Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology

The Difference that Seeing Makes: Homelessness and Visuality in Urban Ecology

A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Eric Brent Goldfischer

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Kate D. Derickson

July 2020

Acknowledgements No writing, large or small, takes place in a vacuum. And I’ve learned that the larger the project, the more of a community that one needs to carry on. I have been incredibly fortunate to be a part of several interwoven communities of people and places, without whom I could have never completed this project. This support arrived both in terms of inspiration and ideas for the actual writing itself and in the form of love and care that kept me going during the times that I wanted to give up (and there were a few), reminding me of the bigger picture that we’re all somehow a part of. At the University of Minnesota, my adviser, Kate Derickson, taught me how to be in academia while remaining true to the vision of community-engaged scholarship and activist work. I’m especially grateful for her ongoing support of my intellectual development in academia. When I floated my first idea for an article that informed this eventual dissertation, she encouraged me to write it for an academic audience and patiently walked me through the initial growing-pains of academic writing and thinking. I owe enormous thanks to my other committee members who saw this project through. Bruce Braun showed me how to connect the theory of aesthetics and vision with grounded geographic analysis. Teresa Gowan taught me how to be an ethnographer, and her collaboration in forming the Power at the Margins initiative created some of the best experiences of my time in graduate school. Michael Goldman gave so much generous feedback and time to this project, while always inviting me into his work along the way, changing my trajectory at multiple crucial moments. And Richa Nagar, who served on my preliminary exam committee, remains an inspiration for how to think about acts of translation and situated solidarity in collaborative work across the spheres of academia and activism. I also want to gratefully acknowledge the support of the staff of the Department of Geography, Environment and Society, especially Sara Braun, Cathy Dziuk, and Glen Powell. Financial support from the UMN Department of Geography, Environment and Society, the College of Liberal Arts, the American Association of Geographers, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona made the research possible. This project, and the work surrounding it, would not exist without Picture the Homeless. Thank you foremost to Nikita Price; I am forever grateful for our partnership and for your generosity and wisdom, and I hope this does you proud. Onwards, always. More PTH members than I can possibly name leant their ideas and thinking to this project; I owe particular thanks to Jermain Abdullah, Arevernetta Henry, Charmel Lucas, Marcus Moore, and Andres Perez Jr for sticking with me on the journey. Former PTH staffers including Jenny Akchin, Ryan Hickey, Lynn Lewis, Sam Miller, and Raquel Namuche made me feel welcome, gave powerful feedback, and put me to work at the right moments. Anthony Williams, the surviving co-founder of PTH, was a source of perspective at several key moments and graciously welcomed me to his organizing work in Baltimore. Beyond PTH, homeless activists elsewhere--especially Paul Boden and Kelley Cutler in San Francisco--gave crucial feedback during my fieldwork. Academic community sustained me throughout this project. Friends at UMN--especially Emma DeVries and Aaron Mallory--shared moments of strength and struggle, and endured (within reason) my never-ending homesickness and kvetching. Co-authorship

i and friendship with Jenn Rice and Jessie Speer lie behind many of the best parts of this project. In New York, I feel incredibly fortunate to share friendship with some amazing scholars and activists: Melissa Checker, Scott Larson, Monxo Lopez, Nerve Macaspac, Oksana Mironova, Jackson Smith, and Sam Stein, some of the kindest and most generous folks you’ll find anywhere. Rob Robinson deserves his own acknowledgements section for his unmatched ability to bring people together--if not for Rob, the ultimate scholar- activist, my journey would have never begun. His encouragement has meant the world to me. Outside of NYC, camaraderie and friendship with Laura Belik, Dana Devlieger, Chris Herring, Amanda Huron, Eve McGlynn, Duff Morton, Odie Santiago, Katharina Schmidt, David Seitz, Tony Sparks, and Stepha Velednitsky has sustained me tremendously. Mel Garcia-Lamarca gave me incredible feedback on Chapter 4 of this dissertation. And my housemates in NYC, Jeremy Specland and Tomasz Zyglewicz, helped make a communal thinking space during my fieldwork and writing years. Friendships can’t be captured on a page, but the page wouldn’t exist without the closest people in my life. Kelsey Detwiler, oldest friend, thank you for giving me insight and confidence. Mia Hassoun, thank you for being my first co-author and fellow no-bs academic. Dan Evans and Mike Morris, for all the softball, beer/seltzer, and to many more days of Queens compatriotship and Baseic Pitches victories. Zoe Rodine, for many years of brilliant thoughts amidst divergent pathways. Adam Safer, for handing me Pedagogy of the Oppressed at age 16 and always being down to talk everything through. Rachel Singer and Daniel Glassman, thank you for your tremendous hospitality and many meals and ideas shared. Ursula Sommer, always font of wisdom and kvetch-buddy, thank you for all the good meals and North Jersey solidarity. And Jefrey Velasquez, longtime confidant, thank you for your steady, patient friendship and for being the ultimate role model. My NYC extended family kept me going in some of the toughest stretches of this project through inspiration and hospitality. They also kept it real real with me when talking about the importance of being rooted in a place. All my love to them for holding me up: Mel Grizer, Susie Hoffman, Daniel Grizer, Andrea Grizer, Eileen and Ron Feinman, Rita and Ira Gurkin. As my Grandpa always used to say, family is everything. Amy Goldfischer, my sister and toughest critic, thank you for always listening and for your courage and conviction. My parents, Dan and Sharlene Goldfischer, raised us in a proud tradition of questioning authority at all times, and I hope that this project can in its small way live up to that upbringing. Dad, thank you for imparting your curiosity about how cities work through all of our transit adventures. Mom, thank you for teaching me about power and resistance. Maggie Hall, partner extraordinaire, thank you for sticking with the ups and downs and for your fierce sense of justice. You brought this project into the world. This project is dedicated to my grandfather, Lester I. Goldfischer. A lifelong New Yorker, he gave me his love for the city, deep skepticism of those in power, and a certain level of chutzpah. His passing during my fieldwork left an enormous hole in my life. Although I doubt he’d have read much past the first few pages of this project, he’d probably have said “put it there, kid!” with a hug and a handshake. So, Grandpa, this is for you.

Table of Contents

List of Figures iv

Chapter 1: Homelessness, Vision, and the Environment 1

Chapter 2: Methodologies 37

Chapter 3: ‘It’s all about the visual:’ Picture the Homeless and the Visuality of Homelessness 51

Chapter 4: ‘We too are ecological engineers:’ Homelessness, Sustainability, and Green Infrastructure 99 Chapter 5: Urban Green Design and the Visibility of Homelessness 135 Chapter 6: Conclusion 171 Works Cited 189 Appendix A: Interviews 201 Appendix B: Meetings 202

iii

List of Figures

Fig Page 3.1: What we’re up against: Bulletin board at PTH’s office 59 3.2: PTH’s structure 76 3.3: PTH’s theory of change 78 3.4: PTH twitter story on visuality 84-86 3.5: Screenshot from “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” Campaign 89 3.6: Photograph by Melissa Shook, from “Streets are for Nobody” (1989). 90 3.7: Screenshot from New York Times, January 8 2018 94

3.8: Image of Karen Dunton by Melissa Shook (1989). 95

4.1: Images from DOT plaza workshop 130 5.1: Snippet from WEACT survey 167

Chapter 1: Homelessness, Vision, and the Environment

I’m glad you popped in the door, because this story isn’t told. Part of our mission is to change stereotypes. So maybe you’ll talk to somebody, and the next time they see me or

Marcus out here collecting cans they’ll say “there goes an ecological engineer!”

--JR, PTH member

This dissertation begins, in many ways, from two provocations. The more traditional “academic” provocation came from a tenured faculty member at the

University of Minnesota, who, upon hearing my research interests in understanding the relationship between urban political ecology and homelessness, told me that such a conjuncture was impossible. “Everything environmental about homelessness,” he proclaimed (and here I’m paraphrasing) “actually stems from the economic, and all the forms of exclusion that homeless people experience in parks are just extensions of policing.” At the time, I was very new to academia, and felt for a moment that this project had received a kiss of death from a well-known scholar. But after a few semesters of training in feminist geography and epistemology, I realized that I could resist the desire to ascribe everything about homelessness to class-based reasoning. There was more, a difference, to the way that homeless city-dwellers engaged with and acted upon urban green spaces and environmental projects than simply an extension of the economic forms that produce traditional exclusions from public space and private property. I was encouraged by some of my homeless colleagues in New York City, who knew from their own experiences that they were a) treated differently in different kinds of spaces, and that the difference in treatment seemed to have something to do with ecology, and b) that their

1 activities as can recyclers for pay and reusers of materials left for waste for survival were not valued the same as the “sustainability” activities geared at the housed population. I determined to continue the line of research, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t driven by a desire to show that faculty member that it could be done, thoroughly, rigorously, and, crucially, always in partnership with homeless people themselves.

The more important (to me) provocation emerged from such a partnership. As I will discuss far more in depth in the following chapter, this dissertation took place in partnership with Picture the Homeless (PTH), New York City’s only homeless-led activist organization. My ‘official’ work with PTH began in the summer of 2016, funded by a summer internship research program at the University of Minnesota. I was a strange intern, in the sense that I worked as a community organizer in the Bronx (where PTH was based at the time, before a move to the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan in 2014) before entering grad school and was already a known entity to PTH at the time that our initial conversations about doing research together took place. But in the eyes of the university, I was an intern, and it was in a mode of learning and taking in information that

I began my full-time work with PTH that summer.

