No direction home

Today I’m writing about the state of people without housing in America. I want to do so in part because of the magnitude of the crisis we’re in and in part because the punishment of this population has been a trial balloon lofted across history by bad actors, becoming a gateway to serious abuses against society as a whole. We are now poised to go down this path again.

Tennessee passed a law in 2022 making it a felony to camp—and effectively to sleep outside—on not just state-owned property, but all public property. The Supreme Court weighed in this summer on an Oregon case and endorsed this approach. In the wake of its decision supporting criminalizing homelessness, the court has effectively made it illegal to exist as a person without housing.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that the decision constituted cruel and unusual punishment, because “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime. For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless.”

More and more people will be subject to these kinds of laws. A report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development came out recently showing a massive spike in homelessness in 2024, with over 700,000 individuals lacking housing entirely.

With a long-term housing shortage already in place, we’re heading deeper and deeper into this crisis. This month, we’re facing the collision of this chronic issue with the adversarial approach of Donald Trump, who has made his opinion abundantly clear in the past, claiming that “The homeless have no right to turn every park and sidewalk into a place for them to squat and do drugs.”

So in this post, I want to address the history of homelessness abroad and in the U.S. I’ll cover the ways it’s been used in authoritarian states, why you might not understand what’s really happening to people without housing in America, and the very real solutions that already exist—some of which you can be a part of. And I’m especially excited to share pieces of a conversation I had last week with Brian Goldstone, the author of a fantastic forthcoming book on homelessness in America.

Punishing the homeless worldwide

First, going back a century: in last month’s essay on immigration, I talked about the use of concentration camps against immigrants from enemy nations during World War I. You might recall that this global internment normalized locking up innocent civilians going forward.

Here’s an example that’s relevant to today’s episode: In 1920, after World War I had ended, Hungary set up concentration camps—think more internment camp than Nazi or Gulag camps. These Hungarian camps were meant for foreign Jews.

This postwar period marked a jump from interning enemy aliens to aliens more generally, even when there was no war underway. But the category of “undesirables” would soon grow from immigrants to include citizens.

By the 1930s, many countries would simply remove citizens deemed undesirable from having any public presence. This was how concentration camps unrelated to war became widespread around the world. And the homeless were the people most commonly detained in them.

In Cuba in 1931, newspapers noted that beggars were being swept from city streets and put into forced labor on farms, with “those lodged temporarily in the old Purisma Market concentration camp for the homeless being outfitted with uniforms” and their old clothing and belongings destroyed.

Fascism and the homeless

Aspiring authoritarians loved the public image of cleaning up the streets. Mussolini adopted similar kinds of camps in Italy, and Spain followed his example not long after Hitler became Chancellor then dictator of Germany.

Public health concerns were often the paper-thin justification given for removing the homeless and those living on the streets from society. But the actual rhetoric was that of a strongman, creating through brute force a faux social “cleanliness” or purification—even where their attempts were not really effective and only temporarily shoved unwanted groups out of sight in a given town.

Nazi Germany and the homeless

Before coming to power, the Nazi party at first tried recruiting disaffected young men from the ranks of the hundreds of thousands who were both unemployed and homeless during the Depression there. But once in power in 1933, the party shifted to pushing those they termed vagrants and tramps out of cities, further shutting them out of food and housing benefits that the country would have had difficulty providing at the time even if it were willing.

The first roundups of the homeless under Hitler began in 1933 at the dawn of Nazi rule. And like the earliest days of concentration camps in that era, those who were not direct political enemies of the new regime were often released quickly or wound up working for pennies in mandatory labor camps.

But by 1938, the attempt to remove any itinerant, unhoused people from public view had become an obsession, and those detained as vagrants were often sent directly to camps such as Sachsenhausen—camps whose brutality had already increased exponentially and would descend further into atrocity after Hitler launched World War II.

Hoovervilles back home

This violent response to homelessness and instability happened around the world during the Great Depression, and the U.S. was no exception. Shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” arose around the country, nicknamed after the president who was seen as doing nothing to help. These “hoboes’ havens” were seen as a blight.

