The Housing Crisis and Newsomville 2024

On July 25, 2024, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-1-24, directing the removal of all homeless encampments on California state land and pressuring municipalities to follow suit. The order takes immediate advantage of a recent Supreme Court decision. On June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s decision in Johnson v. Grants Pass that protected the unhoused from being ticketed and arrested for sleeping in public spaces in cities with insufficient shelter beds. The unhoused plaintiffs of the original Grants Pass case relied on the 2018 Martin v. Boise (9th Circuit Court of Appeals) and the 1962 Robinson v. California (Supreme Court) cases, which decided that penalizing individuals for their mere status as unhoused or addicted to substances constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. In overturning Johnson v. Grants Pass, the Supreme Court asserted that both the rich and the poor are prohibited from sleeping in public and paved the way for states and municipalities to sweep encampments with increased impunity [1].  

Encampment sweeps might make Newsom appear like he is finally taking more effective action to address homelessness, an issue which plagues his administration. The considerable funding and numerous programs provided by his administration have had a limited effect on the number of rough sleepers and encampments in California. Encampment removal may be linked to Newsom’s political prospects in the same way migrants and the unhoused were displaced to make way for this year’s Olympics in Paris or similar large-scale sporting events like the World Cup. If removing uncomfortable social inequities from view is how Newsom decides to refurbish his public image, he continues an old, cruel history. Think the architectural apartheid of colonial Algiers, the ejection of the working class during the Haussmannizaton of Paris, the eviction of the Depression-era Hoovervilles from the National Mall in Washington DC, and the mass demolitions of the urban renewal era targeting poor neighborhoods in postwar US cities and around the world.

Friedrich Engels wrote of such displacements in “The Housing Question” (1872): “No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood.” A century ago, Hooverville encampments proliferated elsewhere after their clearance from the National Mall; the same could happen with this decade’s evicted Newsomvilles. They will persist as long as housing is treated as a commodity (with a home’s exchange value prioritized over its use value), and as long as poverty and difference are treated as aesthetic problems.

Figure 1. After the City of Oakland cleared the Wood Street encampment in 2023, one community member resettled the roadside just meters away from where it remained for months incorporating a “no encampments” sign into its layout. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, August 2023.

A series of articles published in PLATFORM on the (un)housed and the housing crisis offer critical insights in light of Newsom’s order. Written by professionals in architectural history, history, American studies, architecture, geography, and urban studies, they help us understand that the often uncomfortable presence/visibility of encampments and the unhoused is not itself the problem, but rather an outgrowth of historically and geographically situated systemic issues. The first group of selected articles provides historical context for the current housing crisis leading to the proliferation of encampments in the US, while the second helps us reframe the presence of encampments, counteracting superficial gut reactions to them propagated in mainstream culture and media.

Encampments: Historical Context

Lizabeth Cohen, “The US Government Once Promised to Provide Homes for All. What Happened?” (July 15, 2019). From the 1930s to 1970s, the US government actively intervened in national housing, bolstering supply for some segments of the population. Since the 1980s, the US has relied mainly on private, market-driven solutions. Now the numbers of unhoused are ballooning. In light of this crisis, Cohen advocates “re-empowering the federal government to act in public interest” while learning from the grave mistakes of the New Deal and urban renewal era.

Patricia A Morton, “Herbert Gans, Displacement, and the Real Estate State” (September 9, 2019). Building on Herbert Gans’s 1982 essay “From the Bulldozer to Homelessness,” Morton asserts “displacement is essential to the real estate industry’s pursuit of increased property values and profits.” In the era of US urban renewal and freeway construction, the state’s demolitions fulfilled that function by displacing the poor and freeing up their land for more profitable uses. During our current post-urban renewal era, private market forces of rent hikes and gentrification continue the legacy of the bulldozer.

Eric Peterson, “Against Nonprofit Housing and Towards a Mass Politics of Tenants” (February 21, 2022). 1970s Nonprofit Community Development Corporations increasingly took up the torch of housing when the US Welfare State lost credibility in the wake of the spatial violence of urban renewal. Peterson argues that a mass grassroots political movement independent of private and nonprofit entities will be crucial in solving the current housing crisis. A tenant’s rights movement on the scale of Black Lives Matter or the recent wave of labor strikes could “politicize” the current nonprofit- and market-based affordable housing system. It could pressure the state to create new kinds of housing programs beyond the current market-centered model of giving tax credits to builders.

Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, “Settling in the Scars of the City” (October 30, 2023). This article explores the settlement patterns of major encampments in the toxic urban gashes left by redlining, urban renewal, and freeway construction in West Oakland, California. The massive and infrastructurally complex Wood Street encampment was among them. Wood Street was evicted in 2022-23 after Gavin Newsom visited and compared what he saw to the 1979 postapocalyptic film Mad Max, repeating a common conservative refrain of the “lawlessness” in Californian cities. In focusing on its visual resemblance to a Hollywood set, the Governor missed the encampment’s historical context and the ways in which its alternative social infrastructures addressed (and emerged from) the ongoing housing crisis.

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Figure 2. View of the vast and vacant Wood Street Commons lot from the I-880 overpass after the encampment was cleared. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, August 2023.

Reframing Encampments

Figure 3. Nikki reveals the barbed wire and fence appropriated as the rear wall in the “She Shed” at the Fifth Street Natives encampment. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, 2021.

Stephen Legg, “Who’s New to Social Distancing” (April 20, 2020). Written during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Stephen Legg explores histories of quarantine and exclusion during pandemics and other public health crises. He reminds us that in urban planning and policy, the lines between epidemiological and “social” contagions have often blurred. The “cordon sanitaire” surrounding colonial enclaves, for example, were designed to keep both disease and difference at a distance. Legg’s terms “spatial distancing” and “civil abandonment” are useful lenses through which to view contemporary encampment sweeps.

Arijit Sen, “Walking the Field in Milwaukee” (July 13, 2020).  Arijit Sen challenges architectural histories that examine buildings as isolated objects devoid of cultural history. Such histories neglect embedded racial politics and the role of housing environments in creating poverty. It also obscures the ways in which racial groups and the unhoused adapt the environment to their needs. He calls on us to replace old ways of seeing the built environment, where the visual signs of poverty, like boarded windows and the presence of the unhoused, are understood as signs of societal decline. Instead impoverished neighborhoods and encampments present unique “distributions of the sensible,” replete with their own social and infrastructural systems.

Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, “Curbside Castle: Architecture and Aspiration at an Oakland Homeless Encampment” (January 17, 2022). This article relays what Nikki Cooper and her gracious unhoused community taught the author about their Fifth Street Encampment in West Oakland, CA. Complete with improvised plumbing, electricity, and all the rooms of a modern house, their curbside community deftly walks the lines between private and public property while incorporating the existing infrastructure of utility poles and chain link fences.

Figure 4. The Fifth Street Natives encampment uses a utility pole and lamp post as supports. Photograph by Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, 2021.

Helen Bronston, “People’s Park, Autumn 2022, Part 1” (January 23, 2023) and “Part 2” (March 20, 2023). In Berkeley, California’s storied People’s Park is now being reclaimed by the Regents of the University of California and developed into housing for eleven hundred students. The surrounding Bay Area’s very real housing shortages are now weighed against the countercultural history of the Park and the unhoused who dwell in it. Helen Bronston “walks the field” (to use Arijit Sen’s words), documenting ways that the unhoused created their own homes and communities in People’s Park and exploring the implications of their displacement.

Avishek Ray, “Co-spatiality and Dissent: The Migrant Workers’ Walk in Retrospect” (February 14, 2022). In light of the migrant workers walks that took place in India during harsh and sudden COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Avishek Ray examines the ways the modern capitalist state attempts to “contain mobilities.” Drawing on “nomadology” scholarship, Ray explains that in the eyes of the state there are “good mobile subjects” (tourists, businesspeople, and the global elite), and “bad mobile subjects” (migrants, vagabonds, and the unhoused). He uses the term “co-spatiality” to describe a form of resistance used by marginalized mobile subjects where they use spaces for state-sanctioned and unsanctioned uses simultaneously. The unhoused exhibit this co-spatiality when they build encampments in parks, roadsides, and beneath overpasses. The Supreme Court and Newsom have decided such co-spatiality is punishable, even in light of the US housing crisis forcing hundreds of thousands out of sanctioned forms of home.

Notes

[1] The SCOTUS decision that ticketing and arresting the unhoused for camping on public lands is not in fact “cruel” or “unusual” is an unironic repetition of Anatole France’s scathingly ironic quote: “The poor must work for this, in the presence of the majestic equality of the law which prohibits the wealthy as well as the poor from sleeping under the bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing bread.” Anatole France, “Madame Has Her Way,” in The Red Lily (2016).

Citation

Ben Jameson-Ellsmore, “The Housing Crisis and Newsomville 2024,” PLATFORM, July 31, 2024.