Week 7

Key Questions

• What is the homeless industrial complex? How do an array of public-private institutions manage homeless people?

• How do housing and homelessness act as sites of criminalization, control, and paternalism? What does this reveal about the nature of housing under contemporary welfare?

• How do certain purported solutions to homelessness reinforce its reproduction?

Required Materials:

• Tracy Rosenthal, “Inside LA’s Homeless Industrial Complex”

• Sam Russek, “Houston Is Hailed as a National Success Story for Fighting Homelessness. But the Reality Isn’t Quite as Rosy.”

• François Bonnet, The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare, “Reengineering Less Eligibility: The New York Homeless Shelter Industry”

• Keesha Middlemass, Convicted and Condemned: The Politics and Policies of Prisoner Reentry, “Denying Access to Public Housing”

Supplementary Materials:

• Jon Henley, “‘It’s a Miracle’: Helsinki’s Radical Solution to Homelessness”

• Sam Lutzker, “Project No Key”

• Bidish Sarma and Jessica Brand, “The Criminalization of Homelessness: Explained”

• Charles Davis, “The Crime of Living Without a Home in Los Angeles”

• Gus Bova, “Austin and America’s Thirty-Year War on the Homeless”

• Lucius Couloute, “Nowhere to Go: Homelessness Among Formerly Incarcerated People”

• Gwen Rubinstein and Debbie Mukamal, Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, “Welfare and Housing — Denial of Benefits to Drug Offenders”

• François Bonnet, The Upper Limit: How Low-Wage Work Defines Punishment and Welfare, “Prisoner Reentry in Public Housing”

• Human Rights Watch, “No Second Chance: People with Criminal Records Denied Access to Public Housing”

• Ann Cammett, “Confronting Race and Collateral Consequences in Public Housing”

• Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, “High-Tech Homelessness in the City of Angels”

exercise

View the prohibited conduct chart from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty below. What are the ways in which your city attempts to criminalize homelessness? How do these ordinances seek to banish or exclude homeless people from public spaces?