The concept expanded. Soon, the Bonus Army, a group of World War I veterans who had been promised a bonus for their service—a bonus they were not given in any timely manner—set up camp on the banks of the Anacostia River in Washington, DC, in protest. A 52-year-old U.S. Army Chief of Staff named Douglas MacArthur took tanks to the city streets in preparation for their removal. In the end he did so with bayonets and tear gas, which ended up setting fire to the camp.

It was a debacle that led to a national outcry, but violent measures persisted. In August 1932, police cleared a camp of three hundred homeless men in Jersey City, setting fire to it, supposedly to reduce the risk of disease.

Homeless in America today

But homelessness isn’t just something happening in some other place and time. As the recent Tennessee law and Supreme Court decision show, it’s very much with us. To be able to think about where we’re at right now with this issue, I talked with Brian Goldstone, an expert with a heartbreaking book coming out in March titled There Is No Place for Us.

In his book, Goldstone follows the Herculean struggles of people in Atlanta who lose their housing around the start of the Covid pandemic. He illustrates their lives and losses beautifully. One key element to his book is that the main characters he has chosen are all working, some of them holding down multiple jobs. And yet, they cannot find or keep reliable housing.

“My book follows five families in Atlanta,” Goldstone says. “All of them are headed by parents who are employed in full-time jobs. They’re part of the nation’s labor force. It was important to me to focus on people like them because there is this growing phenomenon of people with jobs, often with more than one, who are unable to afford stable housing.”

He noted that his featuring those with paying jobs isn’t meant to exclude the many people without housing who can’t work or who work outside the traditional economy: “It’s simply to say that the American story, the myth that we’ve sort of told ourselves generation after generation does not hold up to scrutiny. The idea that a job is an exit from poverty—and the most extreme form of poverty, homelessness—is simply not true anymore.”

Goldstone focuses on the effects of homelessness and eviction on family life. As someone who faced eviction as a child, I can confirm that the moment you realize you have no place to go, no place to live, that someone from a bank or a management company can turn you out of what you believe to be your home—that’s a harrowing moment that can easily be traumatic for kids and parents alike.

By choosing the working homeless to focus on, Goldstone hopes to reveal how much of the country is vulnerable or already in crisis. He suggests that the problem is much bigger than the official statistics.

“A major argument in my book,” he explains,” is that the population of those in America who lack housing is exponentially greater than what we’ve been led to believe.” Referencing the HUD report on homelessness, he points out that the new numbers show that homelessness in the U.S. has reached the highest levels in recorded history. “As dire as that crisis is,” he says, “there’s actually this entire vast invisible population of men, and especially women and children, who aren’t even counted in that number.”

“Those are people who are not necessarily living on the street, they are doubled up tripled up with others in the apartments of friends and relatives, they’re living in their cars, they’re living in extended stay motels and hotels, and they are really out of sight. The reason why it’s so important to call attention to that invisibility is because it not only forces us to widen our perception of the magnitude and scale of the problem, it forces us to grapple with a new conception of why people have lost their homes and are continuing to become homeless.”

One thing that struck me reading this book is that homelessness in America is one of those crises that doesn’t require malevolent landlords twirling their evil moustaches to happen. The legacy of perpetual displacement and the focus on growth have created a kind of self-fulfilling nightmare.

“It’s so crucial to highlight the extent to which this crisis that continues to escalate in so many cities around the country is a product not of poverty but of prosperity. It’s a byproduct of the very renaissance, the very success so many of our cities are seeing today,” Goldstone says. “In a city like Atlanta, there has been this remaking of urban spaces, this revitalization, that has fueled the very insecurity I’m writing about and has fueled this growing catastrophe of homelessness and housing precarity among the city’s poorest households, including many working households.”

“It’s very counterintuitive,” Goldstone adds, “because we tend to associate homelessness with poverty. But this is not a story about this kind of destitute neglected urban core that is surrounded by wealthy suburbs, and it’s in the inner city that these problems are flourishing. That inner city is actually a kind of playground for the rich now that has actually pushed all sorts of people to the periphery. And in that periphery this kind of homelessness is flourishing. That very tight dynamic between gentrification, revitalization, and renaissance on the one hand, and precarity and insecurity on the other is really a core phenomenon I’m trying to unpack in this book.”

