Right to the Tent City: the Struggle Over Urban Space in Fresno, California
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Syracuse University SURFACE Theses - ALL December 2014 Right to the Tent City: The Struggle Over Urban Space in Fresno, California Jessie Speer Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/thesis Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Speer, Jessie, "Right to the Tent City: The Struggle Over Urban Space in Fresno, California" (2014). Theses - ALL. 86. https://surface.syr.edu/thesis/86 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract Through interviews, archival research, and fieldwork conducted in Fresno, California, this research explores how and why officials spatially control homeless communities, and how homeless people have resisted these controls. Drawing from the theories of Henri Lefebvre, I argue that encampments in Fresno enabled homeless people to assert their right to the city, and challenged the production of urban capitalist space by defying the norms of profit, surveillance, and homogeneity. Part One of the thesis focuses on the relationship between city’s effort to destroy the encampments and its need to attract investment; Part Two focuses on the assignment of homeless individuals to secluded and highly governed spaces; and Part Three focuses on stigma as a product of homogenous urban space. Each section highlights the ways in which homeless people have resisted official policies and representations. RIGHT TO THE TENT CITY: THE STRUGGLE OVER URBAN SPACE IN FRESNO, CALIFORNIA by Jessie L. Speer B.A., University of Arizona, 2004 J.D., New College of California School of Law, 2008 Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography Syracuse University December 2014 Copyright © Jessie Speer, 2014 All Rights Reserved Acknowledgements First and foremost, I owe a huge debt to the people in Fresno who shared their knowledge with me. To Peaches, Willow, and everyone else who opened up to me about life on the street and in the encampment, thank you for showing me another way to live, and for teaching me humor in the face of struggle. If this thesis has arrived at any new insights, it is because of you. Thank you to all of the activists in Fresno who are working to make the world a little kinder. Mike, your devotion to awareness-raising is unmatched, and your coverage of the politics of Fresno homeless encampments was invaluable to me in writing this thesis. Clint, thank you for agreeing to speak with me when no-one else would. Thank you to my family in Fresno: the Bernstein kids for playing and singing, and Catherine and Tom for opening your home and sharing your love during what otherwise could have been a very lonely time. Thank you to Fresno, the land of my father, the land of poets and gangs, irrigation ditches and raisins, methamphetamines and underground gardens. As William Saroyan said: “I would not care to belittle anything about Fresno, and I would prefer to cherish everything about it … because the only annoyance which is worthy of us has got to be the large annoyance of failure, of enormous failure, and that is inevitable.” Like Saroyan, I do not begrudge Fresno for its failures. Thank you to Edward Satie and Nina Simone, to whom I listened to on repeat while I wrote. Thank you to pals in Bloomington, Indiana, for drinking with me after long days of writing. Thank you to fellow graduate students at Syracuse University, roommates and friends, for keeping life fun and creative even through the long winters, to the Syracuse students sleeping overnight on campus as I write this, for protesting our corporate university, and to all those who struggle against domination, for showing us that a more equal and inclusive world is possible. iv Thank you to the geography department at Syracuse University. This thesis would have been impossible without Jamie’s careful comments and insistence on nuance, Matt’s relaxed and open enthusiasm, and Jackie’s constant reminder that knowledge can be sensuous. And most importantly, thank you Don for throwing me head-first into a world of new ideas, and giving me the total freedom to explore. You have a way of making theory exciting and relevant, of challenging without censoring, and giving honest feedback with equal measures of human kindness. Thank you Mom and Dad. You are the reason I exist, and your love is the source of all my inspiration. Thank you for supporting my fickle career choices. Thank you to Carmen and Colenso for being there, no matter what, and always making me laugh. And finally, thank you Majed. You inspired me to embark on a whole new life, to love ideas again, and to see knowledge as full of revolutionary potential. Thank you for gently critiquing my sloppiest drafts. Thank you for sharing your curiosity, your openness, your affection. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. Profit Chapter 1. Revitalization Chapter 2. Privatization Part II. Surveillance Chapter 3. Shelters and Housing Chapter 4. Tent Wards Part III. Homogeneity Chapter 5. Dirty and Ugly Chapter 6. Criminal and Crazy Conclusion Appendix: A Note on Method References Vita vi List of Illustrative Materials Figure 1. Map of Fresno Poverty Figure 2. Location of Fresno Encampments, 2012 Figure 3. Graph of Data on Fresno Homeless, 2009-2013 vii Introduction We’re just pushing people around … We just want to push them and move them from one place to another. —Board member, Fresno Madera Continuum of Care1 They’re trying to herd us all together and then scatter us. —Fresno camper2 If you view Fresno from above with online satellite imagery, you will see tiny clusters of blue and grey squares just east of the Golden State Highway. These are the roofs of hundreds of makeshift houses that once packed this strip of land. Go west a few blocks, and zoom in below the tangle of overpasses. You will find yourself inside a tent city. There is a bearded man sitting in a faded blue overcoat next to a row of tents. His face is pixelated to protect his identity, but the sign posted above him is as clear as day: NO CAMPING OR LOITERING. Down here, there are about a hundred tents lining the street. See clothes drying on the barbed-wire fence, a few half-open tent-flaps, a dog standing next to an old Christmas tree, a man trudging down the road in jeans and a baseball cap. A few hundred feet north, another tent city lines the sidewalk. Here, makeshift plywood houses outnumber the tents. One home is constructed from cement blocks and PVC pipe and fitted with a metal door with a doorknob and lock. Another house is spray painted “KEEP OUT.” Follow the row of homes, and you will see living rooms sprawling into the streets, couches and chairs and groups of men in jackets and hats crowded around trashcan fires. It must have been winter when these images were taken. Next door, an old black man with a white beard and red shoes is smoking a cigarette and staring at the 1 From personal interview, August 2013. 2 From c blove (2013). 1 camera. A white woman stands holding a broom next to a baby carriage. Another man is flipping off the camera. Homeless encampments have a long history in the US, from the “jungles” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression (DePastino, 2003; Mitchell, 2012a). During times of crisis, they have provided poor people a space to build self-made shelters and communities. In recent decades, the widespread presence of urban street encampments has again reemerged. The popular press calls them “tent cities,” a phrase that captures the way in which campers residing in tents have created their own form of urbanism across the nation. The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty found that that the number of urban encampments has increased since the 2008 housing crisis, with family and child homelessness on the rise (Hunter, Linden-Retek, Shebaya, & Halpert, 2014). Based on a review of news reports, the authors identified more than one-hundred camps in cities across the nation. For more than a decade, downtown Fresno has been home to several large and highly visible tent cities. Over the years, local officials have implemented a number of policies toward them. City Hall has pushed for periodic and aggressive eviction campaigns as part of its aim to revitalize downtown Fresno, while simultaneously developing sanctioned and heavily surveilled encampments throughout the city. Meanwhile, the Continuum of Care—an association of public and private agencies— has sought to keep local shelters afloat in the midst of political hostility towards the homeless. Recently, the Fresno Housing Authority adopted the Housing First model of homelessness management, and began forging alliances with private developers to provide monitored housing to a fraction of Fresno’s homeless population. In each of these 2 moments, officials dispersed homeless communities and assigned homeless individuals to various governed spaces. But homeless people have not passively accepted eviction or sequestration and have waged a tireless campaign to assert their right to camp in the city. With little over half a million people and an economy based mostly in agriculture, Fresno is a medium-sized city struggling with widespread poverty. For more than a decade, hundreds of people have continued to camp in highly visible downtown spaces despite periodic eviction campaigns. Very little research has explored the nature of homelessness in small or mid-sized cities.