Property, Power, and the Homeless

Can people be pests? In 2021, Texas answered this question with 87(R) HB 1925, a law prohibiting the act of “intentionally or knowingly camp[ing] in a public space.” Public homelessness thereby became an official nuisance, one considered a crime against the people. This law thus serves to remind us of our cruel, dismissive regard for the interests of homeless people. Even worse, it formalizes an unstated consensus: Some lives are so revolting that the rest of society needs to be shielded from them.

That disgust is the issue at its heart: A homeless encampment forces people to see what they would rather ignore. We can tolerate gaudy billboards plastered with products and celebrities, but an encampment is too much — it has no glossy exterior, only reality staring blankly at us. HB 1925 implies that cities would be better off if they rid themselves of these eyesores.

In that way, the law is an exemplar of marginalization. It throws many Americans onto a cycle of ostracization: They are denied housing, sometimes because they’re priced out of their own cities, and when they then have to live on streets, they’re charged with a crime, branded as hurdles to the city’s “beautification,” subjected to hostile architecture, and forced to go somewhere else. At every step, they stand on quicksand.

This process is just one in a long line of strategies designed to keep the poor at arm’s length. During the New Deal, the Federal Housing Authority played a pivotal role in segregating wealthy districts from poor ones. In the 1950s, urban whites deserted city centers in favor of new suburbs that prohibited minorities from moving in. What sets HB 1925 apart from these two cases, though, is that it puts the onus of migration on the shoulders of the poor. It says: “We’re not leaving this time, you are.” 

And where are they meant to go? Homeless shelters? Not necessarily: The Supreme Court has ruled that the law is still enforceable even if there is no shelter nearby. And, even if they are lucky enough that their city has a shelter with space available, life is far from perfect. A homeless person is merely afforded the privilege of struggling in a precarious building, with depressing and dangerous conditions, in a place where society can safely ignore them. Well, can they move somewhere cheaper? No, relocation would force people to leave their friends, family, and culture. It would deprive them of the control and stability that they still have.

No — neither of those solutions suffice; lawmakers should stop inquiring into the additional burdens they could put on the homeless. They should start to consider why they are so willing to give them one in the first place. In theory, a citizen’s rights should be given significant weight, sometimes trumping policy concerns, in any decision regarding politics or jurisprudence. Clearly, homeless people, many of whom are citizens, have not factored into this equation. A citizen could not be treated like a pest, so what has gone on? 

One issue is the role of property, which confers the powers of civic citizenship and neighborliness. A homeowner has the comfort and social capital to enter into civil society and local politics. They can organize with others into homeowners’ associations, and petition city councils or state governments to pursue their interests. There is no such lobby for the scattered and heterogenous populations of homeless people. So, deprived of wealth or basic stability, they cannot join the “marketplace of ideas” that our pluralist politics hinges upon. Lawmakers can thus ignore them without repercussion. If anything, the homeless can be ridiculed for failing to be “good citizens” under the liberal definition, where one has to participate in institutional politics.

Indeed, homeowning, in one sense or another, has long played a preeminent role in settling the boundary question — who would, and who wouldn’t, be a “good neighbor” for our society? In fact, the issue played a pivotal part in America’s colonial beginnings. In the 16th century, there was an upsurge in urbanization in Tudor England. A new urban class coalesced, and their mere presence disrupted the foundations of medieval society. Peasants were supposed to stay on a set area of rural farmland, and work on it as vassals of a noble lord. By moving from their feudal holdings to the cities, these people were obfuscating the social hierarchy and dismantling the system of property in England. They were soon labeled “masterless men,” and their obstinacy quickly made them enemies among the aristocracy.

The writer Richard Hakluyt, one of those aristocrats, viewed these urban wanderers as vagrants. He recognized that there were “many thousands of idle persons within [England]” who were “burdensome to the commonwealth,” because they “[fell] to pilferage and thievery.” He offered a remedy for this epidemic: “These petty thieves” should be sent to the “western parts,” of the world. In other words, they were to be forced to migrate to America. And, they did. These “masterless men” staffed many of the English colonial voyages in the 16th century.

The American colonies, though, also made the mistake of associating property-ownership with civility. Voting was restricted to those who owned property, a tradition inherited from England and maintained after the American Revolution. In his famous legal commentaries, the English jurist William Blackstone summed up the logic for the property requirement: “The true reason of requiring any qualification, with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons, as are in so mean a situation, that they are esteemed to have no will of their own. If these persons had votes, they would be tempted to dispose of them under some undue influence or other.” In other words, if you don’t own something, you don’t have a stake in society and you don’t have original thoughts, so you can’t participate in its politics. 

That idea is outrageous to us today, but it is core to our historical traditions of freedom and ownership. It was the philosopher John Locke who boasted that our natural rights include “life, liberty, and property.” The American liberal tradition has locked these three concepts together. Home-having became a prerequisite for liberty-having. In such a way, home-having is a dramatically relevant bifurcator for society. 

To be fair, in today’s America, homelessness is a complex and multifarious state of being, one that includes life on pavement, in cars, or with friends. My family has been homeless for short periods of time, which were spent searching for apartments that would accept Section 8 housing. Yet our experiences are obviously different from those who are permanently homeless. And, of course, homeless life in Appalachia is far different from something like New York City. 

That being said, there is an evident binary between the homeless and home-having. It is not enough to speak of the “houseless,” precisely because homelessness in America means to not have a home even in the civic sense, and because homelessness induces a cruel and unstoppable cycle of marginalization. This is evident in our Anglo-American traditions, though it is obviously not limited to them. All over the world, homeless people are exclude from the “neighborhood,” in deep and disturbing ways. And once people are labeled as that irrevocable  “other,” we can ignore them and remove them, without a second thought.