Municipal government addresses crisis not by housing people but by removing them from places where housed people have to see them
New York City
New York City announced a major initiative to address homelessness: eliminate it by making it less visible to people who have homes. The strategy involves prohibiting unhoused people from sitting on benches, sleeping in doorways, or existing in any location that might cause discomfort to housed people trying to enjoy the city.
“The problem with homelessness,” a city official explained, “is that housed people have to see homeless people, which is depressing. We’ve decided the solution is not to house homeless peoplethat would cost moneybut instead to make homelessness invisible. If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist.”
The city will implement this through hostile architecture designed to prevent sleeping (benches with dividers, spikes on steps, removal of any sheltered location) and through police enforcement that moves homeless people from visible areas to less visible areas, thereby creating the illusion that homelessness has been solved through a shell game involving geography.
A homeless advocacy group noted that this approach treats homelessness as an aesthetic problem rather than a housing problem, which is technically accurate but also horrifying. “They’re making homelessness illegal rather than solving the problem,” an advocate stated. “They’re saying ‘be homeless, but don’t let us see it,’ which is impossible, so they’re essentially criminalizing poverty.”
The city’s approach represents standard municipal strategy: identify a problem, refuse to allocate resources to solve it, implement policies that make the problem someone else’s perception, declare victory through legislative action, and move on to the next problem.
Read satire at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: bohiney.com