Reflection & Data:
These past few days, I reviewed scholarship pertaining to tent encampments alongside the west coast, particularly in Seattle, Washington. Specifically examining notions of governance, I found especially intriguing state regulation of such spaces. Rather than simply confining poverty and thus excusing structural solutions to housing insecurity, municipal sanctioning of homeless encampments also produces new imaginings of citizenship that decenter the power of the neoliberal state. Within such occupied settlements, novel concepts of rationality, belonging, and communal obligation coalesce in fluid social contracts developed through numerous forms of participatory democracy. Nevertheless, this research has also reminded me of the potential limitations of squatting, such as unsanitary conditions, transience of constituents, temporal instability, and general isolation within cityscapes. Regardless, I believe that encampments offer a productive lens through which to examine post-neoliberal alternatives to propertied citizenship, ones not confined to massive protests but embedded in informal everyday (political) activities. In the following week, I will assess my final case study example, squatting as a ‘queer politics of home’ in the 2011 Occupy Movement.
Hereafter, I briefly present the history and daily rituals of tent encampments in Seattle:
First materializing as Hoovervilles following the Great Depression, tent cities have long served as a metaphor for homelessness and destitution in the United States. Since the 2008 recession, such encampments have forcefully reentered public view, as residents in increasingly gentrified west coast cities lack affordable housing options (Loftus-Farren 2011). These camps evade simple classification, some originating decades ago with their numbers swelling in recent years, while others only recently emerged, occupied by only a few people. Their residents may consist of people with chronic experience of homelessness, as well as more transient victims of underemployment and repeated eviction. Residents might erect their structures precariously under freeway overpasses and public parks, or with greater security on sponsored church property and privately donated land. Many remain unauthorized, criminalized and surviving with little external support, while others receive considerable assistance from local governments, non-profits, and religious associations (Loftus-Farren 2011).
Regardless of their form, tent encampments offer a relatively affordable temporary housing option, requiring less public financing from municipalities than nightly accommodation and subsidized housing (Loftus-Farren 2011). Within the US, the demand for homeless shelters far surpasses both the availability and desirability of such accommodation. Encampments respond to this material need while simultaneously satisfying other affective desires. Attaining a measure of independence unavailable within the shelter system, for instance, camp residents do not need to obey arbitrary wakeup times, entry and exit hours, or other restrictive regulations. Encampments further provide a sense of stability often unavailable either on the street or in shelters, such as through security systems in which all inhabitants contribute to community safety. Nevertheless, residents still frequently lack access to clean water and sanitary means of sewage disposal, as well as stable tent structures. Moreover, these cities continue to confront neighborhood opposition due to concerns over increased violence and decreased property values, as well as continued disruption beneath zoning restrictions (Loftus-Farren 2011).
While acknowledging the need for structural solutions, Zeo Loftus-Farren (2011) nevertheless proposes that tent cities “can, and should, fill a gaping hole in current government responses to homelessness” (1040). She affirms that as long as municipalities remain unable (or reluctant) to expand affordable housing, local governments and policymakers should facilitate these alternative housing strategies, modifying local ordinances and helping tent cities satisfy local health and safety codes. And indeed, all along the west coast, cities have increasingly sought to support, protect, and regulate encampments, whether driven by media attention and sanitation concerns (Loftus-Farren 2011).
Exemplifying this shift, in March of 2015, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously to make Seattle one of the few US cities to legalize and regulate permanent homeless encampments on publicly-owned property. Professor of Urban Studies Tony Sparks (2017) asserts that this bill reflects a broader trend in US homeless politics centered upon “poverty management,” of designing “spatial and temporal structures” to regulate and manage the consequences of allegedly “disruptive” populations (88). Nevertheless, these encampments still represent sites of “political agency, experimentation, and negotiation,” whereby residents challenge their marginalization and create more habitable and emancipatory homes. Sparks (2017) proposes that within such “safe spaces,” quotidian practices of self-management and camp maintenance produce localized practices of “informal citizenship and governance” that reject homeless stereotypes of pathology and dependence, as well as reimagine relationships to the state (88).
