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作者

Christopher Giamarino

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.60,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionOn March 24, 2021, Los Angeles police (LAPD) officers swept a homeless encampment in Echo Park, a historic city park in Los Angeles (hereafter, LA), where during the previous months unhoused individuals had set their tents. In the ensuing clash, 182 people were arrested for failure to disperse and 193 park dwellers were displaced (Lenthang 2021). One year later, only seventeen of the displaced individuals had received housing, eighty-two had disappeared, and six had passed away (Roy et al. 2022). Heated debates continue in the city about police tactics, the city's failure to respond to the plight of unhoused citizens, and the rights of (un)housed park visitors and of the residents of park-adjacent neighborhoods.LA is the epicenter of homelessness in the United States, but homeless counts have risen in many other US metropolitan areas over the past decade despite efforts and funding from local governments and nonprofits to address the issue. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (2020) more than half a million people experience homelessness every single night, and anecdotal evidence suggests that these numbers have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.As a reaction to homelessness, which became visibly prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, US cities became increasingly hostile to the unhoused, passing “quality-of-life” ordinances and carrying out police sweeps in public spaces (Davis 1990; Kohn 2004b; Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009; Smith 1996). Such ordinances subject people to harassment, fines, incarceration, displacement, dispossession of property, and psychological trauma (Darrah-Okike et al. 2018; Herring, Yarbrough and Alatorre 2020; Mitchell 2003). Colloquially known as “sit-lie” ordinances, some of them penalize even sitting on sidewalks, forcing individuals without shelter to be constantly on the move.This increasing criminalization of homelessness by municipalities led geographer Neil Smith (1996) to coin punitive strategies as “revanchist,” as cities purposefully target the unhoused for spatial banishment. Some scholars have recently characterized cities as “post-revanchist” (DeVerteuil 2019; Murphy 2009), as the passage of homeless service and affordable housing initiatives like “Housing First” programs have a less punitive bent toward those experiencing homelessness (Hennigan 2017; Padgett, Henwood and Tsemberis 2016). Pertinent to our article, however, critics of “post-revanchist” analyses have recharacterized cities as “neo-revanchist” because many continue to adopt “quality-of-life” ordinances and conduct police sweeps that produce anti-homeless landscapes, while failing to build long-term affordable housing to shelter their unhoused population (Clarke and Parsell 2020; Levy 2021). To assess the fluctuations in “neo-revanchist” enforcement, spatial banishment, and the production of anti-homeless spaces, we ask two questions:1.How do cities regulate homelessness through legal and spatial enforcement?2.How have cities developed neo-revanchist landscapes and strategies, and how were these strategies further enabled in LA during the COVID-19 pandemic?To ground our focus, we review “quality-of-life” ordinances in sixteen US cities and further focus on one of these cities, LA. Here, we analyze the city's recent strategies of spatial exclusion of unhoused residents in public spaces. Through this case study, we demonstrate that the city has produced a fragmented landscape of “no-go-zones” for the unhoused. We argue that LA is neo-revanchist because the COVID-19 pandemic enabled various spatial banishment strategies that exacerbated sociospatial exclusion for unhoused people. Drawing from the voices of advocates for the unhoused, we offer five recommendations to create more inclusive public spaces and less punitive service and housing provision geographies.Our article is divided into six sections. First, we review scholarly debates pertaining to revanchism, post-revanchism, and neo-revanchism that illustrate fluctuations in anti-homeless strategies. Second, we set our topic in its broader historic context by reviewing literature on municipal regulation of homelessness, significant court rulings, and contemporary municipal strategies of spatial banishment. Third, we present our methodology. Fourth, we problematize the post-revanchist discourse through a descriptive analysis of “quality-of-life” ordinances in sixteen cities. Fifth, we assess how LA's revived enforcement of quality-of-life ordinances and other spatial exclusion strategies expanded during COVID-19. Lastly, we conclude with reflections on the problematic nature of the production of anti-homeless zones during the pandemic and offer recommendations for more humane public space policies for unhoused folks.