At the time of my arrival, Picture the Homeless was engaged in a full-blown battle over what are called “move-along orders.” Move-along orders take place when police officers, or (more common in cities other than New York) private security officers tell someone to move away from a public space without issuing a ticket, arrest, or other official violation. From PTH’s perspective, the whole racket (as they saw it) hinged on the idea of “looking homeless.” Under other circumstances, laws and regulations defining acceptable uses of public space become weaponized against homeless people. Laws such

2 as SODA (stay out of drug area) orders (Beckett and Herbert 2009), quality-of-life enforcement of laws that prohibit loitering or informal infrastructure (Vitale 2008;

Mitchell 1997; Mitchell 2003; Speer 2016), regulations that prevent “out of place” activities such as sleeping or eating on mass transportation, or rules that result in the confiscation of homeless property (Blomley 2009); these are all familiar modes of anti- homelessness for both geographers and homeless activists alike. And while all involve the idea of “looking homeless” as part of the social construction of correct public behavior--for example, homeless people might get cited for taking up too much space with their belongings, while the same will never happen to the swarms of tourists with large suitcases who descend daily on Manhattan--what confronted PTH in the summer of

2016 seemed, to them, different. The difference lay in the centrality of the problem of

“looking homeless.” When PTH members and other homeless New Yorkers received move-along orders, there was no law cited by those doing the moving, no obscure public space regulation brought forth from the dusty archives of municipal code. Instead, there was a simple directive (“You can’t be here”) from a person holding a gun. And when the person being moved felt compelled to ask why they couldn’t hang out in the given space without breaking any laws or regulations, they received variations of a terse but clear response: “People don’t want to see you around here anymore.”

In this context, PTH asked me to support their ongoing campaign work against move-along orders. This work in itself entailed creating a survey to understand the scope and content of move-along orders across the city--where they took place, how they escalated (or didn’t), and what police officers said to homeless people during these interactions. This data led to our summary understanding of the problem, as described

3 above. But it also led PTH to another quandary: Why was being seen as “looking homeless” still central to the form of enforcement represented by move-along orders, which do not rely on traditional enforcement or legal mechanisms yet still aim to disrupt the lives of visibly homeless people? This became my second provocation, from my collaborators. PTH, as I will explain shortly, has built their entire theory of change around the homeless image; and yet they charged me to understand as deeply and thoroughly as possible the problem of “looking homeless” in this contemporary context.

And there is a third, more hidden provocation, and it comes from my own experience. I grew up initially in the suburbs of Northern New Jersey, but nearly all of my parents’ relatives and friends lived either in New York City or in suburban

Westchester County, where my father grew up. At least twice a month, and sometimes more, my family made the 45 minute drive into the city from our home, driving over the

George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and then heading north into either the Bronx or Westchester. At this time, in the mid-1990s, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was still in the midst of enacting a purge against the sight of homeless New Yorkers, personified by his personal vendetta (carried out through fear-mongering photographs and headlines in the New York Post) against the so-called “squeegee men,” a very small group of informal laborers who worked to wipe down the windows of cars stuck in traffic for a tip. So as we sat in traffic on the part of the bridge leading into the city, I very clearly remember seeing the squeegee men, and seeing other people walking on the highway, moving between stopped or slow-moving cars and carrying cardboard signs saying variations of

“Homeless, hungry, please help.” This, the young version of me figured, is what total desperation in New York City looked like: homelessness. And I, thankfully, was very

4 much removed from it, safely ensconced in the back seat of a locked car with Jersey plates.

But then we would continue driving, away from the bridge and the traffic and into the small and idyllic city of New Rochelle, where we would visit my grandparents in the ranch house that they lived in for 50 years. And more often than not, my uncle, my dad’s eldest brother, would join us. And here’s the thing: My uncle was, intermittently and occasionally, homeless or lost, wandering the streets in a neighboring suburban city sometimes for a week at a time. Now, did I think that my uncle looked homeless? Most definitely not, at least not at that time. My uncle was White; nearly all of the homeless people who I saw in the city were Black or Hispanic. He generally wore a button-down shirt; while you could never accuse him of being over-dressed in any situation, he tended to present like somebody who had some choice in clothing--as opposed to the clothing I associated with homelessness, ratty shirts and fading pants. And my uncle had a roof over his head most of the time, supported by his parents and by state housing subsidies and disability payments. Yet every so often, when a doctor tried a new medication (he had been diagnosed with a litany of mental health problems, for which Western medicine seemed to have no viable solution) or when he hit a funk from which he couldn’t recover, he would leave his apartment and go missing. My grandparents would find him later, either on the streets or in a hospital, and the cycle would eventually repeat. The question continues to haunt me: Would I know my uncle were homeless, if I were to pass him on the street during one of these wanderings? Would I see him differently because of his race, or his clothing, or his demeanor? And what does it mean that the category of homeless--a box that materially contains an enormous range of experiences and touches

5 an incomprehensibly large number of lives in the United States--can be distilled quite easily to a very small set of racialized and gendered images? And then, what happens when those images, which themselves produce geographies through the processes of urban planning and urban design, shift through time and space? How does the city interact with the image of homelessness, and vice versa?

With these provocations in play, my research took form around a set of interwoven questions. In what follows, I briefly explore each question, then outline the dissertation and the remainder of this introduction.

Research Questions

What is the role of “seeing homelessness,” captured through the analytic of “looking homeless,” in the contemporary city?

As suggested through the anecdote above, the troubled visual terrain of homelessness is central to PTH’s own understanding of their place at the margins of the city. It is also central to their theorization of how these margins can build power, how homeless New Yorkers can influence policy and urban geographies without playing into the race and class-based respectability politics of housing that often characterize the landscape of housing organizing in the city (Mironova 2019). I will discuss further in

Chapter 3 how PTH’s emphasis on the visual, and specifically on the image, sets them apart from other activist groups.

Through the analytic of “looking homeless,” we can trace the evolution of anti- homeless policing policies across space and time. Enforcement tends to follow the

6 shifting image: When the late-19th century “Tramp Scare,” illustrated through engravings in popular magazines such as Harpers, convinced frontier settlers that dangerous out-of- work tramps would show up at their door to demand money and commit sexual violence, enforcement followed this image through the creation of labor laws that restricted movement of seasonal workers (Creswell 2001). In the 20th century, as the image of homelessness shifted to the crowded urban setting through the photography of Jacob Riis in New York, policy and enforcement followed through the Chicago School’s concentric ring model and the rise of zoning laws and redlining policies to enforce where racialized populations could and could not live--a system that aimed to confine visible homelessness to small areas called “hobohemias.” Under mid-century urban renewal, meanwhile, cities used the visible presence of homeless encampments as a sign of blight, justifying the full bulldozing of entire areas (Kerr 2011). And in the aforementioned New

York City of the 1990s, the rise of “Broken-Windows” policing came about through an increased emphasis on quality-of-life crimes, which became linked to homelessness through images in tabloids (see fig 1). Clearly, “looking homeless” changes over time, and these shifts can be linked to changes in urban environments and the policing and enforcement of visible differences in public space. So this project asks: How should we understand this relationship in our most contemporary moment, the era following the revanchism that dominated the 1990s and 2000s?

How does New York City manage the visibility of homelessness across different urban geographies?

We know (as will be explored further below) that managing the visibility of homelessness and other forms of visible deviance in the city’s public spaces has been

7 central to the city’s agenda across the political spectrum for at least the past 120 or so years. But the management of this visibility is not the same in all public spaces. The policing that manages the visibility of the sidewalk, in its blunt visibility without any feasible means of shelter from passerby, shifts dramatically in the park, where trees and other elements blunt direct sightlines. And the meaning of these geographies in turns shifts alongside the visibility of homelessness, as linear parks such as the High Line become popular not only for their novelty or ecological value or design aesthetic, but also for their ability to reclaim urban green space from the racialized fear of a homeless person lurking in the background. In posing this research question, this project aims to add an analysis of public space and policing--which will always and forever be an analysis of race, gender, class, and other visible markers of difference--through the lens of homelessness. By trying to understand these shifts in public space through homelessness (and from PTH’s perspective), we stand to learn something about how racial capitalism shifts through different geographies, through spaces new and old in rapidly changing cities.

How does sustainable, or “green” urban development impact homeless New Yorkers?

The latter two questions emerge from answers to the previous question: that, in fact, green development and park areas have emerged as the focal point of the management of homeless visibilities. New York City, like many other global cities, has made a clear turn towards what geographers have variously called “ecological urbanism”

(Gandy 2015). Major development projects have taken on both the content and discourse of creating urban ecological benefits for citydwellers and tourists alike. From megaprojects such as the High Line Park, created initially in 2006 on top of a long-abandoned

8 elevated freight rail line on Manhattan’s west side, to smaller projects such as the city’s

Neighborhood Plaza Program, an initiative that transforms “grey” infrastructure into

“green” infrastructure, ecological urbanism has risen to the top of the city’s agenda since the Bloomberg era, when development rose at rates unprecedented since the time of mid- century urban renewal (Larson 2013, Lindner and Rosa 2017). As we know from Rosalyn

Deutsche and Neil Smith’s work in particular, homeless New Yorkers have historically stood at the center of the urban development agenda, as objects to be visibly removed from the landscape or as justifications for massive redevelopment projects (Deutsche

1996; Smith 1996). So as the urban development agenda itself shifts to encompass ideas of environmental benefit along with its traditional vectors of economic growth and physical construction, how does this agenda impact homeless New Yorkers? This question dominates the second half of the dissertation, but also serves to open a crucial conversation in the academic literature, explored further in this introduction. While many frameworks exist to understand the uneven impact of green development initiatives, none of these deal directly with homelessness. Homelessness is barely considered within the substantial literature on green gentrification, for instance, an absence that this question aims to rectify.

How might sustainable practices already in place in homeless communities make their own impact on the state and private-capital driven green development agenda?

A narrow definition of sustainability pervades many large-scale urban redevelopment projects (Rice and Burke 2018). Not only does such a narrowness contribute to the phenomena of green gentrification, it also prohibits most actors from understanding already-existing sustainability activities amongst marginalized

9 communities as potential pathways to a more environmentally-just city--not as means to be co-opted, but rather as crucial activities to be recognized and saluted. Through this question, I am able to bring out some of the undervalued ways that homeless New

Yorkers create environmental justice, and to call into question how the green development agenda bypasses already-existing activities in favor of new development that erases and removes the visible evidence of homeless sustainability practices.

Green Anti-Homelessness: The Main Argument

Homelessness studies, while producing a powerful framework to understand the anti-homelessness which pervades North American cities through policing, policy, and public space, have generally avoided discussing the relationship between homelessness and urban ecology. The same can be said of work coming from the other side of the equation: urban political ecology and environmental justice literature, while exploring the uneven impact of ecology and green development projects broadly, have largely passed over homeless city dwellers as agents in the analysis. Introducing the framework of green anti-homelessness serves two purposes: to call the attention of each of these fields of study to urban ecology and homelessness, respectively, and to suggest a different way of understanding this relationship, a way that brings together the best analytical tools from each existing field.

Green anti-homelessness is not a panacea, nor does it represent a “solution” that would suddenly fully explain all aspects of the relationship between homelessness and ecology. But what the framework does do is allow us to think through the intersection of homeless visibility and urban ecology from a perspective that takes into account both the

10 importance of being seen as homeless (as articulated by homeless activists themselves) and the increasing importance of urban greening (or, as Gandy (2015) calls it, ecological urbanism) in the shifting meaning and location of visual homelessness. As outlined further below, it does not aim to erase or replace current theorizations of homelessness, but rather build on several exciting movements within both bodies of theory to suggest an additional location from which we can theorize this relationship.

In this project, I argue that green anti-homelessness primarily contains three actions within the urban ecological realm:

1. Mitigating the visibility of homelessness

The visibility of homelessness has long been understood as one of its central vexations. This holds true from multiple perspectives: That of urban governance, homeless activists, and those who study both. Green anti-homelessness continues this tradition, but does so through a slightly different mechanism: Mitigation, rather than banishment or disappearance. The evidence collected in my fieldwork shows that when homelessness and urban ecology interact--through parks, green development initiatives, green design, or green spaces managed by horticultural organizations--the goal and outcome of the governance and management of visible homelessness becomes mitigation, rather than disappearance or banishment.

2. Shifting value away from homeless communities using green design and development

Sometimes, as in the framework of ecosystems services, economic value becomes attached to green development efforts such as park and plaza creation, rainwater recycling, and other forms of ecological resilience and sustainability initiatives. Other times the value attached is not as explicit, displayed more vaguely through language that emphasizes the health and community benefits of greenery. In either situation, however, the value that becomes produced through these efforts often results from a shifting the use-value of a space away from homeless people. This component of green anti- homelessness emerges through evidence showing several instances in which new green development projects in New York shifted the landscape of the space around them in such ways that displaced homeless people from using the area for activities that generated both economic and ecological value for them. In the example that PTH members call

“ecological engineering,” for instance, their ability to systematically store cans prior to recycling them--an ecological and economic activity--was destroyed by the creation of the High Line. This value shifting process, while similar to the displacement caused by green gentrification, belongs within green anti-homelessness because of its particular impact on homeless city dwellers, who rely specifically on invisibilized uses of public green space for survival.

3. Narrowing the definition of sustainable urbanism

The shift in use value away from homeless people also causes a narrowing of the definition of sustainable urbanism, the third component of green anti-homelessness.

Homeless people, as suggested throughout this project, are almost never understood as environmental subjects, by either urban power structures or (maybe more disappointingly) scholars who think about urban space and ecology. But if you spend any

12 amount of time with people experiencing homelessness in US cities, you realize quickly that they have quite a lot to say about urban ecologies and sustainable living--from broader practices like squatting and reusing materials, to can recycling, to making the most of what little spaces have remained uncaptured by landscape design and planning.

Yet in cities like New York where (I argue) the forms of green anti-homelessness now hold influence, sustainable practices are all the rage--but for housed people, not for the homeless. Moreover, the emphasis on a very particular definition of urban sustainability produces the very forms that devalue homeless sustainability practices: Linear parks that remove the valuable ability for homeless people to store their possessions, plazas with farmers’ markets that take away some of the last sheltered daytime gathering places, the erosion of unpoliced waterfront areas by LEED-certified megaprojects such as Hudson

Yards. So the narrow definition of sustainable urbanism is a crucial epistemological component to green anti-homelessness that produces real material consequences through its ignorance of a homeless-centered view of the city’s ecology.

In short, green anti-homelessness mode of governance that relies on managing

(through mitigation, not full removal) the visibility of homelessness in New York City through green urban development, along the way retrofitting seemingly empty spaces to shift their value away from homeless people and their grassroots sustainability practices into a very narrow idea of urban sustainability that only works for a small and powerful segment of the population. But green anti-homelessness itself remains rooted in over a century’s worth of evolving anti-homeless practices in the city. To situate this claim fully, I now turn to a genealogy of local responses to homelessness, read through the intertwined lenses of visuality and environmentalism in New York City. What follows is

13 a genealogy (rather than a history) because it does not fully attempt to trace historical origins or linear histories. As described by Michel Foucault, genealogy uses history to instead look carefully for ruptures and continuities across time and space, and most importantly to search for the disruptions that resonate and connect far away from their source material--what he poetically calls the “petty malices” of values and aesthetics

(Foucault 1984: 80). So while the story I am about to tell begins some 300 years previously and stretches to the present day, I don’t aim to root our current moment solely in the spatial beginnings of homelessness in the city; rather, a genealogical approach allows me to excavate some of the resonating “petty malices” that bring together homelessness and the environment in New York City.

Homelessness in New York City: A visual and environmental telling

The history of visible homelessness in New York City stretches back to at least the 18th century, and intertwines with other histories of visible difference through poverty, race, and disability. Many historians of homelessness in pre-Industrial

Revolution North America focus their investigation on the institute of the almshouse, which became the solution to the problem of “looking homeless” in both colonial New

Amsterdam and in the early days of New York under British control. Yet creating a visual distinction for those considered “paupers”--in our parlance, panhandlers--became an important priority of the state even in its earliest colonial forms: In 1707, only two decades after the British took over management of the city now called New York, they ordered that “all paupers clothed by the City wear a badge made of blue or red cloth with the letters ‘NY’” (Macdonald 1987: 7). As if the act of begging publicly were not enough to create visual distinction, this action shows that over 300 years ago, New York City

14 began creating ways to visually distinguish those who we now understand as “homeless” from the rest of the population.

The rise of the almshouse--the first version of which appeared in New York City in 1736--as the publicly funded (but often church-supported) institution aimed at ameliorating the most basic needs of poverty in New York and elsewhere, continued the trajectory of visually marking homelessness as separate from other forms of poverty, operating through the now-familiar metric of dividing the “deserving” poor from the

“undeserving” poor. As described by historian David Rothman, the almshouse itself became the crucial built environment marker of this difference:

Within this orientation, the central element in poor relief became the alshouse, and its ‘door’ marked the difference between the worthy and the unworthy. The worthy were eligible for outdoor relief, that is, town funds or charitable support which would be given to them at home. The unworthy were to receive indoor relief, that is, inside the door of almshouse...the almshouse itself was at once a functional equivalent to banishment.” (Rothman 1987: 12).

The almshouse looms large in the history of what we now call homeless shelters because of its carceral function. As Christian Siener has written, drawing on the work of Ruth

Wilson Gilmore, homeless shelters fulfill a crucial carceral function within racial capitalism because of their ability to both separate a largely nonwhite low-wage workforce from the mainstream economy while also creating a political economy that holds open a pathway between prisons and shelters, in what PTH and other activists call the “prison-to-shelter pipeline” (Siener 2018; Gilmore 2007). Both genealogically and historically, the contemporary shelter remains the direct heir to the almshouse. In its role as the visual separator within homeless populations (“sheltered” vs “unsheltered/street homeless” is the categorization that makes the most difference in the sorts of services and

15 housing types available to a homeless New Yorker today), the shelter has become the visual arbiter of the ability to be “rehabilitated” (sheltered) and those seen by the state as beyond hope (the “street” homeless populations most targeted by law enforcement)

(Gowan 2010; Wilse 2015). In assuming this role, shelters continue the state’s trajectory that originated in the almshouse of using the built environment to visually mark homelessness as different from other citydwellers.

The visual marking of homelessness in New York City did not proceed evenly across other forms of visible difference. As Craig Wilse asserts, homelessness as a category must always be understood within, not outside of, other markers of difference and the attendant violence that characterizes this marking: “There is no neutral category of ‘homeless’ that travels across time and space; how housing insecurity manifests and is interpreted are technical effects of political economic systems, popular discourse, and social policy frameworks” (Willse 2015: 86). In particular, the visual history of homelessness is one that intertwines closely with state violence along lines of race and disability. Many laws that restricted public behavior and appearances in the United States in the 19th and 20th century came down along these lines, from the well-known “Jim

Crow” laws that produced public racial segregation in the US South to the more universal but lesser-known “ugly laws” that aimed to remove the sight of disability in public, especially in Northern cities. These laws interacted to specifically mark and target homelessness in cities; as Susan Schweik argues,

The tramp whose presence lurks behind the ugly laws was strongly racialized in the cultural imaginary as native-born white and male...If white-trashed unsightly beggars posed the threat of and therefore bore the brunt of class hostilities too flagrantly displayed to public view, their black-trashed counterparts were likely to fare even worse. After all, in the white-dcominated racial order of the late

nineteenth century, any black person might be assigned unsightliness (Schweik 2009: 185-186).

Homelessness in New York City magnified the interplay of racism and ableism represented by the ugly laws and Jim Crow laws. Displaying visible signs of mental illness was, until the onset of New York’s Right to Shelter law in the early 1980s, a surefire way to be refused entry to the Municipal Lodging House and other city and state provided forms of shelter, while perceptions of such spaces as full of emotionally disturbed people continue to this day (Hopper 1987; Hopper 2003). Mental health outcomes for the disabled community varies widely by race, with Black patients experiencing significantly worse treatment by providers and having their concerns taken far less seriously (McGuire and Miranda 2008). And as has been long known, people of color, and in particular Black and Brown New Yorkers, are disproportionately impacted by policing in public spaces (Vitale 2008; Hinton et al 2018). To be homeless and confined to public space puts one squarely at the center of these intersecting modes of violence.

But in addition to the marking of visual difference, homelessness in New York

City also contains a story about urban ecologies and environments. Much of the literature on homelessness (as will be fleshed out further below) pays attention to the social ecology of the street, calling to mind Mitchell Dunier’s famous “street corner” ethnography of homelessness. But the history of homelessness in New York City needs to be placed in the context of the city’s evolving political ecology, not only its political economic structures.

