Tent City, America | (2015) Places, December
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12/16/2015
Tent City, America
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Tent City, America Tent cities are now so common that advocates are campaigning to make them semi-permanent settlements of micro-housing. But is this a genuine solution or merely a quick fix?
CHRIS HERRING
DECEMBER 2015
Clearing of the Jungle, San Jose, December 2014. [Karl Mondon/San Jose Mercury News]
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
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Tent City, America 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.
This is, of course, the “tale of two cities” narrative that has become
depressingly familiar in what many are calling a new gilded age. But to
view the camps simply in this light is to overlook the deeper and more
durable history of encampments for the homeless in the United States,
and of the campaigns both to dismantle and defend them. 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.
“
Homeless camps can be found in cities rich and poor, big and
small, liberal and conservative.
”
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 1
year or more. Homeless camps can be found in cities rich and poor, big
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Tent City, America 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 2
zoning ordinances.
Bonus Army, Washington, D.C., 1932. [Library of Congress]
“Weed-thatched enclosures, paper houses, a great junk pile”
To understand the resurgence of mass encampments, it is useful to recall
that homeless camps have been more or less permanent fixtures within
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Tent City, America 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. Only after the Civil War, with the
expansion of the national rail system and the new markets it opened up,
did cities witness the emergence of large squatter camps on their outskirts 3
— so-called tramp colonies or jungles.
Often located near train stations
or along roads, many jungles became deeply rooted, serving as way
stations for a new proletariat of migratory and seasonal workers. Though
camps usually had a handful of longtime residents, or “jungle buzzards,”
who took on the task of running things, most of the hobos — including
veterans of the Union and Confederate armies — were passing through.
Nels Anderson, who was not only a protégé of sociologist Robert Park at
the University of Chicago but also, in the years before World War I, a hobo
himself, described the transience of these encampments:
Jungle populations are ever changing. Every hour new faces appear to
take the place of those that have passed on. They come and go without
ceremony, with scarcely a greeting or “fare-you-well.” Every new
member is of interest for the news he brings or the rumors that he
spreads. Each is interested in the other so far as he has something to
tell about the road over which he has come, the work conditions, the
behavior of the police, or other significant details. But … there is
seldom any effort to discuss personal relations and connections. Here 4
is one place where every man’s past is his own secret.
Starting around the turn of the 20th century, during the Progressive era, 5
migrant camps became places of political action.
Some were hotbeds of
radical and socialist organizing, where representatives of the newly
formed union, the Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies,” sought
to recruit members. Other camps were incubators of protest. In the midst
of the depression that followed the Panic of 1893, Coxey’s Army — several
thousand laid-off rail workers from the Midwest led by an Ohio
businessman named Jacob Coxey — marched to Washington to petition
Congress to create public works projects to put the unemployed to work,
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Tent City, America camping along the way. In 1932, tens of thousands of jobless World War I
veterans formed the “Bonus Army” and marched to Washington to
demand advances on promised bonuses for their military service. Many
camped in a self-governed tent city on the banks of the Anacostia River,
with makeshift streets and sanitation facilities, that lasted for several
months until they were forcibly removed by troops commanded by
General Douglas MacArthur. And as the Great Depression deepened,
throughout the ’30s, the seasonal jungles of transient workers became
entrenched shantytowns of the chronically unemployed, widely known as
Hoovervilles, after President Herbert Hoover, whom many blamed for the
financial crash.
Migrant farmer’s family, Nipomo, California, March 1936. Photograph by Dorothea Lange.
[Library of Congress]
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Tent City, America
Huts for the unemployed, West Houston and Mercer Street, New York, 1935. Photograph by
Berenice Abbott. [New York Public Library]
Hoovervilles were found coast to coast, often along rivers, which offered
access to food and water, or near soup kitchens. In New York the homeless
set up camp in Central Park and in alleys and along the rivers; in Los
Angeles they occupied a vacant site near Watts. “There was a Hooverville
on the edge of every town,” wrote John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath,
his Depression epic about tenant farmers who journey from Oklahoma to
California. Here Steinbeck describes a camp in the Central Valley:
The rag town lay close to water; and the houses were tents, and weed-
thatched enclosures, paper houses, a great junk pile. The man drove
his family in and become a citizen of Hooverville — always they were
called Hooverville. The man put up his own tent as near to water as he
could get; or if he had no tent, he went to the city dump and brought
back cartons and built a house of corrugated paper. And when the 6
rains came the house melted and washed away.
