The Homelessness Crisis

Discussing homelessness for CounterPunch

My latest article for CounterPunch discusses the homelessness crisis:

Taking a step back, it becomes clear that the U.S. approach to homelessness is a deliberate strategy for maintaining class power and difference, the state ensuring that workers remain compliant, fragmented, and politically powerless. Homelessness looms over the American economic system like a threat. That system is designed to redistribute massive amounts of wealth steadily upward to the owners of capital, institutional and individual, calibrated to reduce the masses to poverty and dependence. The homeless population are punished and criminalized with an almost obsessive fervor in the United States.

The carceral and punitive infrastructures impose a system in which poverty and the precariat are managed brutally through social and economic insecurity. The criminalization of the homeless population, making their bodily placement itself illegal, is connected to several underlying phenomena. Vagrancy laws, “hostile architecture,” and aggressive policing are part of a social and legal environment that systematically abuses the homeless. It is a system attempting to use brute force to manage the obvious consequences of extreme inequality without addressing its roots. The criminalization of homelessness thus has a position within an overarching class system, as well as being deeply entangled with other social and health issues.