When the aforementioned almshouses came into existence as the city’s main infrastructural solution to the problem of seeing homeless people on the street, we have to remember that a large part of Manhattan remained undeveloped by real estate or business, and not fully integrated into what we now know as the landscaped park system. So while

Jacob Riis’ photography drew the eyes of wealthier New Yorkers into the squalor of downtown tenements as the site of housing insecurity, painters in the same era focused their portrayals on children and families living outside beneath the cliffs at the very top of the island (Peters 1987). The desire to erase many of these communities, less visible than their street-homeless counterparts but nonetheless standing in the way of a different kind of development has motivated the creation of landscaped parks through multiple eras of

New York’s history. The creation of Central Park, most famously, removed not only the autonomous Black community of Seneca Village but also several significant squatters’ communities considered eyesores by both the park’s designer, Frederick Law Olmstead, and his political enablers (Rosensweig and Blackmar 1992; Gandy 2002). This pattern repeated itself in the era of the New Deal, when Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and planning villain and Parks Chief Robert Moses contrived to clear shanty towns along the Hudson

River and Jamaica Bay in the name of environmental protection and preservation, creating in their stead landscaped parks (Riverside Park, Red Hook Park) and a massive and short-lived airport (Floyd Bennet Field) that has now become reintegrated into a federal nature preserve. These efforts were all preserved through the medium of photography, as LaGuardia sent out New Deal-sponsored photographers to take pictures of squatters’ shacks in the future park sites to give Moses and his group an easy justification for clearance to work with (Goldfischer 2019a). And Moses himself,

18 according to his biographer Robert Caro, became obsessed with how squatters’ shacks along the Hudson blocked the view for potential park-goers, and embarked on a personal vendetta against these homeless New Yorkers living in urban ecology (Caro 1973). More recently, as I show in this research project, a similar planning approach extended to the new High Line Park, which indirectly displaced homeless New Yorkers who had used its shelter to store belongings and, crucially, aluminum cans that they took for redemption at recycling centers.

This latter practice matters, as I show in this dissertation, because it represents one of several crucial sustainability practices that characterize how homeless New

Yorkers themselves should be understood as agents and key actors within our urban ecological landscape. As Jessie Speer and I argue elsewhere, homeless people living in undeveloped natural areas, including within the confines of hyper-urban New York City, have developed long-ignored theories of urban nature as respite and survival space through memoir-writing and artistic works (Speer and Goldfischer 2019). The political ecology of homelessness has only just begun to be theorized, and even so it mostly takes root in stories of far less dense cities with vast areas of toxic abandoned land that homeless people struggle to clean and re-appropriate for survival (Goodling 2019b). But the density of New York City, as urban political ecologists have long noted, does not diminish its relationship to natural processes (Heynen et al 2006). Both landscaped parks and ungroomed wilderness areas within the five boroughs serve as home to thousands of people, who seek to modulate their visibility through the use and reuse of urban ecological elements. From the famous “mole people” living beneath Riverside Park in the

1980s and 1990s, to far less sensationalist interactions between Parks Department

19 employees and people who don’t leave when the park closes every night, to the massively disproportionate impact of climate change and its attendant natural disasters on people living outside (as evidenced by both Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the current COVID-19 pandemic), homelessness in New York City continues to be as much about urban ecology as it is about the streetscape and traditional built environment.

Telling the environmental and visual story of homelessness in New York City means looking at the intersection of homelessness with development, exclusion, and most importantly, grassroots resistance and sustainability practices from homeless communities all at once, all together, and in intersecting spaces. This dissertation aims to do exactly that, by answering its motivating research questions through an analysis that-- drawing heavily on direct collaboration with homeless activists--moves seamlessly back and forth between thinking through images of homelessness and the relationship between homelessness and urban ecologies.

The Missing Ecology of Homelessness Studies

My proposed framework of green anti-homelessness intervenes in social scientific studies of homelessness by suggesting a crucial addition to the locations in which anti- homelessness takes place in urban areas. In this sense, green anti-homelessness ought to be understood as a two-sided intervention into two different literatures: Homelessness studies, which has (until recently) largely ignored the ramifications of anti-homelessness in urban ecological settings, and urban political ecology, which has written about the uneven impacts of environmental initiatives on precariously-housed and low-income renters in cities but has failed to consider the impacts of the same forms of development

20 on people already without housing. This dissertation then aims to speak to both of these subfields--each of which is largely populated by geographers--to urge a deeper consideration of the environmentalism associated with homelessness, and the importance of homelessness in understanding of urban political ecology, respectively. In the conclusion, I return to draw out larger implications for theorizing urban marginalization and difference within the framework of green anti-homelessness; here, I simply wish to share a reading of existing literature that shows why this intervention is needed.

What we now know as homelessness is one of the foundational areas of study in urban social science. Nels Anderson’s (1923) influential ethnography of transient men known as “hobos” in early 20th-century Chicago, and the “hobohemia” that he categorized and described through his ethnography and own experience, became (along with the work of less progressive sociologists at the University of Chicago on segregation and racial pathology) foundational in social science fieldwork and writing; as Craig

Willse eloquently puts it, homelessness has served a “discipline-building function within social sciences” (Willse 2015: 59). Homelessness, like other forms of poverty, played host to many debates between “culture” and “structure” (Gowan 2010: 20-21). Social scientists in the 1980s and 1990s warred over whether homelessness should be understood as resulting from set of pathological personality and behavioral flaws (this camp was influenced by culture of poverty theorists and the Moynihan Report of the

1960s, which blamed high crime rates in Black communities on a so-called breakdown of the family structure), or whether it instead belonged to the fruits of the late capitalist economic policies of the 1970s and 1980s that produced massive unemployment in cities.

Geographers, unlike anthropologists and sociologists, did not dabble much on the cultural side of this conversation. Influenced primarily by Harvey and Lefevbre, homelessness primarily appeared for geographers as a political economic indicator, and its role in urban space became primarily about understanding criminalization in hypercapitalist spaces such as New York City, and, conversely, a vector for a form of resistance centered on Lefevbre’s idea of the “right to the city.” Neil Smith’s work in the

1990s put forward the framework of revanchism, a way of understanding the vengeful retaking of urban space by yuppies, gentrifiers, and other wealthy white citizens, mobilizing race, class, normativity in sexual orientations, and housing status against those framed as Other in the hyperpoliced city (Smith 1992; Smith 1996; Smith 1998).

Homelessness, for Smith, was always at the center of this analysis; as he wrote in his centerpiece work The New Urban Frontier, the central contrast in the gentrified city will always be a “city sparkling with the neon of elite consumption anxiously cordoned off from homeless deprivation.’ (Smith 1996: 24). It should also be noted that Smith did not just write about homelessness in New York City during this period, but collaborated extensively with homeless activists throughout his life, both by giving an early-stage

PTH a crucial platform at the CUNY-Graduate Center and through his ongoing dialogues and conversations with many PTH members and other homeless activists in the city, lending his ideas and his ear at crucial times. Despite the location of his writing within a tradition of academic Marxist geography that did not always leave much space for the

22 direct ideas of those who hadn’t themselves read Marx, Smith was a far more grounded scholar than can be easily detected in his writing.1

Yet even Smith, whose first academic work focused on the production of nature in cities (foreshadowing the field of urban political ecology that would emerge in the late

1990s and early 2000s and drawing influence from both his early work and the later writings of Raymond Williams) does not seem interested in the particularities of urban ecological elements in homelessness. In the 2008 afterward to Uneven Development

(originally written in 1984), he locates the center of the battle against homeless people in

New York as Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side, much as he did in his 1990s work, and includes a mention of the desire to “clean up” the park space (Smith 2008:

230). Nowhere does that desire to clean up park spaces link to the kinds of environmental history of New York described above; rather, parks get lumped in with streets and public spaces such as Times Square. But the fact that the park space might be different than other forms of public space does not seem a priority in Smith’s analysis, despite his emphasis elsewhere on visibility. But green anti-homelessness, as I develop it in this thesis, shows that visibility is, in fact, one of the key factors that does make homelessness in urban green spaces, even those as dense as Tompkins Square, crucially different.

In Don Mitchell’s writing on the struggles against the eviction of a homeless community in Berkeley’s People’s Park, written around the same time, this problem of lumping urban ecological elements such as parks in with other forms of public spaces

1 In particular, Smith’s longstanding collaboration with Rob Robinson, a community land activist and formerly homeless member of Picture the Homeless, shaped both Smith’s work and Robinson and PTH’s own analysis--a mutually-enriching relationship rooted in both theory and praxis, but rarely discussed within Smith or PTH’s own work.

23 continues into the framework of the Right to the City, which Mitchell borrows and expands from Lefevbre. More than Smith, Mitchell tries to understand the particularity of the park for homeless citydwellers, and does so through the lens of visibility, noting that

“the homeless are all too visible. Although homeless people are nearly always in public, they are rarely counted as part of the public” (Mitchell 2003: 135). People’s Park, a park space about the same size but significantly less landscaped than Tompkins Square Park, becomes the fulcrum of his analysis of homelessness, in which he argues that the Right to the City emerges from the shadow of anti-homeless public space laws that force homeless people and other hypermarginalized groups to retake and reuse public space for basic life functions (Mitchell 1997; Mitchell 2003). Mitchell makes clear that the problem is one of the visibility of private functions within public space, but continues the tendency to lump parks in with streetscapes:

For those who are always in the public, private activities must necessarily be carried out publicly. When public space thus becomes a place of seemingly illegitimate behavior, our notions of what public is supposed to be are thrown into doubt. Now less a location for the ‘pleasurable jostling of bodies’ and the political discourse imagined as the appropriate activities of public space in a democracy, public parks and streets begin to take on aspects of the home. (Mitchell 2003: 135).

Mitchell’s interpretation of the Right to the City from a homeless perspective was similarly influential as Smith’s idea of revanchism within homeless activism, to the point that a Right to the City coalition arose in the late 2000s and placed homelessness at the center of an activist agenda focused on reclaiming public spaces for those who use them most. But again, the smooshing of distinctions between the park and the street leaves both scholars and activists unprepared to deal with the ramifications of the differing treatment

24 and visibility of homelessness within ecological spaces, a missing space that green anti- homelessness aims to address.