One of the longest-operating sanctioned encampments in the US, Tent City 3 represents a community of up to one hundred individuals that circulates seasonally amongst Seattle’s gentrified neighborhoods and inner-ring suburbs. Within the camp, residents resist stereotypes of “unfitness for rational self-governance by producing a self-consciously democratic and collectively operated space” (Sparks 2017:91). At weekly camp meetings, residents organize, plan, and delegate all maintenance tasks, as well as modify community rules via majority vote. Sparks affirms that within this context, governance represents not a formal relationship between state and citizen, but rather an informal practice by which residents “produce localized self-knowledge.” Disengaging their “behavior, identity and resource-seeking from the state,” residents instead reimagine citizenship based upon “an informal terrain of relationships” within the collective (Sparks 2017:91-2). In this “resistant heterotopia,” participants therefore contest “authoritative strategies of exclusion” with “tactical resistances of inclusion,” embodying a novel “campzenship” whereby they can creatively “enact themselves politically” as “good camper[s] (Sparks 2017:93).
Sparks refers to Tent City 3 as a “regulated squatter settlement,” in which residents “recreate [structured] informality as governmentality” (94). The transiency of homelessness nevertheless renders this governmentality “fluid,” with the boundaries of campzenship “continually challenged and reconfigured to meet the needs of the moments” (Sparks 2017:95). A poignant example of such “makeshift urbanism,” a five-member elected council, the Executive Committee (EC), manages administration and rule enforcement based upon a Tent City “Code of Conduct” (i.e. drug- and alcohol-free; no weapons, no discrimination, meeting attendance and etc.). However, the high turnover rate results that “the rules” reside largely in the collective memory of long-term residents, resulting in substantial discretion concerning punishment for violations. Rather than criminalizing transgressors, the EC instead employs these codes of conduct to provide opportunities for individuals to demonstrate themselves as “good campers” – to the degree that their circumstances permit. Accordingly, the Committee operates with a type of “negotiable differences,” bending rules to accommodate individual situations, thus recreating an inclusive “governmental fluidity” (Sparks 2017:97-9).
Accordingly, municipal sanctioning of tent encampments assume a paradoxical function of extending state practices of poverty management, as well as bolstering safe spaces of collective autonomy. Nevertheless, Sparks (2017) notes that tent cities often remain “situated both rhetorically and physically within the American norms of property and labor,” whereby solutions to housing insecurity seemingly ‘necessitate’ people to conform as “laboring propertied citizens” (100). However, while perhaps not directly challenging dominant structures and narratives of homelessness, the everyday tactics of political agency evident in encampments still reimagine novel notions of inclusive governance – in a quiet yet ever mounting encroachment against propertied citizenship.
Bibliography:
Loftus-Farren, Zeo. 2011. “Tent Cities: An Interim Solution to Homelessness and Affordable Housing Shortages in the United States.” California Law Review 99(4):1037-1081. Retrieved March 1, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38HH6C).
Sparks, Tony. 2017. “Citizens without property: Informality and political agency in a Seattle, Washington homeless encampment.” Environment and Planning A 49(1):86-103. Retrieved February 28, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16665360).
Lopez’s Comments:
Brandon, you continue to make excellent progress on your research project. I think that you’ve made a great decision by choosing to examine a case study each week. It is very interesting to see how the three cities that you are working with deal with the issue of homelessness and squatting. One thing you might want to consider is to argue against the idea that homelessness and squatting are actions carried out by individuals. Sort of assumption takes for granted the organizing collective efforts carried out by displaced people. I only bring this up because neoliberalism tends to single out social problems and responses to them as individual actions. Therefore, the sort of deviance is treated as a social problem rather than a structural issue. Excellent work here!