Bulldozed: inside America's war on homeless encampments
Q. You began this project wanting to understand homeless encampments but ended up focusing on why cities destroy them. What changed your perspective?
A. Many US cities tolerated homeless encampments on and off for years, enabling informal neighbourhoods to flourish in fascinating ways. But not long after my research began, local authorities began passing anti-camping legislation. Since this time, bulldozing has become the status quo approach to homelessness across the US. My original interest in the social life of encampments remains but has been undermined by the political reality of camp destruction.
Often, when homelessness becomes about numbers on a page, we strip away the human element and reduce people to the most difficult experience of their lives.
Q. You spent more than a decade returning to your research site of Fresno, California, and following the stories of people displaced from encampments there. How did that long-term relationship with the community shape the book you ultimately wrote?
A. Fresno, in many ways, is my home. I lived there as a child, my father grew up there, and many family members live there still. Many of the housing advocates and unhoused people I spoke with in Fresno remain friends of mine to this day. This close connection to the community enabled me to approach this research as an insider, which inevitably influenced the shape of the book, Bulldozed: homeless encampments and the politics of demolition. I was dedicated to writing a book that portrayed Fresno’s community of advocates and unhoused people with compassion and intimacy rather than scientific distance.
Q. Bulldozed is driven by vivid stories of people like Peaches, Natalie and Louis. What did they teach you that statistics and policy reports couldn't?
A. While statistics are helpful for giving a bigger picture of trends across time and place, taking in-depth oral histories allowed me to understand homelessness in the broader scope of each person’s life history. Unhoused people have families, backstories, happy memories, and painful, often slow trajectories that landed them on the streets. Often, when homelessness becomes about numbers on a page, we strip away the human element and reduce people to the most difficult experience of their lives.
Q. You argue that encampments are often portrayed as problems to be solved, while many residents see them as homes and communities. Why do you think that gap in perception exists?
A. Encampments do pose real and legitimate problems to city authorities. When entire collectives of people live together without access to toilets or garbage services, this places a burden not only on camp residents, but on local housed residents and businesses. A handful of cities have taken the initiative to provide sanitation infrastructure to unhoused communities as an interim solution in the absence of longer-term housing provision. But most cities instead frame camp demolition – accompanied by widespread policing and incarceration – as the only response to these sanitation crises.
I argue that homelessness does not only affect individuals: it impacts entire communities, while also enabling the creation of new communities on the streets who often work together to build makeshift housing, watch over each other’s property, and provide mutual aid in the face of impossible circumstances. Oftentimes, these communities enable unhoused people to politically mobilise and protest city policing, incarceration and the failure of social welfare. This kind of political organising is something most city authorities frame as a problem.
Housed people are often surprised to discover that the majority of those experiencing homelessness are not visible in public spaces.
Q. The book is organised around the ideas of profit, punishment and prejudice. Which of those forces most strongly shapes homelessness policy today?
A. This question gets to the heart of a very old debate in the critical social sciences: is economic inequality under capitalism the primary driver of structural oppression, or do political and cultural factors play an equally important role?
In this book I seek to move beyond these debates to show that these three factors – the economic drive for profit, political systems of punishment, and cultural prejudice – are all deeply intertwined and cannot be understood without relation to each other. As geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore shows so persuasively in her work, the California prison system exists in relation to the economic exclusion of a vast sector of society who are locked out of decent employment opportunities through economic processes that are profoundly racialised. Similarly, the cultural prejudice against unhoused people cannot be divorced from economic norms that privilege financial independence and bootstrap capitalism, which favours self-reliance and argues that people can pull themselves out of poverty through hard work.
Q. You challenge the idea that homelessness is primarily about addiction, mental illness or individual failure. What do you think most people misunderstand about the causes of homelessness?
A. Housed people are often surprised to discover that the majority of those experiencing homelessness are not visible in public spaces. Women and children in particular – because of the risks of sleeping outside – seek out invisible spaces or move from one insecure, temporary housing situation to another. The kind of homelessness that becomes most visible in public space is often the result of multiple, intersecting disabilities and challenges such as addiction, trauma and the physical and mental toll of long-term street sleeping. When we see a person who appears to be a substance user asking for spare change, it becomes easy to assume that homelessness in general is about addiction. But drug use is often a coping mechanism in the face of freezing temperatures or violence on the streets. And research shows that rates of homelessness correlate most directly to rising housing prices. People become homeless, simply put, because they cannot afford to pay for homes.
Q. At a time when many cities are increasing encampment clearances, what do you hope policymakers – and the wider public – take away from Bulldozed?
A. I hope this book brings home the message that camp demolitions are cruel, inhuman and unsustainable. Shifting away from the status quo will require city authorities to reorient their priorities away from profit-seeking and policing, and towards rebuilding the social safety nets necessary for the long-term health of our cities and the survival of those who have been priced out by the housing crisis.
This Q&A was compiled by Joanna Bale, Senior Media Relations Manager at LSE.
Subscribe to LSE Research for the World
Related content
How can we improve services for young homeless people?
Empowering people who are homeless to rebuild their lives and thrive in society
How empty buildings could help solve Britain’s housing crisis