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Tent City, America 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 7
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.
To be sure, there were occasional protest demonstrations — like
“Resurrection City,” the temporary tent colony of the Poor People’s
Campaign, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
and erected on the National Mall in spring 1968 — but these were short-
lived and exceptional.
“
The contemporary era of chronic homelessness in America
began with the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s.
”
Whether the long postwar boom ended because of the oil embargo and
recession of the mid 1970s, or because of competition from rebounding
European and Asian economies, is open to debate. But 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 8
American cities.
In 1982, to call attention to the growing problem, the
D.C.-based Community for Creative Non Violence pitched a group of tents
in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, and called it
“Reaganville,” with a banner reading: WELCOME TO REAGANVILLE /
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Tent City, America REAGONOMICS AT WORK / POPULATION GROWING DAILY. Around
the same time, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now, or ACORN, staged tent cities, called “Reagan Ranches,” in cities 9
across the country.
But most homeless camps were not agit-prop; most were zones for bare
survival. On Skid Row in central Los Angeles, the Justiceville camp,
consisting of plywood and cardboard houses and even a few portable
toilets, lasted for five months in 1985, sheltering several dozen people
until it was bulldozed by police. On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the
notorious tent city in Tompkins Square Park lasted for several years and
sheltered hundreds in rough conditions before being removed by police in
riot gear in 1991.
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Tent City, America Hector A, Bushville, 1991, photograph by Margaret Morton © OmbraLuce LLC [Fragile
Dwelling, Aperture, 2000]
Brooklyn Bridge, 1993, photograph by Margaret Morton © OmbraLuce LLC [Fragile Dwelling,
Aperture, 2000]
Tompkins Park and Justiceville were, in their size and prominence,
exceptional; 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 10
corners of public parks.
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
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Tent City, America 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. Journalist Jennifer Toth’s account of the “mole
people,” first published in the mid ‘90s, remains relevant:
New York City’s underground homeless live in the secluded tunnels
that run beneath the busy streets in an interconnected lattice of
subway and railroad train tunnels, often unused now, that in some
areas reach seven levels below the streets. Often shunned by the
street homeless, the underground homeless are outcasts in a world of
outcasts. … Some go down for safety, to escape thieves, rapists, and
common cruelty. They go down to escape the law, to find and use
drugs and alcohol unhassled by their families, friends, and society.
Some, ashamed of their poverty and apparent “failure” in society and
impoverished appearance, go to escape seeing their own reflections in 11
passing shop windows.
Homeless man, Los Angeles, August 2009. [Terabass/Commons]
https://placesjournal.org/article/tent-city-america/ “A world in which a whole class of people have no place
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Tent City, America “A world in which a whole class of people have no place to be”
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 12
as criminal activity under laws that criminalize homelessness.
“
In the majority of U.S. cities, it is illegal, in certain areas, to
camp, rest, loiter, sit, lie, or loaf in public places, or to share
food or sleep in cars.
”
No Safe Place documents the rise of so-called “quality of life” laws that
push well beyond the more typical vagrancy laws, which prohibit
panhandling. 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
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Tent City, America 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 anti13
homeless campaign in the country.
The urban geographer Don Mitchell
has characterized such policies as the “annihilation of space by law.”
The anti-homeless laws being passed in city after city in the United
States work in a pernicious way: by redefining what is acceptable
behavior in public space, by in effect annihilating the spaces in which
people must live, these laws seek simply to annihilate homeless
people themselves. … We are creating a world in which a whole class of 14
people simply cannot be, entirely because they have no place to be.
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
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Tent City, America 15
downtown.
If downtown vagrancy is a police problem, the illegal camps are to some 16
extent viewed as police solutions.
A few years ago I lived for a summer in
Fresno’s tent camp, and as the city’s homeless policy manager explained
to me, “The tent city has taken pressure off the downtown parks and
pedestrian mall. Since the police stopped chasing homeless people
around, which is ineffective and inhumane, we’ve gotten fewer complaints
from business owners and residents.” On my second day at the camp, I met
Alan, a thirty-seven year-old white man from Merced, who was surviving
by selling recycled scrap metal. He explained how he came to live in the
tent city:
I don’t naturally gravitate to large groups. My first night I slept out in
Courthouse Park and a number of spots near downtown, but I could
never stay anywhere longer than a few nights. Then I hooked up with
a couple of guys who I recycled with. We wanted to avoid the craziness
of the tent camp, and set up camps behind abandoned shops — I mean
really out of the way. Still the police would roost us out every week.
