Housing Inequality in America

Race, Repressive State Apparatus, and Homelessness: From Colonialism to COVID-19


               The picture above displays my google top search result for “America is a land of.” Proverbially –and even globally—known as “the land of opportunity,” America has long offered its dream known as the “American Dream”—one that has been shaped by its longstanding history of power, supremacy, and wealth. Nonetheless, the upsurge of homelessness in the US is a flagrant paradox in the land of wealth and “opportunities.” Indeed, the lack of housing affordability—or for that matter, the problem of homelessness itself—has increased even more than ever since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world, and its extensive empirical economic downfall further contributes to worsening America’s housing affordability crisis. This paper intends to examine the ways in which the problem of homelessness involves the questions of state violence, criminalization, brutalization, and even mental illness.

            The problem of homelessness in the US can be approached and understood historically, to begin with. One can then certainly look back at the questions of property rights and ownership rooted in the history of colonialism/settler colonies and its oppressive apparatus to accumulate wealth where property law extensively excludes the black, Native Americans, and indigenous people in America. As Edward Said in his book Culture and Imperialism rightly puts it: “To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about.” The question of land that Said deems important with regard to colonialism and imperialism is also the question of home, of which, of course, the indigenous people had been forcefully dispossessed. For Native Americans in the US, right from the beginning, the phenomenon of homelessness remained organically tied to their landlessness. In fact, in this instance, homelessness and landlessness are dialectically intertwined.

           Further, there is this question of what Marx calls the “accumulation of capital" that affects and aggravates homelessness. As David Harvey already theorized in his book called The New Imperialism, this accumulation operates through dispossession (137). That is to say, capital itself moves in the direction of dispossessing the poor of their property and dwellings, intensifying the process of impoverishment at more levels than one. And when the dialectic of capitalism and racism obtains and operates, the consequences are even more notorious than otherwise. As victims of violent racial stratification under capitalism, the poorest of the poor of color—who are most suppressed, subjugated, marginalized, even criminalized and derided systemically—turn out to be homeless in the US.
 
            Now the hard materiality of homelessness is evident under racialized capitalism insofar as it directly and adversely affects the very body and being of the homeless. But, then, homelessness exceeds this hard materiality in certain instances. In his book The Value of Homelessness: Managing Surplus Life in The United States, Craig Willse explains “homelessness” as a “cultural artifact” that remains tied to the racialized political economy of capitalism. Many in the US continue to experience housing insecurity that leads to vulnerabilities and further social and locational threats. In fact, one cannot do justice to the phenomenon of “homelessness” without locating it in the sphere of endless capital accumulation, anti-black, and other forms of racism, even the organized police/state violence, and—to use Willse’s own words—“the transformation of urban space into consumption enclaves.” As indicated, the question of homelessness remains tied to the question of property or lack thereof. And to the extent that “whiteness” itself turns out to be property, as Cheryl I. Harri points out in her paper instructively titled “Whiteness as Property,” its dialectical opposite leads to the state of “propertylessness” which characterizes the predicament of the racialized other—black people, indigenous people, and other people of color—and their “propertylessness” comes to mean homelessness as well. 
           Now, this homelessness—in more senses than one—has been systematically produced and reproduced from the days of early “colonialism” to today’s “COVID-19” conjuncture. To have an idea of the contemporary conjuncture, then, let’s take a look at the “State of Homeless 2022” report (which is actually about the year 2021—a report that reveals the horror of homelessness exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic). According to this report, “in December 2021, an average of 18,704 individuals slept each night in the DHS shelter system for single adults—an increase of 91% in 10 years” (19). Further, as the same report tells us, “homeless families with children spend roughly one and a half years on average sleeping in a shelter before finding their way out, and in the Fiscal Year 2021, 1,121 babies were born to parents in DHS shelters – meaning these newborns came “home” from the hospital to a municipal shelter” (20). The report clearly reveals the dismal state of homelessness in the US. Now let me call attention to the following three graphs which not only demonstrate violently increased homelessness over the years but also show how homelessness even leads to deaths and how homelessness disproportionately and even violently affects non-white people—people of color. 
                                                     
                      
                                            
 The State of Homeless Report is published every year exhibiting the current scenario of the housing and homelessness crisis in New York, and the issue of 2022 is specifically titled “State of the Homeless 2022: New York at a Crossroads.” The above three graphs underline—among other things—the vulnerabilities of non-white people and poor white people whose bodies, I argue, are further subjected to violence and abuse by capitalism as a historically produced system of domination and subjugation.   

