Tent City Blues

Far from a solution to homelessness, tent cities allow people to wash their hands of the hard work required to actually tackle the problem.

Freddie deBoer just posted a very thought-provoking ‘dialogue’ between himself and a fictional person who represents a certain type of activist in the ever-divisive debate over homelessness. Person B, in this imagined diagolue, argues that ‘homeless’ is a fraught term that should instead be replaced with ‘unhoused.’

Person B is also an advocate for legal camping within city limits, something my hometown of Flagstaff has faced on more than one ballot—and something I will vote against unabashedly every single time it pops up.

I live in a city with a homelessness problem. My son’s Kung Fu lessons take place half a block away from the downtown shelter, and it can get pretty dicey at times down there. I’ve seen men rolling around in the street punching and kicking and biting one another. The other day a man walked into the Kung Fu studio, though only briefly. Especially in the warmer months, you’ll find homeless people all around downtown, though not camping since that remains illegal here. Should that change, our few public parks would soon be overrun with tents and a more permanent class of the chronically homeless would emerge.

I have a friend who works as a medic on an ambulance and the majority of his time is responding to situations involving the homeless, usually—but not always—involving drugs and alcohol. Sometimes the police show up, sometimes they don’t. It’s a problem. It’s also incredibly sad.

There are many types of homeless, from those suffering from various mental illnesses and addictions to those who have been made homeless by job loss or inflation; who have fell through the cracks, but hopefully not for very long.

I live in a city with insane home prices and rents that are truly through the roof. It’s not hard to imagine people falling through the cracks here. We have tried to tackle this by raising the minimum wage. In 2023 it will go up to $16.80 / hour—making our little mountain town’s the fifth highest minimum wage city in the United States—above New York City, Boulder or Aspen, or San Francisco. But the homelessness problem will not go away, and even with a higher minimum wage, much of that will be eaten up by rent (a two-bedroom apartment will easily run $2500/month here; the average home price is something like $640,000).

I first encountered tent cities when I visited Seattle last year. I had seen homeless people with makeshift abodes in California prior to this but hadn’t actually run into a tent city. In Seattle, they were everywhere. I took the above photo of a small encampment near our hotel as we explored the area. Others I avoided, such as a nearby park I thought would make for a nice place to stroll until I learned that it had been taken over by an encampment soon after being built—sorry kids, families, skaters. This public space is no longer public.

Here’s the thing about these encampments: They’re not safe. They’re not safe for people wandering by and they’re certainly not safe for people living in them. Drugs, alcohol, mental illness, assault, sexual assault, discarded needles, trash, disease. People should feel unsafe near an encampment. That’s your natural survival instinct kicking in.

COVID certainly didn’t help, of course. Already a problem, encampments only grew and expanded as downtown America suffered its myriad setbacks—empty office buildings, shuttered storefronts, less tourism, nightlife etc. etc. etc.

In Freddie’s post, person B argues that no state coercion should be allowed to force the homeless to do anything. Anyone who disagrees in any way is basically a fascist. Anyone who votes or supports politicians who want to dismantle tent cities is a fascist and their concerns should be ignored. But this ignores the many ways that the homeless can impact those around them not in an abstract “I hate the homeless” way, but in real material, quality of life ways—something that the privileged people making these arguments are often well-insulated from.

Homelessness impacts the working poor more than anyone else. The photo I took above is an encampment near a light rail entrance. Others are near bus stops. This could easily dissuade people from using public transportation. If you don’t have a car, this could be a problem. Walking near these encampments could put you at a greater risk of being robbed or assaulted. Would you want your children to play at the nearby park, overrun by tents?

People who don’t have to live next to encampments or deal with the problems associated with homelessness and public spaces are often either ignorant or willfully ignorant of these issues. Trash, broken glass, used needles, theft, public disturbances. This doesn’t just make people nervous, it directly impacts quality of life, disrupting the lives of people who are themselves struggling to pay high rent, get to work, put food on the table, worry about the safety of their kids.

So what to do about all of this? That’s the thornier issue. It’s so complicated because there are so many different causes (and therefore solutions) to homelessness. I certainly think the entire concept of encampments needs to be reevaluated and cities need to begin dismantling them permanently. But not without coming up with a solution to actually house the people who are being displaced.

