“It's not like your home”: Homeless encampments, housing projects, and the struggle over domestic space

Speer, Jessie ORCID: 0000-0003-1636-803X (2016) “It's not like your home”: Homeless encampments, housing projects, and the struggle over domestic space. Antipode, 49 (2). pp. 517-535. ISSN 0066-4812

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• http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/anti.12275

Abstract

Based on an analysis of housing projects and homeless encampments in Fresno, California, this paper argues that both anti‐homeless policing and housing provision mutually constrain homeless people's expressions of home, such that struggles over domestic space have become integral to the contemporary politics of US homelessness. In particular, this article asserts that contemporary homelessness policy is marked by a clash between competing visions of home. While housing projects in Fresno are based on a model of privatized and surveilled apartments, people who lived in local encampments often asserted alternative notions of home grounded in community rather than family, mutual care rather than institutional care, and appropriation rather than consumption. Meanwhile, local officials viewed such alternative domestic spaces as non‐homes worthy of destruction. Rather than valorizing domestic struggles above public or institutional struggles, this article seeks to move beyond geographic binaries to more holistically approach the politics of US homelessness.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions:	Geography & Environment
Date Deposited:	06 Nov 2020 14:54
Last Modified:	09 Nov 2024 01:27
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/107149

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