Those who have studied homelessness in the wake of Smith and Mitchell have generally pursued this same course that blurs distinctions between different kinds of public spaces in the city as they relate to the visibility of homelessness. This is especially true of work that also examines public space and homelessness through the lens of criminalization and the Right to the City framework (Vitale 2008; Sylvestre 2010;

Beckett and Herbert 2009). But other scholarship has left room to begin making distinctions between different kinds of ecological and public spaces in cities as they relate to homelessness. From studies of the design of public spaces that distinguish ecological elements from the concrete (Miller 2007), to a critical exploration of infrastructure such as tents and toilets in homeless communities as different from the Right to the City

(Speer 2016), to research that sees the difference in criminalization and racialized policing across understandings of environmental vs public space (Jefferson 2008), there are seeds to pick up on within urban geographic scholarship on homelessness that suggest we can and should pay attention to these differences. Green anti-homelessness builds on these seeds to say that we have to think about anti-homelessness not only in its legalistic

(Right to the City) or structural (revanchism and gentrification) frameworks, but also in its role as both a producer and product of difference in urban ecological spaces.

Fortunately, there is not total silence within geography and other social sciences on the role of homelessness in ecological spaces. Recently, Langegger and Koester

(2016) have written on the ability of parks in Denver to provide homeless campers a space of relative seclusion and the crucial ability to control their own visibility, an

25 important concern within homelessness studies that also runs through Tony Sparks’

(2010, 2017, 2018) body of work in both Seattle and San Francisco. Jeff Rose (2014,

2015, 2017), although, not a geographer, has conducted research alongside homeless park dwellers in Salt Lake City that puts forward theories of marginalization that stem from the experience of navigating rules of visibility and conservation while surviving outdoors.

Erin Goodling’s work has begun to advance the framework of a “political ecology of homelessness,” which uses an intersectional analysis to chart the overlapping injustices of housing and environmental toxicity (Goodling 2019b). And in my own recent collaboration with Jessie Speer, we have argued for a reconceptualization of value in urban green space that draws on a shared history of exclusion between homeless city dwellers and rural land users: “Just as wilderness planning excluded rural communities who use the land for sustenance, cities refuse to tolerate the use of public parks for survival and everyday life” (Speer and Goldfischer 2019: 3). But all of these frameworks cannot fully account for the broad scope of how urban ecology interacts with homelessness, and how that interaction is primarily a shift in longstanding dynamics of anti-homelessness. For that, we need to think through urban political ecology and environmental justice literature, the second theoretical home of green anti-homelessness.

Urban Political Ecology, Environmental Justice, and Homelessness

Urban political ecology, the subfield of geography that is centrally concerned with the interaction between nature and the built environment in cities, has, until recently, remained surprisingly silent on homelessness. This silence matters because UPE is fundamentally concerned with many of the mechanisms that produce homelessness as we know it, especially uneven development, urban environmental degradation, and the unjust

26 distribution of the benefits of sustainability. UPE stems in large part from the work of

Erik Swyngedouw (1996) that paved pathways to bring the framework of political ecology into the processes and spaces of urbanism. Within this work, crucial inroads have been made in studying the metabolism of cities (an extension of Marx’s notion of metabolic production that theorizes how creativity and production serve to generate value through the interplay between nature and city). Metabolism within UPE then serves as a concept from which to further explore how interplays between the social and the natural, and within the natural itself when lodged within human environments, produces and reproduces uneven landscapes (Heynen 2014). In recent years, UPE has made powerful turns toward becoming more embedded and situated within grassroots movements and communities directly impacted by the uneven landscapes that it studies, embracing situated UPE (Lawhon et al 2014), embodied UPE (Doshi 2018), and grounded scholar- activist epistemologies (Goodling 2019a). Nik Heynen, in particular, has vigorously pushed for more of this kind of work that foregrounds difference within UPE, noting that

“UPE is uniquely situated to draw together multiple currents of theory toward active and dynamic understandings of socio-ecological processes and spatial forms.” (Heynen 2016:

844).

Yet homelessness, surprisingly, has served a marginalized role in UPE--despite the subdiscipline’s central concern with the production of uneven socio-natural landscapes in cities, and the central impact of such landscapes on the lives of homeless urban dwellers. We should be able to theorize homelessness, a product of unequal power relations distributed through space and intersecting with the material consequences of race, class, and gender, as co-productive of urban nature. As Matthew Gandy (2002; 2)

27 notes, the production of nature in urban places is not solely what is left behind after development, but rather “a microcosm of wider tensions in urban society.” But by considering the broader environment--or, to use a phrase that has deep roots in political ecology, the metabolism of the city--urban political ecology moves beyond the “stifling dualisms” of nature-society conversations and instead recognizes the dynamism and creativity that lies within the interactions that occur throughout these interconnected processes (Heynen 2014: 599). In thinking about who and what constitutes this metabolism, it’s clear that homelessness features both as a powerful marker of urban landscapes and a key fulcrum of urban political economy, even as a perhaps necessary ingredient to capitalist urban development (see Kawash 1998; Kerr 2011). The task for a political ecology of homelessness, then, lies in explicating the mechanisms of urban life that allow for the sometimes-visible intertwinement between a non-static nature and those who remain spatially marginalized in the city.

One key mechanism that emerges within between homelessness and the production of urban nature is visibility and seeing. Maria Kaika’s work in particular highlights this connection from political ecology. Kaika traces the role of water in processes of modernist urbanization that “rationalized” urban space in the 20th century, and argues that homeless people are a part of the seen-but-unseen “dystopian underbelly of the city:”

No matter how rational, sanitized, and clean both in symbolic and literary terms) our cities have become, the “urban trash” in the form of networks, dirt, sewerage, pipes, and homeless people lurks underneath the city, in the corners, at the outskirts, bursting out on occasion in the form of rats, disease, homelessness, garbage piles, polluted waters, floods, and bursting pipes. They remain stubborn reminders of the materiality of the networked city and undermine its smooth facade. Despite the quest for clarity, purity, and sanity that was prominent

throughout high modernity (or, rather, precisely because of this quest), the underlying contradictions of urban life, the ones that actually make it possible for clarity to exist, i.e., the urban “trash” and underlying invisible networks--both inorganic (sewerage, water pipes) and organic (homeless people)--remain markedly present. (Kaika 2005: 49).

Kaika’s analysis opens up the possibility of working through the framework of UPE-- analyzing how the metabolism of socionatural processes produces strategic (in)visibilities that reinforce already existing hierarchies and uneven power relations in intersecting natural and social environments--to analyze the problem of homelessness in cities. Yet here Kaika also marginalizes homelessness, consigning it to a list of socioecological problems alongside nonhuman populations and detritus. Reading City of Flows for homelessness produces key insights about its invisibility and relationship to other things that cities wish to disappear through infrastructure, but fails to bring about any sense that homelessness, and the people who experience it, can claim agency in this kind of theoretical study.

UPE has done better at allowing agency for its subjects in a subset of writings dealing with the problem of green gentrification, in which environmental narratives and projects become mobilized as forces producing displacement of low-income residents and precariously-housed people. Classic examples of green gentrification literature examine the uneven impact of industrial pollution clean-up, waterfront redevelopment, park creation, bike path construction, and other forms of state and capital-sponsored environmental development sustainability (Checker 2011; Anguelovski 2016;

Immergluck and Balan 2018; Gould and Lewis 2016; Pearsall 2010). The framework of

“just green enough,” developed by Win Curran and Trina Hamilton, has been influential for geographers thinking about how resistance to gentrification by low-income city

29 dwellers who understand the need to strike a balance between environmental improvement and the ability to remain in a community at risk of displacement (Curran and Hamilton 2012; Wolch et al 2014). Yet nearly all of this work focuses on the relationship between housing and environmental development and sustainability, not on homelessness. This difference is enormous: While low-income and precariously housed city dwellers certainly bear the brunt of environmental gentrification as it relates to housing displacement and the loss of brick-and-mortar resources and establishments, the material relationship to outdoor socionatures depends entirely on one’s housing status: if you have housing, no matter the other factors, your relationship to parks, wooded areas, waterfronts, and so on becomes removed because these spaces do not have to serve as direct refuge or survival space. The failure of green gentrification work to focus on this difference remains surprising, and calls for more concentrated study.

Notably, only one study of environmental gentrification directly examines its impact on already-homeless communities: Sarah Dooling’s (2009) work on ecological gentrification. In this piece, Dooling explores “tensions in public urban green spaces resulting from homeless people who have opted to live there because all other options are not viable for them and the ideological constructions of public urban green spaces espoused by the city parks department and housed citizens involved in planning for future green spaces in the city” in Seattle (Dooling 2009: 625). Dooling argues that “an ecological rationality and an espoused environmental ethic are also involved in the maintenance of homelessness” (Dooling 2009: 629). Similar to processes I highlight in my research, Dooling found that housed citizens turn to environmental design and ecological elements in order to effectively remove homeless citizens from visible areas of

30 downtown Seattle. But what Dooling terms as “ecological gentrification” results primarily in processes of removal, essentially a green version of revanchism. Building on

Dooling, I instead use “green anti-homelessness” because this term encompasses the moments in which anti-homelessness does not always equal direct removal and disappearance; as explored in Chapters 4 and 5 of this project, green anti-homelessness often takes the form of weaponizing ecology to mitigate, rather than diminish, the visibility of homelessness in park spaces. This is a subtle shift, but I think it is an important one, especially when one considers the overall hegemony of housing as opposed to homelessness in the green gentrification literature. I think we need to move away from the term “gentrification” itself when discussing homelessness in public space, because of its stark association with housing displacement as opposed to the violence that already-homeless people experience regularly. Green anti-homelessness, then, is a way to specify and better understand the ecological dimensions of that violence.

Literature from within environmental justice similarly evades homelessness. From the lineage established by Robert Bullard’s (2000) work on the disproportionate impacts of pollution on communities of color in New Orleans, to work by Laura Pulido (2000) and Julian Agyeman (2005) on grassroots-driven environmental justice movements, homelessness repeatedly fails to figure in an analysis that instead largely focuses on working-class housed communities. In David Pellow’s (2018) recent formulation of

“critical” environmental justice, an intersectional framework emerges to link EJ to policing, racial justice, and anti-displacement movements around the globe--yet still no mention of homelessness. Erin Goodling’s recent work (2019a, 2019b) seeks to remedy this absence by centering homelessness in an intersectional EJ analysis, providing a

31 much-needed theoretical framework that “underscores multilayered hazards impacting houseless people” (Goodling 2019b: 5). I build on Goodling’s much-needed analysis with green-antihomlessness, which adds to our ability to theorize homelessness within EJ and

UPE by both considering homeless citizens as environmental subjects and indicating the possible differences between “business as usual” anti-homelessness and its ecological dimensions.