One night an officer woke me up with his boot. I had no idea he was a
cop and drew a knife on him, just instinct you know, which ended me
up in jail. After that, I wasn’t gonna mess around anymore and just did
what the officers had been telling us for months — “go south of 17
Ventura and no one will bother you.”
I heard similar stories in the other tent colonies where I’ve done field
research. But most people didn’t need any official guidance to find the
local encampment. It was well understood that the laws that applied
downtown wouldn’t be enforced on the edge — that you could (illegally)
construct a shanty or put up a tent without citation while also (illegally)
warming yourself by a fire, cooking a meal, having sex, urinating or
defecating, and drinking alcohol and taking drugs — all the usual activities
of people who live in houses.
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Tent City, America
Village of Hope, Fresno, California. [Chris Herring]
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Tent City, America
Ella, F Street encampment, Fresno, California. [Chris Herring]
Fresno’s tent camp, like most, was an adaptation to anti-homeless laws.
But in some cities homeless communities have formed in resistance to the
increasingly punitive regulations. In Seattle, in the early ’90s, a local non-
profit called Share/Wheel established a tent city to help people who’d
been displaced as a result of an anti-camping ban; today the group runs
Tent City 3 and Tent City 4 (the names reflect the group’s successive 18
efforts).
More recently, in 2008, homeless people and advocates pitched
150 bright pink tents in an industrial zone and dubbed it “Nickelsville,” to
protest the policies of then Mayor Greg Nickels. Today Nickelsville is a
501(c)3 with a website, mailing list, and PayPal account. As one
Nickelodian explained to me, “We’re not simply homeless here, we are
activists for the entire population of homeless in this city.”
Seattle is not alone. Dignity Village and Right 2 Dream Too, in Portland,
Oregon; Quixote Village, in Olympia, Washington; Safe Park, in Tucson,
Arizona; and Occupy Madison Inc., in Madison, Wisconsin — all have
emerged in reaction to the criminalization of destitution. All have tight
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Tent City, America connections with local advocacy groups and, like Nickelsville, articulate
their agendas and organize their activities via websites or Facebook. And
unlike the squatter camps on the urban edges, the protest camps 19
sometimes stake out central and symbolic spaces.
Tent City, University Congregational Church of Christ, October 2010, Seattle. [KUOW Public
Radio]
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Tent City, America
Informal community, Right 2 Dream Too, Eugene, Oregon. [Street Roots]
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, 20
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. Here is Geoff, a forty-four-year-old African
American at Sacramento Safe Ground:
The shelter is just a jail that you can leave. I was in the pen for twelve
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Tent City, America years before getting out. I spent the first week out in the shelter, but
never again. The way the staff can talk down to you. The schedule, like
curfew, dinner, wake-up call, showers. You got people trying to prove
themselves, like they all tough so not to try to steal anything from
them. Hell, I swear the bunk beds and food are made by the same
freakin’ companies. Out here in the camp I at least have a bit of the
freedom I’d been waiting for those twelve years.
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
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Tent City, America 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.
Village of Hope, Fresno, California. [Chris Herring]
“These are not homes, these are tool sheds”
San Jose’s Jungle was not exceptional; most mass camps are eventually
dismantled and their residents evicted. Tent City in Fresno, Camp Hope in
Ontario, American River in Sacramento, the Slough in Stockton, the Bulb
in Albany — these are a few of the camps that have been torn down, just in 21
California, in the past few years.
Yet at the same time alternatives are
emerging. Throughout the country, grudging toleration of the squatter
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Tent City, America camps is giving way to efforts to legalize them — and also to sustained
campaigns to create better, more substantial, and sometimes even
permanent alternatives.
“
Grudging toleration of squatter camps is giving way to efforts
to legalize them, and to create more substantial and even
permanent alternatives.
”
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. In central Florida, on several acres of industrial land outside St.
Petersburg, a Catholic charity runs Pinellas Hope; started in 2007 as a five-
month pilot program, the community has endured as a cluster of tents and
sheds that can house approximately 300 people. In Fresno, the Village of
Hope and Community of Hope, both run by a local soup kitchen, house
several dozen formerly homeless people, including some families, in
prefabricated Tuff Garden Sheds; nearby tents offer facilities for cooking
and watching television.