            In fact, homeless bodies are subjected to violence through what Althusser calls the “repressive state apparatus,” which includes the army, police, courts, and prisons (Althusser, 1971). These repressive apparatuses perpetrating violence on the homeless are of course endorsed and perpetuated by the state. To address this issue further, one may look closely at the correlation among homelessness, crime, and mental illness. In fact, the criminalization of mental illness is a major issue often associated with homeless people, and through which homeless people are commodified. A recent report on California, referring to the Los Angeles Police Department Data (LAPD), says that only eight percent (8%) of the crime—including suspects— in Los Angeles involves the homeless community in 2020-2021, which is a highly low rate. Quoting the “University of Texas Study,” the report says: “Homelessness itself is linked to criminal behavior through homeless status offenses.” In fact, according to the report, “negative effects of arrest and incarceration on housing acquisition warrant consideration of alternative legal system interventions to break the cycle of homelessness.” In other words, what Althusser reckons as the RSA—that is, criminal justice and the legal system itself—contributes to the “criminalization” of homelessness.

            Furthermore, a National Homeless Law Center (NHLC) study—titled “Housing Not Handcuffs 2021: State Law Supplement—published in November 2021 shows that:
  • Almost every state, 48 in total, has at least one law restricting behaviors that prohibit or restrict conduct of people experiencing homelessness.
  • 24 states have laws restricting panhandling in particular public places
  • 6 states have laws restricting sitting and lying down in particular public places and 4 states have laws restricting lodging, living, or sleeping in vehicles, and 17 states criminalize camping in public places
  • 16 states have laws restricting loitering, loafing, and vagrancy state-wide, and 24 states have laws restricting loitering, loafing, and vagrancy in particular public places.
      In fact, the creation of the above restrictive laws directly and adversely affects homeless people in more ways than one, making them increasingly vulnerable and miserable. In addition, there are laws against food-sharing with the homeless. Now let us look at the following diagram that has to do with the question of the justice system vis-à-vis the homeless:  


This diagram  makes us see how the most marginalized community is further marginalized, even exploited through criminalization by the “Repressive State Apparatus.” This oppression not only has an economic consequence, but it also has an immense psychological impact as well—one that contributes to the mental illness of homeless people in the US.
In fact, homelessness—as a stark material condition—aggravates mental health or intensifies poor mental health conditions, while increasing anxiety, fear, and depression. sleeplessness, and even substance abuse. But it is true that mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness are sometimes viewed as separate topics but they are profoundly interconnected and even sometimes blurred into one another. As was pointed out, being homeless, as a process of systemic discriminatory experience, contributes to poor mental health. In fact, children and youth in particular are most adversely affected both physically and mentally by homelessness. The homeless may sometimes be treated in hospitals, but, of course, they cannot live there perpetually. So when they are released, they cannot fully recover without housing. In fact, remaining homeless, they remain in perpetual risk of falling sick again and again.  The following graph—significantly and suggestively—reveals the difference in both physical health conditions and mental health conditions—as well as substance abuse conditions—between those who are sheltered and those who are not:

 

Overall, homelessness—as a stark material condition—has multiple consequences involving multiple sites which cannot be abstracted from the larger forces of history on the one hand, and the specific logic of the contemporary state on the other. Homelessness—as has been shown—has simultaneously economic, political, political-economic, cultural, social, juridical, and even medical implications. Thus, homelessness turns out to be a multi-layered or what Althusser calls an “overdetermined” phenomenon in the US and the world—a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated without bringing about a fundamental or radical change in the existing economic, political, and legal systems which have hitherto proven to be decisively anti-homeless. 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page has tags:

This page references: