It’s “Open Season” on the Unhoused. We Must Oppose It.

Part of the Series

Movement Memos

“We don’t have a housing system, we have an unhousing system,” says author and organizer Tracy Rosenthal. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Rosenthal and host Kelly Hayes examine the impacts of the Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing municipalities to criminalize the act of sleeping outside. Rosenthal and Hayes also examine the larger terrain of criminalization unhoused people face, why cities are working to expel unhoused populations, and how communities can defend their unhoused neighbors.

Music: Son Monarcas, Pulsed & David Celeste

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the criminalization of homelessness in the United States. Unhoused people in the U.S. have long faced hostility from judges and courts that are unwilling to protect or uphold their rights. In June, the Supreme Court declared that laws criminalizing people for sleeping outside are, in fact, constitutional. Tracy Rosenthal, a tenant organizer and co-author of the forthcoming book Abolish Rent, says the Supreme Court’s decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson now means it’s “open season” on people living outdoors. In order to fight the carceral disposal of our unhoused neighbors, we need to understand a crisis that we have been conditioned to ignore. So, over the next hour, I will be talking with Tracy about the history and politics of the criminalization of unhoused people, and how we can fight back.

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[musical interlude]

KH: Tracy Rosenthal, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Tracy Rosenthal: Hi. Thanks for having me.

KH: How are you doing today?

TR: I’m okay. On the one hand, I’m visiting LA and I’m really inspired to be back seeing the organizing that’s happening here. The tenants in our Downtown local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union are organizing against the SRO Corporation, tenants in our East Side local just won over $400,000 of canceled back rent, and they did it without stepping foot in a courtroom. And then of course, on the other hand, I’m incredibly pissed off because [Gov.] Gavin Newsom issued an executive order for cities to clear unhoused people’s encampments across California when people have nowhere to go. And I’m pissed off, we’re months into this genocide, and the specter of antisemitism continues to do the work it’s meant to do, which is protect the Zionist entity from answering for its crimes. And I guess generally speaking, in the last few weeks, I’ve just been pissed off because Donald Trump turned his head, but that’s neither here nor there. But yeah, I appreciate you having me. I’m excited to be here.

KH: Well, I’m so glad to be in conversation with you today. Can you tell the audience a bit about yourself and your work?

TR: Yeah, so I’m a writer and a tenant organizer. In 2015, I helped start the LA Tenants Union, and I recently moved back to New York City, and I’ve been on rent strike there for almost two years, alongside my own tenants association. I often write about the criminalization of homelessness, most often for The New Republic. And I have a book co-written with my mentor Leonardo Vilchis called Abolish Rent, which is coming out from Haymarket on September 24th.

KH: Well, I am looking forward to that book, and I’ve also really been looking forward to hearing your thoughts about what we’re up against, with regard to the criminalization of homelessness. There was so much bad news in the recent wave of horrific Supreme Court decisions that I feel like people barely had time to process each blow. So, returning our attention to the Grants Pass case, what does this decision mean for unhoused people around the country right now?

TR: I mean, to put it bluntly, it’s open season. The Supreme Court just obliterated one of unhoused people’s only defenses against criminalization, which was the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment. And cities, especially in the West, had been constrained by court rulings that said that unless they could prove they had adequate alternatives to the street, that they could not arrest, jail, fine unhoused people for sitting or lying down or taking up space in public when they had nowhere else to go. And now, after this Supreme Court ruling, that barrier and any barrier has been removed, and what we’re seeing almost immediately is moves across the country to sweep unhoused people from public space. Gavin Newsom just issued an executive order to clear encampments across the state. We’ve heard London Breed promise aggressive action against encampments. And it’s like even the mayor of Lancaster said that he’s warming up the bulldozers. So what we’re seeing across the country in the wake of this ruling is a doubling down on criminalization and violence against unhoused people, precisely the policies, which we already know don’t work.

KH: Can you give us some background on the Grants Pass case? Who was Deborah Blake, for example?

TR: So Debra Blake was a 62-year-old woman who was living outside and who got fed up with getting thrown in jail and ticketed because she had no place to sleep. She sued the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, for violating her constitutional rights. And she won. She won in Oregon District Court. She won in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. And then, finally, after she unfortunately passed away and another unhoused plaintiff was named in her stead, she lost in the Supreme Court after the right wing takeover of the court. And to give a little bit more background on Grants Pass, this is a town of 40,000 people, and that might seem really distinct from some of the other parts of the country that this ruling is going to establish the conditions of governance for, but it really in some ways performs the dynamics of the entire country.

Rents and property values were soaring. The unhoused population was growing, and the city’s reaction to this was to devote more and more resources to policing. And a pretty stark statistic, or a pretty stark way of demonstrating that is that in this town, there are six police officers on patrol at any given time, and two of them were devoted at all times to policing unhoused residents. And so what we’ve seen across the country is that rather than deal with the underlying structural problems of a housing system that prioritizes the right to profit over a right to shelter, cities are devoting themselves to criminalization with this idea that we can deter people from being homeless by punishing them for it. And in this sense, I think the ruling is just like the latest installment in this broad national story of this bipartisan backlash against people who have no choice but to live outside and against those very policies that are proven to house people long term.

And I think also it’s worth mentioning that this case is really the result of the capture of more and more institutions by the right wing. The law firm which represented the town at the Supreme Court is the same law firm which defended Chevron, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. That same law firm won Citizens United, granting unlimited campaign funding for shady super PACs. And in the year 2000, they were the law firm that helped block the Florida recount and put George W. [Bush] in the White House. So I think it’s also important to establish this case as another notch in the bedpost of right-wing attacks, that the super majority of the court means that the right has been leveraging that institution to restrict civil liberties, criminalize the poor and people of color, and enrich the rich. And this is just one part. And the day that the decision was released was, it was among a stack of decisions intended for those purposes.

KH: I really appreciate your analysis of the right-wing capture of institutions. Can you explain how unhoused people are being used as a deceptively race-neutral target by right-wing politicians?

TR: Yeah, I mean, I think this is a great question, and I think my answer is you can’t talk about race in this country without talking about housing, and you can’t talk about housing in this country without talking about race. The two are completely interdependent, and each one, I think, makes the other what it is. The piece that we’re discussing today in The New Republic, I called “The New Sundown Towns,” and Josephine County, the county where Grants Pass is, was a literal sundown town in the past, and the Klan held hooded rallies in the streets of downtown. And I think it’s important to name that these white supremacist practices of exclusion and banishment as well as incarceration and what is both organized state violence and vigilante violence, that all of those things continue in new forms. And I think just naming that continuum, like the thing that Ruthie [Wilson] Gilmore would call the changing same of racial capitalism.

We can go back to the first instant when Black people in this country were no longer held as property themselves and think about the construction of property ownership and homeownership in this country. And the white reconstruction, as a backlash against that project of Black liberation, that the project of recruiting poor white people into alignment with elite interests was done through offering them claim to stolen indigenous land. And that is sort of a repeated process throughout the history of housing policy in the US, that predominantly white people see the benefits, and those benefits are sloughed off into private hands. We see this in the New Deal when the US invents the 30-year mortgage and homeownership subsidies, and it determines the value of property through segregation, redlining, deed restrictions, zoning restrictions, like the exclusion of Black and people of color is what makes housing valuable throughout that time. We see this when the GI bill is luring white people into the suburbs and abandoning Black and people of color to the cities.

And to make a long story short, we see this all the way into the policies that sped up the financialization of housing and end in a crisis that wipes out disproportionately Black wealth. And so thinking about all of these policies which established this bifurcated system of homeownership and tenancy where the government is actively subsidizing the private assets of predominantly white people and abandoning people of color to spend their lives as tenants in the predation of the private market. And then I think finally to say beyond that kind of organizing abandonment of people of color, of tenants is organized violence.

Rather than receive government support, tenants get incarcerated and policed. And an argument that I make in my book, citing others, is that we should think of prisons as a form of public housing. It’s public housing as warehousing and population control, and that the subsidies that go to private homeownership are actually mirrored by those that go to the system of human caging, of mass incarceration. And all of these legacies that I’m describing mean that while Black people make up about 13% of the general population, they make up almost 40% of the unhoused population. So when the right is dehumanizing homeless people, and that population is disproportionately Black, they’ve found a seemingly neutral loophole to help launder their racism. And that racism is actually deeply functional within this kind of private capture of wealth and private capture of state policy.

