Encountering Home: A Contemporary Archaeology of Homelessness

Abstract

On 17 September 2011 people flooded Zuccotti Park inManhattan’s Downtown Financial District to protest multinational corporations and major banking institutions. Protestors left their houses and established encampments in public parks in over a hundred cities across America to live in solidarity as the ‘99%’. The 99% were ready for conflict between citizen and state, public and private institutions, but they did not expect the conflict that erupted within the encampments between protestors and local homeless populations. Despite the fact that protestors were living ‘homeless’ for symbolic and political purposes, they had not anticipated how to handle the homeless communities who they actively displaced and engaged in the service of their politics. As they pitched their tents, strung up tarpaulins, established communal kitchens, and inflated blow-up mattresses the 99% encountered the already-present local homeless population: people who were both known and unfamiliar, but who were meant to remain hidden and invisible. Cities where the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) had a strong and quick start had more problems regarding homelessness than cities where the movement started later, but all Occupy protesters realized homelessness was an issue that had to be confronted (Ehrenreich 2011). Austin and Tampa, for example, used homelessness as the central organizing issue, one that could be easily grasped as a human circumstance with universal appeal. This was primarily because these cities were able to anticipate incidents that had arisen in New York, Denver, and Portland (see AP 2011; Nagourney 2011). Conflicts that first occurred in these cities allowed for later responses to be more proactive, and they subsequently positioned homelessness as a universalizing issue that everyone could rally behind (Ehrenreich 2011). In Denver, Portland, Boston, and New York City protestors expressed fear and apprehension towards the homeless, calling them ‘protest imposters’, ‘freeloaders’, and ‘rapists and gropers of females’ (Algar 2011; Huffington Post 2011a, 2011b; Occupy Wall Street 2011). One New York protestor stated that the homeless were ‘mentally ill and out-of-control’ (Algar 2011). The responses of the Occupy protesters at Zuccotti Park were rooted in a belief that there was a fundamental distinction between themselves and the homeless with whom they lived side-by-side and shared the same materials and spaces.

7 Home(less) Place and Home‐Making at the Albany Bulb

“…I began my engagement at the Albany Bulb alongside a small, evolving collection of projects calling themselves “the archaeology of homelessness.” I share their goal of developing socially meaningful archaeologies that challenge normative assumptions about the experience of people identified as homeless (Kiddey 2018; Singleton 2017; Zimmerman 2016; see Danis [2020] for full literature review). These projects, the people who lived at the Albany Bulb, and the material patterns we documented make it impossible for me to carry forward the generally received understanding of homelessness as a state of lack of attachment, lack of placemaking, and lack of belonging.…”