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... Indeed, after two decades of revanchism, crises of visible houselessness began to spread to other large US cities with rising housing costs and only worsened in those cities where revanchist policy approaches first emerged (Marcuse 2017). After the implementation of 10-year "plans to end homelessness" in myriad US cities in the 2000s, most were enduring greater levels of houselessness 10 years later (Sparks 2017). ...
The study examines compassionate revanchism as a contemporary feature of houseless management in the context of an emergent phenomenon: the formation of private‐sector coalitions as coordinating leaders in houseless management. We deconstruct compassionate revanchist discourse through a comparative analysis between the Oregon Harbor of Hope in Portland, OR, and the Hello for Good Coalition in Spokane, WA. As such, the study responds to recent calls for more research on under‐studied cities such as Spokane, where rates of houselessness have spiked in recent years. In the process, it critically examines recent proclamations of an emergent “post‐revanchist” city and concludes by arguing that we are currently at a crossroads whereby the impulse to “take back the city” for propertied interests is either compassionately tempered and/or passionately reinvoked, and that the practices taken by such private‐sector coalitions, and how genuinely compassionate they are, manifest in variegated ways across socio‐spatial contexts.
... That homelessness has not ended suggests the underlying causes of this phenomenon remain unaddressed. Of course, as many scholars have now overwhelmingly documented, such policies and programs serve to merely spatially manage this particular transient population, to "corral" (see Tsikalas & Jones, 2018) them into shelters or peripheral zones whereby their otherwise vagrant and unpredictable presence on the street seizes to threaten the business interests of developers and retailers that rely on perceptions of safety among potential consumers (e.g., Beckett & Herbert, 2010;Marcuse, 2017;Mitchell, 2003Mitchell, , 2011Sparks, 2010Sparks, , 2012. The actual causes of homelessness today, following Langegger andKoester (2017, p. 1044), are rooted in "labor market conditions and housing market dynamics." ...
This study deepens our understanding of the political-economic drivers of contemporary homelessness by bringing scholarly literature on land rent theory and the political economy of homelessness into closer dialogue. We interrogate the tactics in which the actors that comprise urban growth machines collaboratively work to control the spatiality of the homeless as a means of preserving their investments in urban space. In the process, we hypothesize that it is not just the mobilization of property toward rent-enhancement that both produces and spatially manages homeless populations, but in the neoliberal era, it is specifically the mobilization of property toward one particular category of rent: class monopoly rent. Based on a case study of Portland, USA, the study illustrates the conceptual value of this category of rent in illuminating the specific economic relationships that have underpinned the past four decades of homelessness in urban America, and concludes by discussing implications for policy.
Access to housing: Homelessness and vulnerability in Europe
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- Joe Doherty
- Henk Meert
Long nights with little sleep for families seeking shelter
- Nakita Stewart