KH: I want to zero in on something you said about prison as a form of public housing. I think this is an important point, because the containment of people who have been deemed surplus, or undesirable, is really at the heart of what we’re talking about today. That containment happens in a number of ways. In addition to being funneled into jails and prisons, through criminalization, unhoused people are also contained via systems that are characterized as “providing services.” Can you talk a bit about the carcerality of homeless shelters, and the connection between shelter systems and the prison system in the US?

TR: I think that’s a really important question about coercion and the provision of a social need being unified in what we understand the shelters to be. And the shelter system, I think I’ve said in the past, this isn’t housing. It’s punishment for the crime of not being able to afford rent. I think about how the national system for homeless management is called the Continuum of Care. And the UCLA Echo Park research collective describes instead the continuum of carcerality to describe what’s happening between all the pieces of the shelter system.

So when we’re talking about shelter, we’re talking about congregate shelters, which have some of the most vile living conditions on earth. We’re talking about tiny homes, which are tool sheds the size of a prison cell. We’re talking about hotel rooms that have been converted, but where people don’t get a key and are sometimes provided instant ramen for three meals a day. And in all of these cases, unhoused people are subject to these really infantilizing and strict rules where staff and security often subjects people to incredibly demeaning treatment.

People are only allowed a trash bag’s worth of belongings. And often that means that when you’re living outside, you’re making the calculation between a limited time in a shelter, even as little as one night, and all of the survival gear that you’ve accumulated, that you’ll surely need in the future, that you might even need for the next night. So I think that what is often presented as an offer of shelter is actually an order. It’s made in conjunction with the police and basically this is an offer made at gunpoint.

And I think also the most literal connection to imprisonment in the shelter system is lockup. Each of these shelter sites have what they refer to as curfews, but are really lock-in hours. And they often begin as early as 7:00 pm or in some cases as early as four. So you can’t work or live life as an adult who stays out to before the sun even goes down. And your free time is basically constructed as yard time, as it would be in a prison. And I think also being entered into a shelter system in any one of these forms, subjects you to a kind of new legal regime between yourself and your landlord.

When you go into the shelter system, you don’t become a tenant, you don’t have access to the rights the tenants have fought for a hundred years, standards for your living conditions or eviction processes. You have to sign a contract as a participant, which is, this is a legal category, which basically allows the state or a nonprofit manager to take away your things, to subject you to dehumanizing surveillance and treatment and to evict you at will with basically no notice.

So all of this is occurring in the context of there simply not being enough permanent housing. So people are churned through various parts of the shelter system and spat back onto the street. And I think we need to be watching for the ways that these new legal categories are being created to make people disposable and displaceable and more subjected to dehumanizing treatment. And then I think too about how these categories are enabling a kind of churn that in some ways mirrors the material conditions of property ownership, where new forms of rent back securities and asset manager landlords, our owners are churning through our housing at a rapid scale, and I think that these two things are absolutely related.

And I should say finally, one way that I think we have to understand the expansion of the carceral shelter system is as a response to the really successful organizing that’s been happening against incarceration and jails, the result of organizing, which is managed in sometimes really difficult circumstances to close jails and prisons and prevent more from being opened. And I think that all of this is amazing work, but if we have to track that kind of state capacity to punish people, to contain people, to banish people from public space and manage surplus populations by containing them, that kind of state capacity in many ways hasn’t been eliminated, it’s just finding new outlets with new names and new practices, and often new rhetorics.

The intervention, as some people call it, of removing someone from an encampment at gunpoint and placing them in this carceral shelter system often happens under the guise of care, under the ruse of housing. And I think we just need to track that process of how one kind of state capacity of punishment and incarceration is being reproduced in new terms and in new relationships here.

KH: So, we are seeing demonization and scapegoating from the right and a sort of feigned saviorism from liberal officials. Can you talk about the bipartisan nature of these attacks, and the evolution of some of the political tactics we’re seeing?