The big picture

To the people who ask if the homeless have always been with us, Goldstone answers that the problem of homelessness became pervasive and ongoing and permanent in new ways during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in part because of the ways it was ignored, and in part due to the decimation of the social safety net and the gutting of housing assistance in that era.

“It was really only recently, in the early 1980s that what we now know as homelessness, which is this pervasive, seemingly intractable and increasingly unremarkable phenomenon arose… People who lived through that period recall seeing, all of the sudden, masses of people living on the street. And I think what was especially striking at the time was the number of families with children who had become unhoused.”

If we try to hold to a popular but narrow view of homelessness and convince ourselves that it’s only the profoundly mentally ill or those with addiction and substance abuse issues who fall prey to it, Goldstone suggests we’re missing an important part of the picture.

”Those who are visible on the street,” Goldstone says, “many of whom, it is undeniable, struggle with mental health issues and substance use issues—first of all, many did not necessarily have acute struggles with those issues prior to losing their housing. So there’s a cause and effect dynamic that’s often lost in the national conversation about homelessness. [For] a lot of people, an eviction, a job loss that leads them to lose their housing actually is the first domino that falls in a series of events that lead people to have really difficult struggles with addiction and mental illness.”

If we broaden our view of the definition of homelessness, we can begin to imagine people in a stable home being just one crisis removed from experiencing the same trauma experienced by the homeless. And while that’s true for far too many, the burden of housing instability falls disproportionately on people of color. Everything from housing covenants to discrimination in home loans has shaped limitations on minority access to stable housing for generations. And the burden of homelessness is likewise not equally shared today.

“The roots of housing precarity in America have been deeply racialized from the very beginning,” says Goldstone. “It is not an accident that in a city like Atlanta, the Black population is now under 50%… but the percentage of families in Atlanta who are experiencing homelessness is like 93% Black. The disproportionate experience of homelessness among not just Black Americans, but in different regions of the country for indigenous people, on the West Coast for a lot of farmworkers, migrants—it takes different forms in different places, but the point is that it has been deeply racialized. This insecurity is not colorblind.”

We need protections for residents, including renters, to make it more difficult to evict people, and to make sure those who hit life crises don’t fall between the cracks. And we desperately need a bigger housing supply.

It’s been shown pretty clearly that what’s known as a housing-first policy, prioritizing stable shelter as the first step, before requiring the completion of rehab or mental health treatment—is most effective. It’s been proven again and again, most recently with veterans, a community whose homelessness has fallen to record lows due to the housing-first approach.

Yet the appointees who will take over the country’s housing policies at the federal level in the coming weeks and months are likely to follow the same approach espoused during Trump’s first administration, when the housing-first strategy was rejected. Project 2025 likewise calls for an end to a “housing first” policy.

And, as the history of homelessness has made apparent, authoritarians and wannabes alike have used people without stable housing as punching bags to establish policies that could be used against them in cruel ways and then expanded to encompass others. Many challenges lie ahead.

Hitler in Tennessee

Some local discussions on this issue are simply incoherent. In 2022, Tennessee state senator Frank Niceley testified during debate over punishments for homelessness, noting that Hitler at one point had been homeless. Yet, Niceley explained, Hitler somehow “went on to lead a life that's got him into history books.” Niceley suggested that those without housing should follow Hitler’s example.

Aside from the creepiness of using Hitler as a role model or inspiration porn, the willful disregard of politicians for what’s happening and how to address it is shocking. The trend toward criminalizing the homeless with potential loss of voting rights, and in the case of Tennessee, up to six years in prison is not just cruel, but self-sabotaging.

The cost of enforcing these statutes by charging and especially incarcerating the unhoused is massive. And the cost to anyone charged over homelessness—giving them an arrest record which will go a long way toward torpedoing their ability to secure housing in the future—is staggering.