Community First! Village, in development by Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Austin, Texas. [Mobile
Loaves & Fishes]
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Opportunity Village, Eugene, Oregon. [Opportunity Village]
The most ambitious effort to date is in Austin, Texas, where a Catholic
group called Loaves and Fishes has been developing a “master planned”
cluster of micro-homes, RV’s, and large canvas tents on twenty-seven
acres of donated land. Scheduled to open this fall, the Community First!
Village will enable a few hundred homeless people to rent tiny dwellings
for modest sums (averaging $200 per month). The village already has a
community garden and raises chickens and bees; earlier this year an
outdoor cinema opened with a showing of The Karate Kid. In the works
are a medical clinic and even a columbarium — the latter perhaps
underscoring the ambitions of the village to be more than a short-term or
transitional place. You can see a similar ambition — a scaling up from
camp to campus — at River Haven, in Ventura, California, which consists
of Buckminster Fuller-inspired U-Domes, and at the Cottages at Hickory
Crossing, in Dallas, where residents live in smartly designed single-room
cottages. River Haven is classified by city officials as “transitional,” and
the Cottages as “permanent” support housing; both benefit from HUD
funding and, unlike municipal emergency shelters, both communities
require residents to pay rent.
These new villages are undoubtedly improvements over the illegal camps.
For the most part conforming to local building, health, and safety codes,
many feature on-site toilets and showers, laundry facilities, shared
kitchens, communal gardens, propane heating, electricity, wi-fi, real beds,
and personalized decor; some even have computer labs and libraries. Most
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Tent City, America of the new communities maintain websites detailing their various 22
amenities.
Yet somehow, much like the evolving squatter cities of the
developing world, these new quasi-formal communities seem not quite 23
fully legitimate — and as such they raise uneasy questions.
Should the new and improved encampments be viewed as innovative
housing models to be added to the existing policy menu of shelters and
transitional housing like single-room-occupancy hotels? In some cities,
officials have been eager to take credit for what can seem a flexible and
low-cost expansion of the municipal shelter system. In Fresno, the mayor
held a press conference at the ribbon-cutting for the Village of Hope,
hailing it as a “demonstration of our government’s determination and
capability to take responsibility for the homeless.” A couple of years ago,
Seattle planners acknowledged the tent cities run by Share/Wheel as a
“viable temporary living option” and “lower cost alternative to more 24
permanent and costly housing options.”
“
Should the new and improved encampments be viewed as
innovative solutions? Or as regressive forms of affordable
housing?
”
Advocates argue that providing the homeless with legal, organized, and
self-sufficient spaces will improve the public’s perception of a population
often perceived as disorderly or dependent. Yet 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. After an
effort to locate in central Austin, Community First! settled for a parcel of
land bounded by a fence marking the city limit. The tent cities of Seattle
relocate every three months, from one parish to another, a practice that
eases the anxieties of property owners even as it heightens the stress of
homeless campers. Proponents of the tiny house movement argue that
city regulations are being wielded by wealthier residents to prevent the
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Tent City, America 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.
pŀǻčěș jǿųřňǻŀ İș șųppǿřțěđ bỳ řěǻđěřș ŀİķě ỳǿų. pŀěǻșě șųbșčřİbě ǿř đǿňǻțě.
ňǿțěș
1. For an overview, see Tent Cities in America: A Pacific Coast Report
(National Coalition for the Homeless, 2010); Welcome Home: The Rise of
Tent Cities in the United States (Allard K. Lowenstein International
Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School, 2014); and tentcityurbanism.com.
↩ 2. For a legal perspective on the sanctioning of mass encampments see Zoe
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Tent City, America Loftus-Farren, “Tent Cities: An Interim Solution to Homelessness and
Affordable Housing Shortages in the United States,” California Law
↩
Review, 1037–81, 2011.
3. See Mark Wyman, Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting
↩
of the West (New York: Macmillan, 2010).
4. Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (originally
published 1923; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 20. See also
Donald F. Roy, Hooverville: A Study of a Community of Homeless in Seattle
↩
(Masters Thesis, University of Washington, 1935).
5. For a history of the political role of U.S. tent cities, see Don Mitchell,
“Tent city: Interstitial spaces for survival,” in Urban Interstices: The
Aesthetics and Politics of Spatial In-Betweens (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013),
↩
65-85.
↩
6. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin,1939), 234.
7. See Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003), which traces how
vagrants were coerced into slavery in the mercantilist era and conscripted
from poor houses and jails during the industrial era; and how more
recently, in the age of monopoly capitalism, homeless men were drafted
into military service during the World Wars. All too many veterans return
to lives of homelessness; in 2009, before the Obama administration
prioritized housing for veterans, over 75,000 were counted during a
biannual survey. See Meghan Henry, et al., The 2013 Annual Homelessness
Assessment Report to Congress (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
↩
Development).