We need to address the cost-of-living issues so many Americans face, the various zoning laws and other impediments to creating affordable and varied housing. As Matt Yglesias has written, we need to legalize housing not tent encampments. And instead, we’ve effectively made cheap housing—flophouses, cheap hotels, single-room occupancy buildings, and all the other unfashionable ideas that seemed to go away when we invented freeways and suburbs and strip malls—illegal instead.

And we need to put tax dollars toward mental healthcare and mental healthcare facilities. More equitable healthcare in general, because some things are basic rights: Food, clothing, shelter, healthcare. A roof over your head and food in your stomach and not dying because you can’t afford your doctor visits and not going into debt because you got sick or hurt. Once you solve these problems you can start tackling everything else.

But this requires public support. It requires hard work at the polls. It requires convincing people that these costs are worth it—the same way anti-crime activists convinced us to put all this money into prisons and police.

Whatever the case, it’s obvious that citizens living in cities with homeless encampments are getting fed up with the inaction of their leaders. While there was a huge push to “defund the police” recently, if you look at the areas where police are most needed, unsurprisingly voters actually want more cops, not fewer. In the neighborhoods I walked around in Seattle I barely saw a single police officer which only made them feel even less safe, even more sketchy. (Again, many of the people who argue for things like defunding the police live in safe neighborhoods, gated communities, far away from the unwashed masses).

And while I fully support efforts to reduce imprisonment of nonviolent offenders, decriminalize drugs and focus on treatment rather than carceral solutions to addiction, we should be deeply skeptical about efforts to de-police too rapidly or empty prisons of violent offenders.

In Portland, the lack of police response to crime and homelessness has led to the rapid rise of private security firms. How ironic would it be if the privatization of the police came about not because of the corporate, capitalist scheming of rightwing privateers, but due to the inaction of left-leaning city and state governments to address public health and safety concerns?

There is something to be said for social order. I am a liberal, but I am not blind. I believe in far-fetched idealistic notions like free healthcare for everyone. I also believe that if a man is walking down the street shouting at the sky, acting like he’s high on PCP and is nearing a school at release time, the police should probably go have a look. Better the police and the use of state force, than this man stumbling into a group of second-graders walking home from school.

Another example I’ve heard used: What if your neighbor was an elderly woman with dementia, and you learned that she was out driving around or wandering around in the middle of the night? Would it be so terrible for the police to come and help her home, or to prevent her from driving? Is the use of state coercion always a bad thing? What if your home is being broken into? Do we really want to resort to everyone fending for themselves—because that’s an awfully good argument for private ownership of firearms.

Police reform is necessary to maintain social order as well. Learning that another innocent person has been killed by the police (or perhaps not innocent, but not requiring deadly force) shakes up our faith in the very people who are supposed to protect us. Police reform—like homelessness reform—is as much to help protect the police as anything. When police and the civilian population get along, social order is maintained.

Perhaps framing all of this in terms of social order (or social stability?) is important in deeper ways. We have a deeply divided society—yet one where most people agree on most issues, outside of the usual controversies. It is in the fringes (which seem to be growing at an alarming pace) that most of the division is created, and often it seems just for the sake of division. Radicals have no interest in maintaining societal balance, stability, social order. Progressives are so worried they might be labeled a fascist—or worse, a conservative!—have allowed these encampments to continue because they’re too petrified to apply some common sense to the issue, and so ignore everyone whose lives and businesses and public spaces are impacted by them.

The right has its own share of radicals who love the radicals on the left because they provide them with so much easy fodder, and so we see more conservatives radicalized by members of the ‘alt-right’ with their grab-bag of white supremacist and other noxious ideas.

(My belief that we’re all mostly on the same page comes from interacting with lots of different types of people who I generally like despite knowing we often don’t share the same politics. If we just leave politics at the door, we get along fine. I am endlessly baffled by people who refuse to even interact with someone who holds different views. It strikes me as deeply anti-social and needlessly cocooned from reality. Go spend time with people from other cultural and political groups. It’s healthy).

The midterms are just around the corner and we’re about to see just how badly the Democrats have screwed the pooch. It looks like Trump could be president again in two years and if not Trump, than Ron DeSantis. There was a time when this kind of thing might scare me because of all the myriad ways I disagree with rightwing policy, but now I suppose I’m just so sick of it all, my greatest fear of a second Trump presidency is just how much chaos it will create, how much endless pearl-clutching, how much more we’ll have to hear the name TRUMP again, and how social order and cohesiveness will continue to decay, spurred on by a gleeful media and lying politicians. (I also think we put too much weight into who becomes president, quite frankly).