Squashing dissent and difference

Goldstone also noted that laws against camping have also been proposed for use against the waves of protest that rose in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. This is another way in which the homeless serve as a canary in the coalmine, not only in the past with detention between the wars, during the normalization of concentration camps—but in the present, where the public frustrations about homeless people on the street can be weaponized to encompass groups that more directly question authority. In the case of both the homeless and protesters, these laws allow the removal of inconvenient people, so as not to have to address society’s pressing problems.

Many people have noted the cruel baselines of American policy, which would rather deny children a free lunch than potentially feed one whose parents might have the money to do it themselves. In housing policy, this streak is particularly evident, because it’s clear that it’s cheaper and more effective to house people than to go down the path we’re on aby criminalizing them.

“Faced with the scale of homelessness, we can either provide people with housing or we can remove them from public space and public view,” Goldstone says. He notes that on the whole, the trend is to do the latter, and that allies of the new Trump administration are vowing to create internment camps and other kinds of temporary out-of-sight spaces to which homeless people can be moved.

Yet we don’t even have to reinvent the wheel to address the problem. Our own history, as well as two examples in Europe, offer ambitious and promising ways to think about next steps.

“What we really need to address the scale of this crisis is a massive public government investment in housing,” Goldstone said. “What both Finland and Vienna have done is created thousands of units of what they call social housing, that removes housing from the private market. It’s on publicly owned land. And it basically guarantees a roof over their heads, and not just a roof over their heads but actually really nice accommodations—permanently affordable.”

What we can do

Of course, the U.S. is not yet at this point. As a country, we first need, Goldstone suggests, to be thinking about this issue entirely differently than we do.

“There’s a whole range of very practical things that can be done to alleviate the suffering that people experiencing homeless in America and who are on the verge of that—that can be done to help them,” he says. “Everything from, with the case of these families, widening the definition that the federal government uses, so that families who are excluded from the formal metrics can begin to access services and resources today. Banning things like application fees when people are applying for apartments. Banning discrimination against people who have housing vouchers. There’s a lot of really practical stuff that can be done.”

“But at the foundation of any solution,” he says, “I feel there has to be a paradigm shift about how we understand housing and its function in our lives. For too long we’ve treated housing as a vehicle for wealth accumulation. We’ve treated housing as a commodity. And whoever owns the most of it can control what it costs. Another term for that is price gouging. It’s hoarding.”

The need for a paradigm shift at a national level shouldn’t keep you from action, however. Homelessness is one of those issues where local action to protect the vulnerable and adopt best practices can make a big difference close to home. Goldstone cites the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, which has groups around the country, as well as the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s list of needs and opportunities by state. There are many other groups doing this kind of work, which you can plug into. (I’ll share more of his examples in our Friday roundup.)

“One of the most hopeful developments in recent years where these issues are concerned,” Goldstone told me, “is the emergence of a powerful and vibrant tenants’ rights movement. Significantly, tenants’ rights have been framed by many in this movement as extending to tenants who don’t have housing today, so kind of connecting the dots between those are renters who have a lease who are living in a apartment and might be vulnerable to losing it and those on the streets or in cars or hotels or in shelters who were renters and have lost that status. I see the tenants’ rights movement as encompassing both homelessness and housing as we tend to conventionally think of it.”

“A lot of the things that will solve the problems that are highlighted in my book happen at the local level,” Goldstone says. “They actually don’t happen as much at the federal level. And it’s really important to become more knowledgeable about who in their community is being subjected to the violence of arrest, ticketing, being fined, who is already experiencing homelessness, and all the ways that those who currently have housing are being exposed to the threat of homelessness through a lack of basic tenant protections. Both of those things come up a lot in local legislation at the state, city, and county level.”

The key is, he suggests, “finding out who in your community is talking about these things and joining them.”

We will not, however, be able to resolve the problem coast to coast until we take on the housing shortage in a realistic way, and also recognize this issue as part of the culture war wedges used by those who want more political power without caring about those they harm.

We cannot let our communities be splintered. And part of that is realizing that just like the pipeline from detention camps to punitive concentration camps during World War II, allowing any group to be isolated and removed from society puts the whole society at risk.

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