8. See Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear, Malign Neglect: Homelessness in an
American City (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994) and Joel Blau, The
Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), for overviews of the structural causes underlying
the rapid growth of homelessness in the United States during the 1980s.
↩ 9. See The Homeless: Growing National Problem, CQ Researcher, October 29,
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Tent City, America
↩
1982.
10. See Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist
City (London: Routledge, 1996); and Talmadge Wright, Out of Place:
Homeless Mobilizations, Subcities, and Contested Landscapes (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1997). See also the short video directed by Gary Glaser,
↩
Justiceville.
11. Jennifer Toth, The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1995), Chapter 4. See also Teun Voeten,
Tunnel People (Oakland: PM Press, 2010); Margaret Morton, The Tunnel
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and the 2000 documentary
↩
Dark Days, by Mark Singer.
12. National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, No Safe Place: The
Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities (Washington, D.C., 2014),
Executive Summary. See also California’s New Vagrancy Laws: The
growing enactment and enforcement of Anti-Homeless laws in the Golden
State (UC Berkeley Law Policy Advocacy Clinic, 2015), which points out
↩
that many of these laws have been passed since 2000.
13. National Coalition for the Homeless, Share No More: The Criminalization
↩
of Efforts to Feed People in Need (Washington D.C., 2014).
14. Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and
Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States,” Antipode 29: 3,
↩
(1997), 303–35.
15. See Chris Herring, “The New Logics of Homeless Seclusion: Homeless
Encampments in America’s West Coast Cities,” City & Community 13: 4
(2014), 285–309. From 2009 to 2011, I did a comparative study of twelve
encampments in eight cities along the Pacific Coast, from which I draw
the bulk of evidence for this article. See also Welcome Home: The Rise of
Tent Cities in the United States. For more on Fresno, see Mike Rhodes’s
coverage at the Community Alliance. The initial growth of a much larger
encampment in Fresno, starting in 2002, was also confirmed through
interviews with long-time residents, homeless people, and service
↩
providers.
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Tent City, America 16. See Sharon Chamard, “The Problem of Homeless Encampments,” Guide
No. 56, Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, (2010). A study by the Los
Angeles City Administrator found that fifty percent of the city’s $100
million budget for homelessness was spent on policing. See
“Homelessness and the City of Los Angeles,” Office of the City
↩
Administrative Officer, April 2015.
↩
17. All interview quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
18. See Tony Sparks, As Much Like Home as Possible: Geographies of
Homelessness and Citizenship in Seattle’s Tent City 3 (Ph.D. dissertation,
↩
University of Washington, 2009).
19. In Madison, Wisconsin, and Tucson, Arizona, the homeless encampments
that grew out of Occupy have endured, and provide safety and shelter to
the homeless while also serving as centers of community organizing. See
Zoltan Gluck and Chris Herring, “The Homeless Question of Occupy,”
↩
Occupy! (New York: Verso and N+1, 2012).
20. See David Wagner and Jennifer Barton Gilman, Confronting
Homelessness: Poverty, Politics, and the Failure of Social Policy (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2012). See also Teresa Gowan, Hoboes,
Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homelessness in San Francisco (Minneapolis:
↩
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Chapter 3.
21. See Chris Herring “Evicting the Evicted,” Progressive Planning, November
↩
2015.
22. See, for instance, Dignity Village, Tent City 3, Camp Unity, Quixote
Village, Opportunity Village, Second Wind Cottages, Occupy Madison Inc.
↩ 23. See Peter Ward, Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico:
Urbanization by Stealth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), in which
he describes how a two-tier system of housing regulations was gradually
codified by the state in Mexico, leading to the legitimization of sub-
optimal informal housing for the poor. See also Ananya Roy, “Paradigms
Of Propertied Citizenship Transnational Techniques of Analysis,” Urban
↩
Affairs Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (2003): 463–91.
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Tent City, America 24. See Department of Planning and Development, City of Seattle, Director’s
report relating to Council Bill 117791 (Seattle City Clerk’s Office:
↩
Legislative Information Service, 2013).
čİțě Chris Herring, “Tent City, America,” Places Journal, December 2015. Accessed
16 Dec 2015.
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Chris Herring
Chris Herring is a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at University of California, Berkeley.
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