I would like very much a Third Way. A new party (I know, not gonna happen) dedicated to common sense and determined to frame these common sense policies in terms the public will understand and accept. Freddie wrote another piece not so long ago about “normie” politics that’s something I’ve been thinking about. Quoth Freddie:

It’s here that I must immediately inform you that when I say normie politics, I don’t mean centrism. I don’t mean both-sidesism. I don’t mean economically liberal but socially conservative. I don’t mean Bill Clinton. Indeed, Fetterman is well to the left of Conor Lamb, the establishment candidate he faced and slaughtered in the primary. By normie politics I mean, instead, a politics that plays to the electorate’s sense of normalcy and which assuages their fundamental fear of change through symbol. Normie politics is not inherently moderate but rather presents its positions and candidates as commonsensical and in keeping with folk wisdom. And I believe that such a politics can help Democrats stop the bleeding as they face potential electoral annihilation this fall.

Again, most people are normies and most people agree on most things, no matter how Twitter and the news media makes it seem, and regardless of whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat you share a lot of the same cultural baggage and baked-in beliefs and notions. That’s how society works.

If you trade out the word “socialism” and package it as American greatness—if Trump had come up with some sort of MAGA healthcare socialism, for instance—a lot of conservatives would have eaten it up. A lot of liberals will support gun ownership, border security, and so forth if these policies aren’t dressed up in jingoistic rightwing talking points. I think most people would support better gun laws, too, as long as it didn’t mean losing their own or their ability to safely purchase firearms. But we have so much radical bullshit infecting our dialogue (and plenty from the NRA on that front) that it’s impossible to find common ground.

But common ground is crucial to the health of our society and our nation and our government and our national security and prosperity. To our ongoing peace and liberty.

Common ground and common sense.

And common sense tells me that no, these homeless encampments encroaching upon our public parks and spaces that become dangerous burdens to the broader community, are indeed a sign of social decay and in no way actually help the homeless. And common sense tells me that eventually voters will get sick of political leaders who don’t actually deal with the problems this creates and elect people who have promised to solve these problems instead—such as newly elected Seattle Mayor, Bruce Harrell, who won in no small part thanks to his dedication to combating tent cities. The mayor has proposed a $38 million 2023-2024 spending plan to do just that.

“As long as people live in parks and on sidewalks and sleep in tents and on benches, we refuse to be complacent,” Mayor Harrell said in a statement. “Our administration’s immediate priority has been to stand up a better system and act with urgency and compassion to address the impacts of homelessness – helping people off the streets and into shelter while we also work to make sidewalks, parks, and open spaces accessible to all. My proposed budget reflects our plan to draw from lessons learned, build on this early work, and develop a more swift, effective, and sustainable City response.”

Contrast Seattle and many other large cities with Houston, TX:

During the last decade, Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, has moved more than 25,000 homeless people directly into apartments and houses. The overwhelming majority of them have remained housed after two years. The number of people deemed homeless in the Houston region has been cut by 63 percent since 2011, according to the latest numbers from local officials. Even judging by the more modest metrics registered in a 2020 federal report, Houston did more than twice as well as the rest of the country at reducing homelessness over the previous decade. Ten years ago, homeless veterans, one of the categories that the federal government tracks, waited 720 days and had to navigate 76 bureaucratic steps to get from the street into permanent housing with support from social service counselors. Today, a streamlined process means the wait for housing is 32 days.

This is, quite obviously, better for both the homeless (who are being housed!) and the rest of the city (who don’t have to deal with so many tent encampments!) and is a good, common sense approach to dealing with this issue. Of course, the fact that housing is much cheaper (and less restricted) in Houston than in comparable big cities like Seattle, Portland and so forth certainly helps. Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner recently unveiled a $100 million plan to reduce homelessness in half by 2025, so they’re not sitting on their laurels either.

This is a tough issue, but it seems clear that action—including a compassionate approach to removing encampments and placing homeless people in actual homes—speaks louder than words. You can fume all day about fascism or state coercion or whatever other hot-button bullshit, but that won’t put people in homes, safe off the streets, or make parks accessible to kids and families again.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below.

P.S. I’m still trying to figure out what the best approach to diabolical should be. I think I like the idea of touching on politics and culture here and saving most of my video game and TV stuff for Forbes. I’m also going to start making more of my YouTube videos podcast episodes in this space as well. Thanks for reading and subscribing as always and for engaging in civil conversation and debate. Much love.