Dec 21, 2022
"The
city has had 125 daily interactions," New York Mayor Eric Adams
tells the Daily News. "We’re working to solve the homelessness
crisis, with innovative mental health interventions," San Francisco
Mayor London Breed tells reporters. The city needs to "clean up
homeless encampments," countless city officials tell us. Everywhere
we turn, our elected –– largely Democratic –– governors and mayors
are talking about quote "solving the homelessness crisis" without
specifying what, exactly, these plans entail.
Saying elected officials are going to harass and
displace the homeless population until they’re incarcerated or
leave our city and wealthy neighborhood sounds unseemly and
inhumane. But this –– minus the occasional and insufficient
attempts to offer public housing –– is more or less the strategy of
most big cities: Send in police to "sweep up" encampments, enforce
low-level drug offenses and ticket the unhoused for loitering and
camping, But saying this is the plan sounds mean, so, over the past
couple of years, as America’s housing crisis has grown more acute
and the end of COVID-era tenant protections unceremoniously sunset,
a cottage industry of pleasant sounding euphemisms have emerged to
sell police-led homeless crackdowns to squeamish
liberals.
The
right-wing, historically, is fairly upfront with its bootstrap,
austerity logic. And they, for the most part, don't run major
cities where the homelessness crisis manifests. Liberals and
progressives –– short on resources and political incentive to
actually address the underlying issues –– need to sell the same
played out, discredited carceral attempts at removing Visible
Poverty but, unlike Republicans, can't do so in explicit terms. So,
a PR regime emerges to paper over these glaring contradictions,
leading to heretofore unseen levels of bullshittery.
On
this episode, we going to examine four popular euphemisms employed
by "blue" city leaders to sell the same old carceral playbook to
their wary, self-identifying progressive constituents, how these
programs do little to address the central issues of a lack of
affordable and free housing, and how city leaders –– with wildly
insufficient federal support for housing, a foaming anti-homeless
media and suffering from institutional political cowardice –– are
left with little more than meaningless "emergency declarations,"
Tough Guy, Take Charge press conferences, and nice-sounding
rehashes of the same failed, cruel policies of austerity and
precarity.
Our
guest is The Wren Collective's Henna Khan.