Overall, green anti-homelessness addresses the glaring absence of homelessness in UPE and EJ literature by drawing on these very lenses themselves to analyze the relationship between urban ecology and homelessness. For instance, when PTH members assert their roles as ecological engineers, green anti-homelessness allows us to not only take that seriously, but analyze it against the backdrop of the constant narrowing of the definition of sustainability, through projects such as the High Line that forcibly insert a singular (and exclusive) notion of sustainability into a community and onto the urban landscape. Green anti-homelessness helps us think through design and visibility together, and allows us to show why it matters that planters, instead of other elements, become the primary mode of mitigating homeless visibility in NYC’s green plazas. And most crucially in academic analysis, green anti-homelessness provides a way not to simply add in the category of “homeless” to studies of green gentrification or urban metabolic processes, but rather to create intersectional work that augments the already-powerful environmental theorizations of people with lived experience of homelessness.

Overview of Chapters

Chapter Two kicks off this project with a focus on my methodology, discussing what it means to conduct community-engaged scholarship alongside a homeless-led

32 organization. This chapter, in addition to sharing some background on my collaboration with Picture the Homeless, contains a discussion on what it means to gaze critically at the state from a position in solidarity alongside a group directly impacted by unjust policies and structural violence. I foreground this methodological approach because of the epistemological nature of this work: Echoing many feminst scholars across the social sciences, I argue that the location from which we know about homelessness matters deeply and impacts the kinds of research that becomes doable, both in feasibility and ethicality. A deep community-based research partnership, in my case, allowed for thinking through homelessness, visibility, and urban ecology from a grounded position; such a positioning in turn led to thinking about green anti-homlessness not as a “new” or overarching framework, but rather as an amplification of how my colleagues at PTH understand their world.

In Chapter Three, “It’s All About The Visual,” I focus on the visuality of homelessness. Drawing extensively on my ethnographic fieldwork alongside PTH, I show first how the organization’s own emphasis on the visibility of homelessness came to be. I then delve into a theoretical exploration of visibility, visuality, and in particular the importance of “picturing” when it comes to homelessness. The image, I show, becomes important in PTH’s own work as the key vessel of anti-homelessness, an argument that I have also put forward in other articles. Putting PTH in conversation with thinkers of the visual alongside those who have studied homelessness in cities, I show how the visuality of homelessness shifts through different modes of governance--from the early “rabble-management” policies of New York City in much of the early and mid

20th century, to the revanchism and violent anti-homelessness of the 1990s. Using data

33 from ethnographic participant-observation and focus groups conducted during my fieldwork, I show how PTH’s emphasis on visuality leads to an understanding of the shifting visuality of homelessness within the framework of green anti-homelessness, which its members have experienced firsthand.

Chapter Four, “We Too Are Ecological Engineers,” advances the main thrust of my argument for green anti-homelessness. I explore how PTH members theorize ecological engineering as a homeless practice, and dive into several key examples of how the city’s green development agenda produces a narrow definition of sustainability while reappropriating the use-value of public spaces and mitigating the visibility of homelessness. I rely heavily on a mini-case study of the 125th St Plaza in the East

Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, a space that PTH has been intimately involved in struggle around for the duration of my fieldwork. After showing how these components of green anti-homelessness complement existing literature on urban green development and the visibility of homelessness, I back up the chapter’s assertions with a range of fieldwork evidence: ethnographic data from a workshop conducted for plaza managers and their horticultural colleagues who “dealt with” homelessness on a regular basis,

PTH’s own actions and discussions around the 125th St Plaza, and, crucially, the theorization of “ecological engineering” that comes from PTH members whose ability to recycle cans was directly impacted by the creation of the High Line, New York City’s massive linear park near the Hudson River.

Finally, Chapter Five builds on the problem of narrowing sustainability within green anti-homelessness to specifically discuss the role of urban design. During my fieldwork, I conducted many supplemental interviews with urban landscape designers

34 who dealt with homelessness directly in their work; these insights come to the forefront in this chapter. I interrogate the role of CPTED (Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design), a series of design principles that once aligned closely with revanchist anti-homelessness but now seem to more reflect the priorities of green anti- homelessness: Using environmental design to mitigate, rather than remove, the sight of homelessness. This chapter also contains data from two collaborative projects that I worked on alongside PTH during my fieldwork: A partnership with urban designers who pushed for a more inclusive public realm, and a campaign to produce more public bathrooms in New York City. Each of these design efforts demonstrates further instances of how green anti-homelessness brings together ecology and homelessness in the contemporary production of space in New York City.

In bringing my fieldwork together though these chapters, and through the framework of green anti-homelessness, I hope to build on the work of my colleagues at

Picture the Homeless, who insist that homeless New Yorkers have powerful solutions to homelessness based on their own direct experience. I see green anti-homelessness as a compliment to that claim (a claim that I fully believe), a way to bring together several intersecting elements of knowledge about urban ecology and experience of homelessness in contemporary New York City. It is my hope that this framing proves useful to both my colleagues at PTH, and to geographers and other scholars who aim to understand the shifting dynamics of urban public space, urban ecologies, and housing justice. And to begin that investigation, we return to the visual, where so much of this project began in its impetus. As Gloria Anzaldua said: “Nothing happens in the real world without first

35 happening in the images inside our heads” (Anzaldua 1987: 109). So to begin, we return to images of homelessness.

Chapter 2: Methodologies

Before I decided to become an academic geographer, I began my career as a housing organizer. Community organizing was a career I had intended to pursue for a long time, in part because I was in awe of the power of its methodological approach: The core belief that people are the experts in their own lives, neighborhoods, and economic realities, the heavy use of popular education in the style of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the

Oppressed (1970), and the useful interplay of research and action to push both the mundanities of urban policy and the everyday drama of urban life in a more just direction. Accordingly, I learned the practice of community organizing at a young age from a homeless community organizer in Philadelphia as an apprentice, and then deepened my skills through working at a drop-in center in Minneapolis during my years as an undergraduate student. I augmented this on-the-ground experience with a slew of organizing trainings, including at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. Upon graduating from college, I found a full-time community organizing position at Banana Kelly

Community Improvement Association, an organization that remains intimately associated with the recovery of the South Bronx after the nadir of disinvestment and urban decay in the late 1970s. I was immediately thrown into the extensive network of NewYork City housing organizing, and saw what seemed like a clear path ahead: Organize successfully, become a director of organizing, and so move up the well-established ladder toward directing an initiative or organization.

After about a year as a paid professional, I realized that I had put myself in the wrong position: I was drained from the realities and serious limitations of laboring inside

New York City’s extensive nonprofit industrial complex, working for a once-radical

37 group in the South Bronx that had received just a little too much governmental support over the years, turning them from organizers of people for power into managers of rent payments and eviction notices. My desire for advancement in the organizing world also dulled, largely pushed by the realization that the only part of the job that I found actually powerful was facilitating popular education sessions at the very beginning of the organizing process--a task delegated to junior organizers (seen as grunt work by more senior organizers, who seemed to prefer instead high-stakes negotiations with local political leaders). At some point, it occurred to me that facilitating these meetings and workshops felt a whole lot like being in an inspiring academic classroom setting. One thing led to another, and inspired by too many to name here, I resolved to become a deeply engaged academic geographer, blurring the lines between research, theory, knowledge production, and working for justice through organizing.

While still an organizer, I worked on a campaign with an organization called

Picture the Homeless. At the time, I remember thinking that in a sea of predictably- named organizations--groups with “community” or “power” or “revitalization” featured prominently in their titles--a group that instead labeled itself under a seemingly-simple call to action stood out. What did it mean, that a homeless-led activist group was called

“Picture the Homeless?” I was already drawn to questions surrounding homeless visibility because I had noticed that in nearly a decade of housing organizing and activist work, no housing group wanted to touch any deep collaboration with visibly-homeless folks. Homelessness, in many scenarios I found myself in from separate organizing stints in Philadelphia, the Twin Cities, and New York City, was used effectively as a specter of what would happen if we couldn’t successfully organize to preserve or create low-income

38 housing. And indeed, many people who were the members of groups I worked with and for in these settings themselves had plenty of short-term experiences of homelessness, in and out of shelter systems and doubled-up couch-hopping situations. But people who were “visibly homeless”—whose images saturated many racialized understandings of cities as frightening, disinvested, and dangerous spaces—were somehow excluded from the housing organizing work I had done to that point.

Working with Picture the Homeless on a joint campaign just before I left for graduate school, I learned a new spin on the old organizing chant of “Nothing about us without us is for us.” At PTH, I learned, staff and members used a slightly more direct version, most often attributed to Nikita Price, the organization’s longtime Civil Rights organizer: “If we’re not at the table, then we’re on the menu!” Often punctuated with an expletive or two, this phrase seemed to animate much of PTH’s work. In PTH’s lexicon, the name holds a similar call to action: As they put it, “the name Picture the Homeless itself is a reflection of our co-founders analysis about how important the ways in which people “picture” homelessness results in negative public policies that actually harm homeless people” (Picture the Homeless website). In other words, PTH argues that any attempts to change the material conditions of homelessness—punitive policing, an impossible dearth of low-income housing, an intensely racialized shelter system that has turned homelessness into a branch of the carceral state—must also be attempts to alter the images that saturate and produce discourses of homelessness. In attempting to recenter the stories told about homelessness through how everyday New Yorkers “picture” those who experience it, PTH effectively stops the story that is always being told (Simpson

2014), instead replacing it with a narrative that emanates from homeless people (the

39 experts on their own lives) and gazes back sternly upon state policies, understanding them as produced through everyday discourse. As a group primarily led by people who had experienced homelessness—mostly street homelessness and the hyper-visibility that came with it—the call for visibility, for a more accurate and less-stereotyped version of the “picture” that most housed people carry in their minds of homelessness, was always connected to the need to sit at the decision-making table so as to not be, in a word, eaten by the state and private capital.