TR: I think we should really establish that in our capitalist system, homelessness itself is a punishment, that the threat of the outdoors is often what is disciplining people to work for a wage so that they can secure the basic human need of a roof over their heads. So the criminalization of homelessness has long been tied to the disciplining of the workforce, especially the surplus population of people who are without employment. And so I think if we go back to this long history of criminalization of homelessness and tie it to the disciplining of the workforce, when we see the rise of the poorhouse and vagrancy laws, what these things are responding to is in some ways this vast transformation of the labor market ushered in by industrialization, urbanization, this sort of forced migration of labor and this workforce that has now become transient. And what we’ve seen over time is that the function of cities has changed, and thus the disciplining of that surplus has changed. And so whereas we’ve had in the past, those surplus populations were abandoned to cities, now, when more money was to be made elsewhere.

Now, when real estate and real estate speculation and investment in urban space has become such an immense part of capital accumulation, that has changed. So rather than being contained in cities, unhoused people are being banished from them or they’re being contained in prison so that they don’t take up space within them. And I think that this is really… We can see the way that the state has organized the institutions of policing and incarceration to really hand itself over to the interests of real estate, that right now unhoused people in cities disrupt their capacity to draw in and lure that real estate investment that is such a part of how they both get tax bases for their own resources and how capital is accumulating more broadly. One of my favorite ways of describing this process is to quote former Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti, who once said, “In a good economy, homelessness goes up.”

So he’s talking about the transition in an economy that is increasingly tied to investment and speculation in urban space. And he’s saying the result of that process is that homelessness goes up. But of course, that’s a contradiction. I think Don Mitchell would describe homelessness as a limit to capital, because it actually deters investors from moving money to frack our urban space as a place to grow their wealth. So I think that the way that cities are trying to resolve that tension is to banish people. And that is kind of the motivation that what we think of as our most liberal cities are actually the innovators in so many of the forms of criminalization that we’re now living with.

KH: Absolutely. And there is a bit of a challenge for people here, in terms of understanding that multiple things can be true at once. Right-wingers and Donald Trump have a particular vision for the war on unhoused people, and that vision is bound up in fascistic desires to “cleanse” communities and put people in relocation camps. At the same time, if we look at what’s happening at the municipal level, in terms of the hyper-investment in policing, the control of public space, the escalation of rents, the criminalization of homelessness is really being facilitated by both major parties. While the parties have some areas of disagreement, the maintenance of capitalism and protecting the interests of the rich – these are things they are absolutely on the same page about, and that leads to similar end games, regarding the fates of everyday people who don’t have a productive place in the economic system. So, with that in mind, can you tell us a bit about what the participation of liberal mayors in the criminalization of homelessness has looked like?

TR: Yeah, of course. I think, as you just said, thinking about the allegiance between Democrats and Republicans on the issue of criminalization is so central, and it was really central to writing this piece. And what I sort of try to make clear is that the broader trend is in rhetorical rather than practical differences, although there are even now many rhetorical overlaps. But I think some of the innovations that we have, some of the innovations that liberals can take credit for include this model of policing on demand where constituents are recruited into clearing their unhoused neighbors through 311 calls and emails to council members, which end in police enforcement actions. Another innovation that liberals can claim is this language of care and treatment that these violent interventions into people’s lives that remove them from their communities, steal their stuff, put them in jail, are presented in the language of care and treatment, and this is what organizers have rightly called care washing.

And I think Gavin Newsom is an expert in this. His Care, Not Cash program that he developed when he was a supervisor in San Francisco would take welfare checks away from San Francisco residents and use them to pay for shelter beds. So this kind of paternalistic controlling intervention into people’s lives was presented in the language of care. And now we have Mayor London Breed standing on the steps of the Ninth Circuit Court quoting Fannie Lou Hamer, saying she’s “sick and tired of being sick and tired” while she wants more power to sweep people off the streets. And that rhetorical move has then been taken up by the right wing and their language of treatment. And for them, the language of treatment and even forced treatment has been central to recruiting more people into their practices of criminalization. So I think that we’re not only seeing liberals innovate these strategies, we’re seeing them being borrowed, taken up, and expanded by the right and that process continue.

KH: What you’re saying reminds me of something Ruth Wilson Gilmore has said about liberals domesticating elements of fascism.

