Homelessness and Eviction in the Land of the Free
Over the past weeks, multiple crises have merged: a crisis of democracy with the most significant attack on voting rights since Reconstruction; a climate crisis with lives and livelihoods upended in the Gulf Coast and the Northeast by extreme weather events and in the West by a stunning fire season; and an economic crisis in which millions are being cut off from Pandemic Unemployment Insurance, even as August job gains proved underwhelming. There’s also a crisis taking place in state legislatures with an ongoing attack on women’s autonomy over our own bodies. The Supreme Court let a law go into effect that makes abortions nearly impossible in Texas and turns its enforcement over to vigilantes. And then, of course, there’s the looming eviction crisis that could precipitate the worst housing and homelessness disaster in American history.
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Over more than 40 years, while a crisis of homelessness has exploded, a narrative has been popularized that sees it largely through stereotypes. For a wealthy elite that’s advanced a generation of neoliberal reforms, it’s been critical to cast homelessness in this way — as an aberration on the margins of an otherwise healthy society, rather than as a startlingly visible indictment of a political and economic order in which homelessness and poverty are at the very core of society.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, major structural shifts in the global economy were accompanied by deep tax cuts, the deregulation of banking and the financial markets, the privatization of public utilities and services, and anti-labor measures. In the midst of all this, homelessness grew, as the government demolished public housing while investing in private urban development projects that fueled gentrification and pushed poor families from their homes.
Up from the streets and out of the shelters, poor and homeless people began organizing themselves into communities of mutual-aid and solidarity. In just a few years, the National Union of the Homeless (NUH) broke into the national narrative, challenging the prevailing notion that its members were poor and homeless because of bad personal decisions and moral failures in their family lives. Instead, they targeted the systems and structures that produced their poverty.
Recently, images of the flooding of Tompkins Square Park when what was left of Hurricane Ida hit downtown New York City received significant attention. Over the summer, the number of homeless people living in that park increased strikingly and neighbors began organizing mutual-aid projects to help the unhoused. Such conditions and projects of survival connect this particular moment to the past — specifically to a time decades ago when homeless and formerly homeless organizers from Tompkins Square first helped form the National Union of the Homeless. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NUH would organize 25 chapters in cities across the United States representing thousands of homeless people. Its slogans then included “Tompkins Square Everywhere,” “No housing, no peace,” and “You only get what you’re organized to take” — and they still resonate today.
The NUH was known for coordinating housing takeovers: those lacking housing moved into abandoned, government-owned dwellings in a politicized and organized way. The spectacle of homeless people directly challenging public property in the name of survival was striking. In fact, in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold actions resulted in the union winning the right of the homeless to vote, setting up housing programs run by the un-housed themselves in nearly a dozen cities, and so shifting the national narrative on poverty and homelessness.