When I began forming the project that eventually became this dissertation, I knew that I wanted to know more deeply about the intersection of homelessness and visuality in

New York City. My background research—primarily driven by literature that took place in the height of Giuliani-era revanchism—had convinced me that images and visual imaginations of homeless people essentially constituted their own visuality. I use visuality—rather than visibility or vision—because the term connotes a particular attention to acts of “picturing,” or the way that images become greater than the things they make immediately visible: as explained by Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visuality is very much to do with picturing and nothing to do with vision, if by vision we understand how an individual person registers visual sensory impressions” (Mirzoeff 2006: 67). Besides the affinity of visuality with PTH’s own theorizations, it also presents a useful mode of analysis because it aims to encompass not only the visibilities and invisibilities contained in vision, but the social and spatial constructions of those very (in)visibilities, and that of vision itself (Rose 2012). I also knew that I wanted to study how that visuality of homelessness might be changing, given that I knew from experience that the policing forms that characterized the revanchist era were being eroded by strong activism from an

40 abolitionist left in New York City. And finally, I knew that I wanted to study these intersecting phenomena not through an ethnography of homeless people, or a study of homelessness itself. Instead, I wanted to take homeless activists—PTH—as experts in their own lives, in confluence with the organizing methodology that has animated my own praxis. To do so, I resolved to do an ethnographic study from the perspective of

PTH, but gazing back sternly on the parts of the state with the most direct impact on my area of research: those apparatuses that dealt with urban development, public space management, housing, policing, and (as it turned out) environmental sustainability in the city.

Understood as a practice of looking, the gaze is theorized as producing relationships of power through knowledge and as central in establishing difference through photography and other visual media (Foucault 1977; Sturken and Cartwright

2009). The gaze has a position--it comes from somewhere, and projects onto somewhere else. This may appear as a surface observation, but matters more when discursive practices of public space fail to appreciate difference and instead conceive its users as on an equal plane, all-encompassed within the category of “citizen” or, more specifically,

“park user.” Taking seriously the different modes of seeing from disparate locations comes forth strongly in Donna Haraway’s work, and most particularly in her concept of situated knowledges: “a doctrine of embodied objectivity” (Haraway 1991: 188). Situated knowledges suggest partial knowledge and partial vision, meaning that different gazes within the same site can produce drastically different knowledges for their subjects and objects--the sanctioned park user sees the river very differently than does the homeless person living by it, but each remains both objective and partial.. Situated knowledges,

41 through seeing from non-infinite perspectives, hold potential for disrupting the work of an all-seeing god’s-eye mode of vision and gazing.

In crafting my approach to researching with (but not about) PTH, I was inspired by thinkers who engage extensively with a core question that must haunt social science work: How do we write for academic audiences about things that happen to people we work closely with, people with whom we are joined in some kind of struggle for justice?

This question has taken flight through powerful work that thinks through knowledge- production in terms of epistemic epistemic foregrounding and backgrounding (Dotson

2017), divides in North-South knowledge production practices (Jazeel and McFarlane

2007), interstitial knowledge produced in the movement between social justice organizations and academic spaces (Oldfield 2015), the formation of interdisciplines in and outside the setting of the university (Ferguson 2012), coauthorship, friendship and translation (Nagar 2014; Nagar et al 2016), resisting the tendency for social autopsy

(Woods 2002), and engaging in deeply curious research practices that refuse to take anything for granted (Povinelli 2012; Roy 2011). Two frameworks in particular have shaped my approach to scholarly research: Accompaniment and Situated Solidarity.

In working alongside Picture the Homeless, I aimed to practice academic accompaniment as a methodology. Initially conceived as a framework to describe the work that happens where those who do not identify primarily as activists nevertheless spend large amounts of time working closely with those on the frontlines of social justice work, sharing spaces and activities, accompaniment imagines a flexibility of relation with clear acknowledgements of power and difference (Lynd 2012). Accompaniment acknowledges that the motivations and repercussions of the struggle for justice cannot

42 possibly always be similar between those occupying different positions within the work, and in fact they often diverge sharply. As much as Nikita Price and I might share a vision for a homeless-led justice movement in New York City, and as much as our ideas individually have come together to amplify and expand the work of Picture the Homeless, we do not share the same stakes and possible outcomes of our work together. Nikita, as a formerly homeless Black man, experiences specific responses from the state that differ dramatically from the treatment that I, as a white man with no personal experience of homelessness, regularly receive. This difference persists whether we encounter the state together or separately, and inevitably our different life experiences lead to conflict at times over questions both big and small. Yet accompaniment, as a framework, allows us to acknowledge and work with this difference. As described by Barbara Tomlinson and

George Lipsitz:

Accompaniment does not erase differences or suppress disagreements in the name of an artificial and premature unity. In accompaniment there are times when it will be wise to work together and times when it will be necessary to remain apart. Yet accompaniment allows disagreements to be seen as evidence of problems yet to be solved, discussions yet to be conducted, and understandings yet to be developed (Tomlinson and Lipsitz 2019: 30-31)

In addition to laying out a clear set of principles for how to do scholar-activist work in ways that productively acknowledge moments of togetherness and divergence, accompaniment also fits particularly well with an organization that believes so strongly in highlighting the image of homelessness, rather than running away from it. Within PTH’s own work, the ethos of accompaniment runs strong: Some members were only briefly homeless and never slept outside, while others have spent years on the streets. Their paths converge within PTH as they formulate shared actions and organize campaigns together, yet the impact of PTH’s work to alter the image of homelessness affects each member

43 quite differently. The presence of these narratives, and the openness and frankness with which PTH already discussed visible differences, made working with them as an accompanying traveler a clear part of my methodology.

Where accompaniment focuses most on how to work within moments of divergence, situated solidarity, first theorized by Richa Nagar and Susan Geiger (2007), came to the forefront of how I located my own approach in the many moments of work when togetherness and proximity were predominant. In their own interpretation of situated solidarity, building on their own work as scholar-activists, Paul Routledge and

Kate Derickson define it as an ethos that “works to create spaces of encounter, resource productive dialogues, and, in so doing, challenge assumptions and norms” (Routledge and Derickson 2015: 401). In the actual activities that I conducted during my period of dissertation research, I aimed to closely follow this definition of the ethos of scholar- activism as situated solidarity. For example, PTH staff and members often expressed a desire to be in closer conversation with other similar homeless-led groups around the country and internationally. Alongside other scholar-activists, I organized a gathering at the University of Minnesota (Power at the Margins, which took place in March of 2018) that utilized funding from several sources within the university to bring activists and scholars into the same room for several days, resulting in encounters that challenged the silos that such work often falls into. In the past year, much of my work at PTH has taken the form of organizing and facilitating conversations between many of the people who I came to know through my research on green infrastructure—landscape designers, architects, urban planners—and PTH members, who want to make sure that the people designing often-exclusive green urban spaces understand why they perpetuate anti-

44 homelessness, and how they might resist such impulses. These instances (along with many other more mundane activities that took places as part of fieldwork) demonstrate how I attempted to bring Routledge and Derickson’s interpretation of situated solidarity to life in my work with PTH—an effort that largely felt like a natural progression from my work as a community organizer.

But beyond bringing the resources of the academy and scholarship to bear usefully on the work of activists, what does it mean to study from the perspective of

PTH? Derickson, in her own scholar-activist work with the Gullah-Geechee nation in

South Carolina, describes the direction that this approach has taken her:

For me, it has meant a move away from ethnography all together. I take Gullah/Geechee Nation as a standpoint from which to know and arrive at a new vantage point for understanding the intersections of the state, natural resource management and racialization. I arrive at that standpoint through listening to Gullah/Geechees describe their experiences and name their challenges and desires, but I attempt to leave these narratives intact and take them as they are given to me to the degree possible (Derickson et al 2015).

I recognize much of this in my own approach, in that I spent my research putting myself in a position to know alongside PTH and from their perspective. This meant (in part) retaining an emphasis on the visual in my own analysis, and continuing to think about the impact of development on visible street homelessness, even as (at moments) my training as a geographer also impelled me to step back and think about the political, economic, and spatial hierarchies and constructions that lay behind the interventions in the built environment that we jointly found ourselves concerned with.

Yet I continue to identify this work as an “ethnography” that simply looks at a different subject than homeless people themselves. I do this for three reasons. First, the

45 literal methods that produced this dissertation—participant-observation, extensive field notes, and supplemental semi-structured interviews—mirror the components of ethnography, and particularly Burawoy’s (1998) reflexive approach to the extended case method, where knowledge is never outside of the ethnographic work itself but rather co- formed through the process. Second, I would not know about, or be able to describe accurately, the framework that I identify as “green anti-homelessness” without studying it ethnographically from the perspective of PTH. PTH’s own theories of development, while rigorous and exhaustive, must be extended beyond the immediate experience of homelessness and into the broader context of urban development not only in New York

City, but globally. To do so requires an ethnographic and relational approach that shows homelessness as the starting point, but not the ending point, of ecological development’s influence in cities. Finally, I call this an ethnography because it includes what Audra

Simpson (2014) calls ethnographic refusal, an approach that moves away from historically exploitative forms of studying difference. Simpson, writing from her location in Indigenous Studies, asks what scholarship not built on difference as the “unit of analysis” might look like, and argues that a crucial tool in creating such work is refusal:

“My notion of refusal articulates a mode of sovereign authority over the presentation of ethnographic data, and so does not present ‘everything’” (Simpson 2014: 105). My dissertation research exposed me to aspects of PTH’s work that either the organization or

I have decided are not to be written about. Even as the gaze of this ethnography falls firmly on the state, the things not written, and the differences not analyzed, became as crucial to the study as those that appear centrally within.

Practically, following this approach meant that I needed to become deeply embedded at PTH, but not as an ethnographer or invisible participant-observer—rather, as a scholar and organizer working with the organization in a position where my own ideas and experiences would have plenty of time and space to be put into conversation with ongoing campaigns and struggles. To that end, in the summer of 2016—supported by an internship fellowship from the University of Minnesota—I began working full-time at Picture the Homeless. At the time that I arrived, the neighborhood of East Harlem, where PTH’s offices are located, had just been subjected to a city-driven rezoning process, a decision that increased the density allowances and hence incentivized large- scale private developers to begin buying up lots and parcels in the neighborhood. As is often the case in moments of gentrification, homeless residents of the neighborhood— especially those who spent time on 125th St, the major east-west arterial that runs the entire width of Manhattan through East Harlem, Harlem, and Morningside Heights— began “feeling the squeeze” in the form of increased police surveillance and harassment from both those in uniform and the newer wealthy residents of the neighborhood. This

“squeeze” often took the form of what we came to call “move-along orders,” in which officers told homeless people that they had to move from a given area, even if they were not breaking any laws or violating any regulations. My first work with PTH came in direct response to this increased anti-homelessness, as I helped to organize members and other homeless New Yorkers to file a complaint with the NYC Human Rights

Commission, on the grounds that the move-along orders violated a law that PTH had helped to pass (the Community Safety Act of 2013) that made housing status protected alongside other categories such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.

