It is illegal, in other words, to be homeless or live outdoors for any other reason. It should be noted, though, that there are no laws requiring cities to provide food, shelter, or restrooms for their indigent citizens.
The current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s, along with the ferocious growth of the financial industry (Wall Street and all its tributaries throughout the nation). That was also the era in which we stopped being a nation that manufactured much beyond weightless, invisible “financial products,” leaving the old industrial working class to carve out a livelihood at places like Walmart.
As it turned out, the captains of the new “casino economy”—the stock brokers and investment bankers—were highly sensitive, one might say finicky, individuals, easily offended by having to step over the homeless in the streets or bypass them in commuter train stations. In an economy where a centimillionaire could turn into a billionaire overnight, the poor and unwashed were a major buzzkill. Starting with Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York, city after city passed “broken windows” or “quality of life” ordinances, making it dangerous for the homeless to loiter or, in some cases, even look “indigent,” in public spaces.
No one has yet tallied all the suffering occasioned by this crackdown—the deaths from cold and exposure—but “Criminalizing Crisis” offers this story about a homeless pregnant woman in Columbia, South Carolina:
During daytime hours, when she could not be inside of a shelter, she attempted to spend time in a museum and was told to leave. She then attempted to sit on a bench outside the museum and was again told to relocate. In several other instances, still during her pregnancy, the woman was told that she could not sit in a local park during the day because she would be “squatting.” In early 2011, about six months into her pregnancy, the homeless woman began to feel unwell, went to a hospital, and delivered a stillborn child.
Well before Tahrir Square was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, and even before the recent recession, homeless Americans had begun to act in their own defense, creating organized encampments, usually tent cities, in vacant lots or wooded areas. These communities often feature various elementary forms of self-governance: food from local charities has to be distributed, latrines dug, rules—such as no drugs, weapons, or violence—enforced. With all due credit to the Egyptian democracy movement, the Spanish indignados, and rebels all over the world, tent cities are the domestic progenitors of the American occupation movement.
There is nothing “political” about these settlements of the homeless—no signs denouncing greed or visits from left-wing luminaries—but they have been treated with far less official forbearance than the occupation encampments of the “American autumn.” LA’s Skid Row endures constant police harassment, for example, but when it rained, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had ponchos distributed to nearby Occupy LA.
All over the country, in the last few years, police have moved in on the tent cities of the homeless, one by one, from Seattle to Wooster, Sacramento to Providence, in raids that often leave the former occupants without even their minimal possessions. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, last summer, a charity outreach worker explained the forcible dispersion of a local tent city by saying, “The city will not tolerate a tent city. That’s been made very clear to us. The camps have to be out of sight.”
What occupiers from all walks of life are discovering, at least every time they contemplate taking a leak, is that to be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals,” facing prohibitions on the most basic activities of survival. They are not supposed to soil public space with their urine, their feces, or their exhausted bodies. Nor are they supposed to spoil the landscape with their unusual wardrobe choices or body odors. They are, in fact, supposed to die, and preferably to do so without leaving a corpse for the dwindling public sector to transport, process, and burn.
But the occupiers are not from all walks of life, just from those walks that slope downwards—from debt, joblessness, and foreclosure—leading eventually to pauperism and the streets. Some of the present occupiers were homeless to start with, attracted to the occupation encampments by the prospect of free food and at least temporary shelter from police harassment. Many others are drawn from the borderline-homeless “nouveau poor,” and normally encamp on friends’ couches or parents’ folding beds.
In Portland, Austin, and Philadelphia, the Occupy Wall Street movement is taking up the cause of the homeless as its own, which of course it is. Homelessness is not a side issue unconnected to plutocracy and greed. It’s where we’re all eventually headed—the 99 percent, or at least the 70 percent, of us, every debt-loaded college grad, out-of-work schoolteacher, and impoverished senior—unless this revolution succeeds.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.
HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS
“Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” (Harper’s Magazine, 1999)
“How You Can Save Wall Street” (Mother Jones, 1988)
“S&M As Public Policy” (The Guardian, 1993)
“Going to Extremes: CEOs vs. Slaves” originally published as “CEOs vs. Slaves” (The Nation, 2007)
“Are Illegal Immigrants the Problem?” (Barbara’s Blog, 2006)
“What’s So Great about Gated Communities?” (Huffington Post, 2007)
“Is It Now a Crime to be Poor?” (New York Times, 2009)
“A Homespun Safety Net” (New York Times, 2009)
“Dead, White, and Blue” (Guernica, 2015)
HEALTH
“Welcome to Cancerland” (Harper’s Magazine, 2001)
“The Naked Truth about Fitness” (Lear’s, 1990)
“Got Grease?” (Los Angeles Times, 2002)
“Our Broken Mental Health System” (The Nation, 2007)
“Liposuction: The Key to Energy Independence” (The Nation, 2008)
“The Selfish Side of Gratitude” (New York Times, 2015)
MEN
“How ‘Natural’ is Rape?” (Time, 2000)
“The Warrior Culture” (Time, 1990)
“At Last, a New Man” originally published as “A Feminist’s View of the New Man” (New York Times, 1984)
“Patriarchy Deflated” (The Baffler, 2018)
WOMEN
“Are Women Getting Sadder?” originally published as “The Sad Truth” (Los Angeles Times, 2009)
“Our Neighborhood Porn Committee” originally published as “The Story of Ed” (Mother Jones, 1986)
“Strategies of Corporate Women” (New Republic, 1986)
“Feminism’s Assumptions Upended” originally published as “What Abu Ghraib Taught Me” (Los Angeles Times, 2004)
“Making Sense of la Différence” (Time, 1992)
“Outclassed: Sexual Harassment” originally published as “Sexual Harassment Doesn’t Just Happen to Actors or Journalists. Talk to a Waitress, or a Cleaner” (The Guardian, 2017)
GOD, SCIENCE, AND JOY
“Mind Your Own Business” (The Baffler, 2015)
“The Animal Cure” (The Baffler, 2012)
“The Missionary Position” (The Baffler, 2012)
“The New Creationism: Biology under Attack” (The Nation, 1997)
“Up Close at Trinidad’s Carnival” (Smithsonian Magazine, 2009)
BOURGEOIS BLUNDERS
“Family Values” (Introduction to The Worst Years of Our Lives [Pantheon, 1990])
“The Cult of Busyness” originally published as “Hers” (New York Times, 1985)
“Death of a Yuppie Dream” (Journal der Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2013)
“The Unbearable Being of Whiteness” (Mother Jones, 1988)
“Is the Middle Class Doomed?” (New York Times, 1986)
“Welcome to Fleece U.” (Mother Jones, 1987)
“Prewatched TV” (The Guardian, 1994)
“The Recession’s Racial Divide” (New York Ti
mes, 2009)
“Divisions of Labor” (New York Times, 2017)
“Throw Them Out with the Trash: Why Homelessness Is Becoming an Occupy Wall Street Issue” (Huffington Post, 2011)
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About the Author
BARBARA EHRENREICH is the author of more than a dozen books, including the New York Times bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Natural Causes. She has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
OTHER BOOKS AUTHORED OR
CO-AUTHORED BY BARBARA EHRENREICH:
Natural Causes:
An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Living with a Wild God:
A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth About Everything
Bright-Sided:
How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
This Land Is Their Land:
Reports from a Divided Nation
Dancing in the Streets:
A History of Collective Joy
Bait and Switch:
The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Nickel and Dimed:
On (Not) Getting By in America
For Her Own Good:
Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
Global Woman:
Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
The Snarling Citizen: Essays
Fear of Falling:
The Inner Life of the Middle Class
The Worst Years of Our Lives:
Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed
The Hearts of Men:
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
Re-Making Love:
The Feminization of Sex
Women in the Global Factory
Complaints and Disorders:
The Sexual Politics of Sickness
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses:
A History of Women Healers
The American Health Empire:
Power, Profits, and Politics
Long March, Short Spring:
The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad
Had I Known Page 28