TR: I mean, obviously, I think that’s perfect. And it’s like we see the kind of [smoke] screen that is used by these politicians to make palatable what is effectively banishment and containment. And I think, too, the role of shelter that we can sort of credit liberal cities with… these sort of alliteratively named treatment, not tents, care, not cash, that these interventions are really about recruiting people into these policies of banishment and containment. And also, I should say, into making the problem worse. One example that I can point to, which really I think goes to the heart of what is happening in liberal cities is on Thursday I went to the tenant association meeting of the Rosslyn Hotel Tenants Association. And these are SRO, single room occupancy, tenants living in the Rosslyn Hotel. And their landlord, the SRO Corporation, is now in the process of evicting these poor tenants for the sake of making space to receive funding, to receive tenants or to receive, they’re not tenants, they’re participants of [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program.

So these poor tenants are being evicted to make room for people who have been formerly unhoused people who are being placed into housing through Karen Bass’s Inside Safe program. And that program is more profitable. The resources, the public resources that are delivered through that program are more profitable to the SRO Corporation than what a poor tenant can pay. And so what this process is doing is eliminating the places where poor people can live, producing more homelessness at the same time that it’s being presented as the solution to homelessness. And I think that that dynamic of what I call in another piece the homeless industrial complex is really a liberal production. That is sort of their model that we can… That’s the model that they’re inventing.

KH: Circling back to the right-wing agenda for the unhoused, a right-wing think tank led by tech billionaire Joe Lonsdale has been offering guidance to states that have or may soon outlaw sleeping outdoors if you’re an unhoused person. Florida’s law, which goes into effect in October, will allow cities to create their own designated temporary shelter sites, which Donald Trump has agreeably characterized as “relocation camps.” Trump has also promised to set these policies at the national level. Can you talk about how the criminalization of homelessness is frighteningly situated at a time when housing costs and fascistic politics are on the rise?

TR: Yeah, so I think just talking about Joe Lonsdale’s… This is the founder of Palantir, and he also established the Cicero Institute, which is a right-wing think tank whose legislation is now working its way through state legislatures, and it’s been passed or introduced already in 12 states. And now they’ve just been given the legal basis through the Supreme Court to push it through and more. And the template legislation, I think you name half of it, which is this creating temporary shelters. But it actually does two things, which is it institutes a total statewide ban on camping and it removes funding from permanent housing and puts it into temporary shelter and treatment. So I think that thinking about criminalization and an attack on the very policies that we know work combined into a single piece of legislation that it’s working its way through the states. So of course what the data show is that the opposite works, like permanent housing uses resources more efficiently.

It turns out that housing people is cheaper than policing, jailing, and hospitalizing them, and that housing people actually keeps them housed. And I think about David Peary who served as an unhoused plaintiff on a court case against the city of Miami, who put it really well, I think, when he said criminalization is an expensive way to make homelessness worse. So in Los Angeles, our own data from the Homeless Services Authority says that encampment clearances are only temporary, and this is data that is supported by the RAND Corporation. In no way a left institution, but they show that the results of sweeps may last a few months, but seem to have little or no effect long-term. But what sweeps do for sure is traumatize people, destroy their belongings, throw away their medication and survival gear, and separate them from the support networks that they’ve developed in order to survive, and also their outreach workers.

It just certainly makes people’s lives more miserable. It makes it even harder for them to access the resources that they need to get back into housing. So I think just to zoom out a bit, I think we can use what’s now being referred to as the migrant crisis as an example of what these policies, what this right-wing push will make possible, which is this dynamic between dismantling an invisible bureaucracy to produce a visible crisis in cities. And as we know, during the Trump administration, the Trump administration attacked the invisible bureaucracy that processed and housed new migrants, and this produced a visible crisis, like more people with nowhere to go. And that very visibility that you can trace to those policy choices are now being used as a recruitment strategy for the right, further revanchism, further violence, and further retrenchment.

This is precisely the result of that, what the Cicero Institute is proposing, the dismantling of resources for permanent housing and the criminalization of people who live outside. And I think that that dynamic is precisely the right strategy for growing its increasingly fascistic base. And I should say, too, that this kind of violence is not just at the hands of the state, right? Kentucky just passed a form of a stand your ground law that makes it legal to murder an unhoused person that is suspected of trespassing. So this kind of dynamic between vigilantism and the brutality of the state is, I think, also what’s being supported and ignited by these policies. Every time I think about fascism, I think about George Jackson’s line, “Fascism is here and… people are [already] dying who could be saved.” And the linking of those two things to me is, I think, really important. They’re often sort of split apart. Fascism is here on one side and people are dying who could be saved on another. But I actually think they’re the same problematic, that the homelessness crisis is life and death. And in the city of Los Angeles, six unhoused people are dying on the streets every day. And that is.. Whether they are dying because they are killed or dying because they are being left to die is actually the same fascistic process. And I think to recognize it as that is a really strong call for what are we going to do to organize against that growing fascism.

KH: I really appreciate these insights, because I think it’s so important for people to recognize right now that we are not going to defeat fascism at the ballot box. Even if you believe that Donald Trump must be blocked, and prevented from regaining power, and I do believe that, we will not defeat fascism by stopping him. Fascism exists in the fabric of our society. Racial capitalism will do the work of maintaining itself amid deteriorating conditions, and on a dying planet, within a flailing system, that work will be violent and fascistic. So, no matter who wins this election, we will be fighting fascism.

TR: Absolutely.

KH: Now, you have mentioned municipalities and states doubling down on policies that we know don’t work. And you’ve also talked a bit about policies that do work, such as just getting people housed. Can you say more about these failures and successes?

TR: So I think that there’s multiple ways of looking at this question, which is so important. And when we think about policy, the history that I just laid out, and what I argue in the book is that we should really be thinking about housing policy as a war on tenants, as a war on people of color and the poor. So when we talk about policy, I think understanding it as a form of counterinsurgency, that the only policies that we have that provide us with any sort of stability or safety in where we live are ones that we’ve fought for, the ones that fought our landlords for. The history of rent control and rent stabilization, even building codes, those are all policies that have been won through organized tenant struggle, tenants in the Lower East Side going on mass rent strikes to guarantee the bare minimum of safety that we all benefit from still to this day.

And so when we think about policy in the context of a history of class struggle, what we’re saying, what we’re asking for in terms of policy, to quote the National Union of the Homeless, “You only get what you’re organized to take.” And so I think it’s complicated to name both those dreams of policies that we’ve had in this country for a long time. You can go back to the history of public housing and see people’s dreams of mixed -income, mixed-race tenant communities that were fully funded and provided people with not just housing, but community and a place to make a life. And I think that what we see now in terms of the policies that we receive, when I say that Housing First works, it does. This is a policy framework that was popular and even popularized by George W. Bush.

And the irony should not be lost on us, that the right wing is now attacking policy first popularized under Republican leadership, but when I say that it works, I mean that it is functional. It keeps people housed, generally speaking, it keeps people housed long-term and it is an efficient use of public resources. But it is funded and structured as a housing of last resort. But there is no reason why it has to be so, or the reason why it has to be so is because it preserves the function of homelessness as a disciplinary tool for the broader capitalist system. And that is the threat that the right wing sees in Housing First, in public housing, is the threat that providing people with the means of survival is to deny capital what it needs to take from us in order to function. And so yeah, just for me, situating policies as the kind of within that history is really important.

And when I think about what works and what doesn’t work and what we need and what we don’t need, we need a housing system that prioritizes people’s human rights over a corporation’s demand for profit. And we are so far from that goal. And in fact, what we’re seeing is the growing precarity of tenants, the consolidation of real estate in fewer and fewer hands, and a combination which means that more and more people are being ejected into the streets. And so we don’t really have a housing system, we have an unhousing system, and that is the thing that we need to attack both through our movements, and we need our movements to force the state to make those policy compromises that will give us better conditions to organize with tomorrow. And I think that’s me trying to situate policy in the context of a broader class struggle, even as I’m trying to recognize it as something that changes the terrain on which we’re organizing.

KH: “We don’t have a housing system, we have an unhousing system.” I think those words are going to stay with me. I really appreciate the way that you frame housing justice within a broader class struggle, and the way you have broken down the issue of criminalization for us today. I have learned a lot and I’m really looking forward to talking again after your book comes out. For now, as we wrap up this conversation, is there anything else you would like to share with our audience today about this issue?

TR: Yeah, I mean, to answer this question, I want to read a line from the Supreme Court’s decision, the Grants Pass decision that has made it legal for cities to criminalize homelessness across the country. And it says, “The public-camping laws prohibit actions undertaken by any person, regardless of status. It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”So I want to end there because, to me, the force of this decision doesn’t end with unhoused people, right? This ruling is making an opening to an attack on encampments as a protest form and coming on the heels of the vast movement of solidarity shown on college campuses for Palestinian liberation and against the genocide in Gaza and the form of that protest taking shape in encampments, which have been a successful and animating protest form in this country for decades.

