, and whatever the interventions of the charities, both were overwhelmed by the explosion of need that marked the Depression. Charity collapsed under the weight of both numbers and the contradictions of its own ideology as millions lost their houses and sought shelter wherever they could. On the basis of surveys, the hobo-sociologist Nels Anderson estimated in the spring of 1933 that 1.5 million people slept in public shelters or outdoors, and additional millions filled the flop- houses and commercial lodging houses; more still, no doubt, were doubled up with rela- tives. The term “homeless” was newly reserved “for those unable to pay for shelter of any sort” (DePastino, 2003, pp. 200–201). Other research exposed the appalling conditions— the dilapidated and overcrowded houses, the airless, firetrap tenements, the neighborhoods still without plumbing or safe water—within which much of the working class lived. And unprecedented migrations of new “tramps,” new migratory workers—the masses, often whole extended families, fleeing drought and economic collapse in the Dustbowl states— created housing and political crises in rural and urban areas alike (Stein, 1974; Gregory, 1989). Economic explanations of the new homeless and poorly housed were unavoidable, as were solutions targeted at the conditions that produced homelessness, rather than at the characteristics of homeless people themselves.9

Welfare, American Style

Keynesian interventions in the U.S. economy beginning in the 1930s and 1940s were halting, discontinuous, and frequently contradictory. Nothing like the Beveridge Plan for post-war Britain, and certainly nothing like the social welfarism of Europe, was ever developed. But the effect of what interventions there were on the nature of homelessness, and its geography, was profound. The Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 created a national program of public housing for the first time. Imagined in the first instance as workers’ housing, the housing built under the act expanded the pool of low-cost housing and relieved pressure on overcrowded tenement districts. The major 1949 amendment to the act promoted slum clearance and urban development as well as rehousing in mas- sive projects (Hackworth, 2007, pp. 44–53). These acts, and others that followed, together with the heavy subsidization of suburban housing (through tax breaks as well as through the creation of the federal interstate highway system), had profound effects on skid rows in many cities, beginning a long decline of SROs and rooming houses (Jackson, 1985; Fishman, 1987; Groth, 1994, chapter 9).

Make-work programs, like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, provided immediate relief to the un- and underemployed, especially young and single men, eating into the traditional pool of recruits for the migratory labor forces. The military draft, war-oriented production, and thus the full employment of World

homeless people can be found in Anderson (1923) and Thrasher (1927); for an excellent discussion of the latter, see Tonnelat (2008). 9Analyses and policy interventions aimed at the characteristics of homeless people never disappeared, of course (cf. Southerland and Locke, 1936; Crouse, 1986).

HOMELESSNESS, AMERICAN STYLE 939

War II had an even more profound effect (as did the heavy subsidization of college and university education for veterans under the postwar G.I. Bill). State planning of industry, some support for unionizing, the invention of Social Security, the development of state and corporate pensions, a modicum of health insurance, and what eventually became known as the “Great Compromise” between capital and labor after the war (a compromise that traded high wages and job security for labor peace), all radically transformed the labor market, cementing into place a “fordist” regime of accumulation and social regulation. While some transient labor was still required in the economy in seasonal industries like agriculture, the bracero guest-worker program (1942–1964) helped assure that such work would be con- ducted largely by a nonwhite, immigrant labor force, one often excluded from the fruits of the postwar boom (Galarza, 1964, 1977). “The Great Depression, which began by sending millions to lodging houses, jungle camps, and public shelters,” DePastino (2003, p. 219) concluded, “ended by confirming hobohemia’s [skid row’s] demise and recommitting the nation to the suburban domestic ideal.”

As a result, the structure of homelessness—and most especially its representation— changed. Women and children were never absent from the ranks of the homeless, nor were people of color, but neither were they now typically counted as part of the new, postwar homeless. Those labeled homeless in the postwar years were the residents of the remaining SROs, missions, and lodging houses, and they tended to be white, elderly, and rarely transient. They were frequently alcoholic. They were either minimally employed or unemployable. They were modern society’s outcasts (Cayo Sexton, 1986).10 They were disaffiliated men—disaffiliated from the nuclear family (both the ideal and the reality) and disaffiliated from society. Urban sociologists “characterized skid row as a world apart, an isolated enclave of damaged white men who had failed to take up their proper roles as family breadwinners” (DePastino, 2003, p. 231; cf. Hopper, 2003, p. 45; Bahr, 1970; Bahr and Caplow, 1973). They were truly the undeserving poor, because they had failed to avail themselves of the benefits of the new postwar era. In this way, despite the construc- tion, at least in part, of what Jessop (2002) termed the Keynesian welfare national state, homelessness could be made to fit a traditionally liberal ideology, in which opportunities for individual success were everywhere available, and thus lack of success was a function of either a character fault, a (bad) choice, or some combination of the two. But one salient fact remained the same: homeless people were people “whose presence represent[ed] unneeded labor,” and as such they remained “a drain on households [and] an affront to the peaceful enjoyment of civic space” (Hopper, 2003, p. 45).

THE GREAT U-TURN11

“So long as the appearance of unusual numbers of homeless men (in addition to the accepted residuum of ‘unemployables’) can be framed as a temporary aberration,” writes urban anthropologist Kim Hopper (2003, p. 46), “the fiction can be maintained that home- lessness signifies nothing other than deranged mentalities, bad habits, or faulty coping

10The first wave of deinstitutionalization in the 1960s, which moved the mentally ill out of the total institution of the asylum and into unprepared and underfunded neighborhoods for care, reinforced the notion that street and homeless people were “not like us” (Lamb, 1984; Dear and Wolch, 1987). 11The title is borrowed from Harrison and Bluestone (1988).

940 DON MITCHELL

skills of those whom it affects.” By the early 1980s, this fiction was, in fact, quite difficult to maintain. Uneven recovery from the deep recession of the 1970s; the rapid slide into a new recession in 1981; the massive deindustrialization that had begun in some areas as early as the 1960s, but really gathered force after the oil shocks of 1973–1974; the steady erosion of union rights and benefits; changes in housi

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