Sooner or later, a person’s homelessness reaches a point of terminal decline. The undelivered resources, the absence of opportunity, the institutional violence of coercive apathy produce a kind of stasis, a kind of non-life. Beyond survival, no outcome has meaning, no choice has value. This is the purpose of homelessness policy in the modern city.
Homelessness…is the death of a meaningful future.
Policy for homelessness is founded on the protection of property rights. The goal is to limit the homeless posing a threat to property. We, as a population, are the epitome of the words, ‘nothing to lose.’ As such we pose a very real threat. With that in mind, policy has been designed not to provide resources or housing, but to deploy force through the application of psychology. We have been turned into objects, into chattel.
The result of these efforts is to condition us for a non-threatening, controllable passivity. The overall effect on a person’s life is to put an end to anything that resembles living. We are beaten into submission. We are formed and shaped through abuse and neglect, pain and suffering. Eventually, we are all walking wounded, barely formed figures of clay.
Let there be no mistake. These policies are the result of decisions made by civil servants. These are choices made by people. This instead of funding. This instead of housing. This instead of education. This instead of a future.
Homelessness is not hunger, it is not discomfort. It is the death of a meaningful future. Eventually, if suicide is not the path you take, every future is a slow nightmare, every future is the enemy. Cold is the enemy. Hunger is the enemy. Police are the enemy. Social workers are the enemy. Time is the enemy. Boredom. Heat. Sleeplessness. Confusion. Impulse. Life itself becomes your enemy. It does not have to be this way, but it is. And everyone believes you’ve chosen it.
The problem of homelessness is one of support. It’s one of resources. It’s one of time. It’s been cured, the problem, according to the goals of homelessness policy as I have experienced it. Homelessness has been cured by grinding out the spark of life, the ambition, the will of the individual to ascend, to aspire, and to fight for their future. This system is an inhuman, vicious attack on people whose only real crime is poverty, whose status as a minority only makes them invisible to everyone else. The culmination of the efforts the city and it’s system of homelessness policy enforcement is not a humane, working set of policies. It is a prison camp. The bars are invisible, and the guards are the inmates themselves.