We can go all the way back even to think about the encampments that took shape as Hoovervilles during the Great Depression. And up until this day, the merging of encampments in moments of economic crisis and encampments as protests are really… That is what’s being named. And the politicization of encampments is already understood by the right, and I think is not yet sufficiently understood by us on the left, that the forms of policing and enclosure of public space, that these strategies of deflection and this criminalization of protest, that all of this implicates all of us and that it should really remind us that we have more in common with people who live outside than don’t, and it should really animate us to defend our unhoused neighbors and defend this form of protest that is the encampment and to see the encampment in and of… To see the political potential and the political demands that encampments themselves are making now.

KH: Thank you so much for that. I think it’s crucial in this moment that we make these connections. Sometimes, direct action is about taking action for the sake of our own survival, outside the law or outside the norms of capitalism. Sometimes, it’s about breaking laws or norms, or intervening so that others might survive or have their humanity respected. All of these modes of survival and resistance are under attack, as you are saying, and our experiences of carcerality are going to converge, just as our efforts to save ourselves and each other are going to converge more and more with time. So, thank you so much for emphasizing the implications for protest and for reminding us all of the sense of connection we should feel to our unhoused neighbors.
After hearing from you today, I’m sure some of our listeners and readers are as excited about your book as I am. Can you tell them a bit about it and when to look for it?

TR: So Abolish Rent is coming out from Haymarket on September 24th of this year, and it was written by me and my mentor Leonardo Vilchis. We’re both co-founders of the LA Tenants Union, and we wanted to write a manifesto against rent, that monthly tribute that steals our wages and makes the rich richer, denies us our capacity to live as we choose, and in some ways a manual for tenant organizing and offering to tenants who are suffering under this power relation to start to take control over the places that they live, beginning with their own apartments, their own buildings, and their own neighborhoods. And so, yeah, I’m hoping that it will help ground us in our fight and animate us towards a better future.

KH: What an exciting offering. Well, Tracy Rosenthal will be back on “Movement Memos” later this year to talk about Abolish Rent, which is currently available for preorder. You can also find Tracy on Instagram and Twitter.

Well, Tracy, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I’ve learned so much listening to you, and I am really looking forward to your book.

TR: Thank you so much.

[musical interlude]

KH: I am so grateful for that conversation, and for all of Tracy’s work. I hope you will all join me in preordering Abolish Rent, and I hope that we will all continue to learn more about how we can act in solidarity with our unhoused neighbors. The carceral disposal of unhoused people in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon, but we are living through an era of escalation on many fronts. Homelessness in the U.S. increased by 12% in 2023, and the crises that drive homelessness, such as skyrocketing rents, mental health crises, substance abuse, and catastrophic displacement, are likewise on the rise. Most of us are, at best, a couple of bad breaks away from becoming unhoused.

The organized abandonment we face in the United States is bipartisan, and we have to be ready to fight for our collective dignity and survival on many fronts. We must protect and defend our communities, whether that means defending encampments or joining a tenants union – or both. Late capitalism is grinding us down and we are all under threat. We can’t afford any illusions about electoral salvation, or about the nature of this system. We must be deeply invested in each other’s survival and well-being, because ultimately, we are each other’s best hope.

I want to thank Tracy Rosenthal, again, for a great conversation, and I also want to thank our listeners for joining me today. Remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.

Show Notes

• Don’t forget to check out Tracy’s upcoming book with Leonardo Vilchis, Abolish Rent.
• You can keep up with Kelly between episodes by subscribing to their newsletter.

Referenced

• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
• The New Sundown Towns by Tracy Rosenthal
• U.S. homelessness up 12 percent to highest reported level as rents soar and pandemic aid lapses by Kevin Freking
• “Designed to be Cruel”: How Grants Pass Will Ramp Up the Policing of Homelessness by Camille Squires
• U.S. Supreme Court rules Florida cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping in public spaces by Luana Munoz
• Amid record homelessness, a Texas think tank tries to upend how states tackle it by Jennifer Ludden

• Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (webinar)