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Abstract

Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti-homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions of home. While housing projects in Fresno are based on a model of privatized and surveilled apartments, people who lived in local encampments often asserted alternative notions of home grounded in community rather than family, mutual care rather than institutional care, and appropriation rather than consumption. Meanwhile, local officials viewed such alternative domestic spaces as nonhomes worthy of destruction. Rather than valorizing domestic struggles above public or institutional struggles, this article seeks to move beyond geographic binaries to more holistically approach the politics of US homelessness.

“The Echoes of Echo Park”: Anti-Homeless Ordinances in Neo-Revanchist Cities

“…They are sometimes tolerated by cities, and may function as both sites of resistance and containment (Herring 2014;Herring and Lutz 2015). Research from Fresno and Seattle finds that, at best, encampments function as spaces of care and alternative expressions of home, as they provide residents with opportunities for autonomy, community, and mutual care (Herring and Lutz 2015;Speer 2017). At worst, they represent segregated geographies (Parker 2020;Speer 2018) and spaces of seclusion (Herring 2014).…”

Of (not) being neighbors: cities, citizens and climate change in an age of migrations

“…This requires a transversal form of politics, one that truly engages with the different experiences of the distinct social groups in cities (Mayer 2017). Enhancing urban autonomy to generate such transversal politics will most likely require working 'in, against and beyond' the nation state and its local apparatuses (Cumbers 2015;Cooper 2017). Eventually, if the state is not a thing but a relation, an institutional ensemble (Jessop 2016), countering the hegemony of state-centric responses to climate change and mobility response will require nothing short of countering state power and its role in limiting local autonomy.…”