American Capitalism Enables its Citizens to Hate the Unhoused
A majority of Americans have misguided views of unhoused communities, ranging from neglect to cruel dehumanization. This is not a cultural anomaly, but the result of the American legal system’s long-standing criminalization of unhoused folks. Consequently, feelings of pity are accompanied often by discomfort, and even disgust, when interacting with and considering impoverished and unhoused people. People may outwardly sympathize with the houseless, but most walk by the unhoused on the street, attempting to avert their eyes from the reality of our world. While these feelings may be unconscious, or often denied, they assuredly exist as a part of American culture.
Grants Pass v. Johnson, decided on June 28th, 2024, was a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that determined unhoused individuals could be arrested for sleeping on the streets, regardless of whether or not they had anywhere else to go. In this case, two-thirds of a branch of the U.S. government, meant to protect and uphold rights for American citizens, ruled that the existence of unhoused people was criminal. Neglect of the unhoused could not be more obvious. Unhoused people have been, and now constitutionally can be, subjected to state violence and imprisonment due to the American state’s failure to provide housing as a basic human right. These consequences are deadly for those living on the street, who are now legally subjected to displacement and brutality at higher rates from this June ruling.
The driving force behind this criminalization is an economic system that manufactures poverty. Those who make the most profit will win in a capitalist system. Profit is maximized by exploiting workers through extracting the most labor for the cheapest wages. This fundamental truth means that when wages aren’t enough to pay rent, afford food, and access other necessities, people become unhoused. As housing costs around the country rise exponentially, working-class wages have comparatively stagnated. Pouring comparatively inconsequential sums of money into social services is like putting a bandaid on a knife wound, and American politicians know it. It doesn’t matter how much money is put into houseless shelters and public resources when working-class people are being systematically unhoused due to the unlivable costs of housing.
The American state, despite calls from the United Nations to do so, has continuously failed to ensure a right to housing. The U.S. has deliberately ignored rulings from the international committee, and this case is no different. Since 1948, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN has outlined adequate housing as a human right, yet the United States has not federally codified a right to housing. Most state and local U.S. governments also fail to ensure this right. Failures to provide housing as a human right cut deep into cultural messaging: the commodification of housing, a purely capitalist reality, is more valuable to our government than the lives of American citizens.
Anti-houseless sentiment permeates beyond courtrooms and legislation. Hostile architecture is installed in every American city. Benches in urban areas have bars preventing people from lying down, and ledges are covered in spikes. Public space is no longer an area of refuge for the unhoused, casting the houseless out from both the private and the public. American architecture suggests that the unhoused should sooner lay on spikes than get a night’s rest, let alone find shelter.
Though this reality is national, the city of Los Angeles has a particularly heinous history of criminalizing their unhoused population. Los Angeles Municipal Code outlines extensive policing of houselessness. Section 41.18 forbids sitting, lying, or sleeping in public if doing so creates “obstruction,” as well as within 500 feet of any freeway ramp, overpass, tunnel, park, library, school, or daycare, within 10 feet of any driveway or bike path, and within 1000 feet of unhoused shelters and service centers, to name a few. Section 56.11 prevents individuals from storing personal property in public areas, which results in extensive sweeps of people’s encampments carried out routinely by Los Angeles Sanitation (LASAN). Section 85.02 prohibits people from sleeping in their cars on residential streets or within a block of parks, schools, and daycares. Without a protected area, sleeping in a car is difficult to do legally. Enactment of these laws shows their targets: from 2016 to 2022, 38% of all LAPD arrests were of unhoused people, even though unhoused individuals make up 1.2% of LA’s population. In the same time frame, 99% of all citations and 42% of misdemeanor arrests were of unhoused people. Unyielding attempts to eradicate the unhoused demonstrate, in the eyes of the American state and in state and local governments, that houselessness is a crime.
Trust in the American government’s supposed “democratic” system is a theme echoed by politicians, our education system, the media, and a culture espousing American values. Politicians exist to represent the people, America is the leader of the free world, and police protect and serve our communities — all fundamental American “truths” that are very visibly and repeatedly contradicted. People see loved ones brutalized by police, politicians accept corporate payment to abandon their constituents, and funds allocated to imperialist wars abroad instead of healthcare and social services. These critical views develop in response to the failures of our “perfect” system. Unlearning the confidence we put in the American system isn’t a choice for many, but it takes work to erase this from deep in our psyche. It takes seeing the political realities of the world — inequities, suffering, violence — to lose trust in the American system and recognize who the state truly serves. Even then, it is a constant fight to remove the remnants of these systems, reinforced through propaganda in media, education, and politics, from our subconscious.
The American people are raised to believe that the American state is the best, the moral, and the just, as we simultaneously witness the American government neglecting, criminalizing, and brutalizing unhoused individuals. People get arrested for sleeping in public despite having nowhere else to sleep, for setting up impermanent shelter in a last-ditch effort to create protection from the brutality of our world, and we witness hostile architecture that screams “You should not lay here, sleep here, exist here” to those who have no private space of their own.
When faced with these dissonant realities, people choose to resolve the difference in two ways: either they take issue with the American state, or, the easier, complacent way: they, too, grow to neglect and dehumanize those facing houselessness. Often, both coexist in our conscious and subconscious. In return, American cultural values, upheld by the American government, our economic system, and our political system, are neglectful and violent towards the unhoused.
People do not want to face this capitalist cultural reality, regardless of the role they play in creating it. Eighty-five percent of Americans say that houselessness is a serious problem, yet unhoused people are viewed with patronizing pity at best and with disgust and a sign of rising crime at worst. The material conditions of the unhoused community are viewed as an inherent, unchangeable reality, rather than a failure of the American government and economic system to provide its citizens with the basic right to housing. This sentiment is further proven when looking at volunteer and mutual aid networks. Formal volunteering and charity do not provide stable support for communities, but mutual aid networks are fleeting. Even in regards to formal volunteering, only 23% of Americans in 2021 volunteered through organizations aimed at aiding the community. In LA, where citizens are faced with poverty and houselessness on most streets they walk down, only 15% of residents engaged in formal volunteering in 2021. Statistics regarding mutual aid are not available, which points to the lack of prominence of these networks. Mutual aid requires the support of the entire community, and these statistics point to the reality that if Americans truly cared for individuals in need, and for communities who cannot afford housing, food, and other services, we would become actively involved. Instead, most people become uncomfortable, choose to ignore their privilege, and stand idly by while the American government disservices the people who need the most help. If people accept that the existence of unhoused people is criminal, they no longer have to feel morally conflicted over the realities they see. Our fundamental cultural problem is that internalizing the dehumanization of the unhoused is easier than challenging this idea due to American institutions.
The result of our material realities, where the unhoused are neglected and dehumanized by American economic and social systems, is that compassion towards the impoverished only surfaces as reactionary cultural sentiment. Because of this, we will only be able to make a culture of understanding, community, and compassion by changing our material conditions: by moving past understanding housing as a commodity, and past the capitalist nightmare that needs people dying on the street to survive. While we can shift a neglectful culture through aiding and interacting with those experiencing houselessness, we must understand that solving this problem is bigger than culture: it lies in our capitalist economic realities and the political systems that manifest within America.