That first summer of organizing, I later realized, was also fieldwork—although at the time, I barely noticed myself doing any academic work as part of my daily responsibilities. Members at PTH—many of whom I already had relationships with from my organizing days—knew that I was in school and would take time to discuss “why this all was happening” with me during meetings, or more informally as we rode the subway between actions and events. PTH is an intensely theoretical organization, so the flow of knowledge production during my fieldwork moved through writing (processes of coauthorship between members of the organization and scholars who work closely with them), regular organizing meetings where members put their knowledge and experience into strategic planning, and finally actions that push forward the organization’s agenda.

Simultaneously, I began to branch out from only locating my fieldwork with PTH, conducting interviews with policymakers and others who knew me as someone who worked with PTH but not as an academic. In such cases, I would have to explain my location—“a graduate student who also works with Picture the Homeless”—and reframe myself before their very eyes into a strange in-between position, not quite an independent outside academic but neither a fully-embedded confrontational community organizer. I found this space to be generative both for the conversations that ensued—which constituted many of my fieldwork interviews—and for the way that it allowed me to see the state apparatus from PTH’s perspective not only as an activist, but as a theorist, a hat that many of their members also proudly wear.

Learning about the state from the perspective of PTH meant attending a lot of meetings. Some of these meetings were arranged by PTH organizers as part of ongoing campaigns or coalition work; for example, as detailed in Chapter 5, we had repeated

48 meetings with the Department of Transportation (DOT) on issues surrounding both the plaza program and the automated public toilets that were supposed to be maintained in several key public spaces. At times these meetings were instigated by outside actors who very much wanted PTH to be present, either in an attempt to head off potential future antagonism (the workshop on plaza stewardship, described at length in the following chapter, falls into this category), or in an honest effort to learn more about PTH’s work and a homeless perspective (my engagement with the Urban Design Fellows, also discussed in Chapter Five, exemplifies this type of meeting). Each of these engagements revealed new perspectives for me on how outside housed actors—especially those in the business of design and urban planning—adjusted both their own images of homelessness and the built environment that they associated it with. It was this interplay, brought out in many fieldnotes, which led me to see ecological development as an overarching theme of the relationship between urban governance and the visibility of homelessness. As I developed this strain of thought in my writing and in conference presentations, I also discussed it frequently with PTH, as their own organizing work turned increasingly toward the public green spaces of the city. In this confluence, I found moments of what felt like “co-research,” where we were moving in similar directions with different outputs—writing for me, organizing for PTH—that were nevertheless completely intertwined and often inseparable.

In addition to the broad ethnographic work, I supplemented my research with several very different archival sources. In New York City, I spent time in the Parks

Department archives, located largely in a temporary structure built for the 1964 World’s

Fair in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. Here, quite removed from the places that

49 dominate popular imaginary about parks, green development, or homelessness, I viewed sets of photographs from the original construction of many of NYC’s iconic green spaces, establishing key connections between the visual framing of these projects and the homeless people directly and indirectly displaced by them. At the Center for Creative

Photography at the University of Arizona, the collection of Melissa Shook’s photographs of homeless women in the late 1980s, along with her powerful oral history transcripts, helped to further my analysis of homelessness and visuality, and gave me material besides PTH’s work to think with on homeless counter-visuality. And finally, the PTH archives themselves—some of which I have participated in myself, most of which go back far beyond my own engagement—showed a lineage of powerful homeless theorization of race, space, and development. Engagement with these archives supplemented my day-to-day participatory research and helped to deepen the connections between present day green anti-homelessness and its intellectual and geographic predecessors.

Chapter 3: ‘It’s All About the Visual:’ Picture the Homeless and the Visuality of

Homelessness

In the middle of a meeting discussing an upcoming public protest and press conference, Nikita Price, the civil-rights organizer at Picture the Homeless, grows agitated. Members of PTH, all currently or formerly homeless, are working through an

“action checklist,” a document collated from nearly 20 years of organizing experience that guides the logistics accompanying every public event put on by the organization.

Assisted by a note-taker (myself, in this moment), members assign roles: press spokespeople, police negotiators, and chant leaders. But Nikita wants to know more than roles at the upcoming event. His concern, as he emphasizes over and over, lies in what will be seen: “Where is the visual in what we’re doing right now?” When those in the room demur, he grows more insistent: “Remember, nobody believes homeless people when we tell you that something’s wrong. We need the picture. Unless people have the visual, nothing happens!”

Nikita is the longest tenured organizer at Picture the Homeless, having worked there in multiple stints since 2006. He is in his early 60s but shows no signs of slowing down; as he often says, his struggle for justice is lifelong, ever since he was named after the former leader of the USSR by his McCarthy-era blacklisted father. As a Black man growing up in segregated industrial Rochester, NY, his political consciousness was formed through the local Black Panther party in the 1970s, a worldview that he took with him into a career working in the kitchens of riverboats and high-end restaurants in New

Orleans and New York City. It was in the latter city that he became homeless in the mid-

2000s and spent time in the shelter system, through which he discovered PTH as a

51 member. A seasoned veteran of both direct action campaigns and policy work, his particular focus lies in pushing back against anti-homeless policing (or, as he prefers to put it, “I just want to chase cops, ok?”). Of all the organizers at PTH, he emphasizes the visual the most, but this practice carries forward an emphasis that existed at the beginning of PTH and indeed reflects in their name.

PTH came into existence in 1999, at the height of Giuliani-era anti-homelessness in New York City. The official story of the organization’s name reflects an already- developed political analysis by the two co-founders, Lewis Haggins and Anthony

Williams: “Anthony and Lewis knew that nothing would change until homeless people were able to shift the narrative about why folks are homeless. The name Picture the

Homeless itself is a reflection of our co-founderś analysis about how important the ways in which people “picture” homelessness results in negative public policies that actually harm homeless people” (Picture the Homeless website). But a deeper dive into the PTH archives reveals more about the particular visuality associated with this choice of name.

In the Picture the Homeless Oral History Project, an archive gathered and curated by

Lynn Lewis, PTH’s original executive director, Anthony Williams reveals more about how the name came into being:

I said, “Picture that person that you see every day. Picture what’s going on. Picture this. Picture that. Picture the Homeless. Picture the people. Understand who the people are. They’re not just a photograph or a photo op; it’s picturing the person. It’s seeing the person. It’s picturing their life. Picture the Homeless. We’re talking about actually picturing someone’s life. We’re looking; we’re talking about the inside of people, picturing that person, and you’re looking at that person.” (Lewis 2018; 31-32).

By looking ‘at’ and ‘inside’ homelessness, Williams’ account of PTH’s name origin demonstrates a visuality of resistance. This moves beyond needing a visual in order to believe homeless people, or re-setting the terms of discourse, but instead gets at the very nature of images themselves--as things that may cause harm, but also hold the capacity to see ‘inside’ in a way that might be politically generative and useful.

In this chapter, I aim to answer a seemingly simple question: Why does ‘picturing homelessness’ matter, as both a call to action from a grassroots activist group and as a geographic provocation? At its core, this question raises epistemological concerns: Why is it that those charged with ending homelessness can “know” that the solution to homelessness is housing (a seemingly logical enough proposition) yet continue to invest in solutions that instead focus on mental health, shelter provision, and, crucially, the visible spectacle of street homelessness? In some ways, this is the same question asked by Nikita Price in the anecdote that opens this chapter. But where Nikita is most concerned with the problem of proving a point from the perspective of homeless New

Yorkers, who have far less political and social capital than their interlocutors in government and policy worlds, I am interested in the structural and epistemological components of the question.

I argue that one of the most powerful epistemologies of homelessness is primarily one composed of images--the work of photography in particular--and that this way of knowing homelessness weighs heavily on the imagination of the work to address homelessness, whether that reckoning comes through policy, governance, or activism.

But activists such as PTH aim to produce a different picture--as opposed to an image-- that enables alternative ways of knowing homelessness. “Picturing” homelessness

53 becomes central because it allows for a broader view of homelessness that invites both systemic policy solutions alongside relational thinking that connects the issue of homelessness to its interrelated forms of spatial injustice. To explicate this argument, I begin by showing the importance of “picturing”--different from seeing-- as an act of visuality. I then contextualize the process of picturing as part of a long history of thought centered on the relationship between vision and knowledge. In reviewing this lineage I put theorists of the visual such as Foucault and Ranciere in conversation with work coming from urban geographies of homelessness: Neil Smith, Rosalyn Deutsche, and

Craig Willse, among others. Having established the theoretical framing to show how visual understandings of homelessness shift overtime but remain central to its political economy, I then deploy evidence from my fieldwork to show how contemporary New

York City spends significant financial and political resources in their attempt to contain the sight of homelessness. PTH’s own response to these conditions demonstrates their theory of change, which I show mobilizes “picturing” through acts of counter-visuality both through actions, organizing, and online interventions. Finally, I then use some of my own visual analysis to explore how iconic and non-iconic images of homelessness become pathways to knowledge about homelessness, showing examples that both reinforce and resist harmful epistemologies.

From “Seeing” to “Picturing:” The Importance of the Image in Homelessness

Chapter One illustrated the importance of images of homelessness--captured primarily through photography--in the historical and environmental trajectory of homelessness in New York City. The popular imaginaries of homelessness that hold sway in broader discourse come into being based on a combination of individual

54 practices of “seeing” and collective acts of “picturing.” But it is the act of “picturing” through photography that allows for images to jump scale and become stereotypes, in an act that has particular ramifications for marginalized populations. As Caitlin Cahill observes from her own participatory research with youth on the Lower East Side, “If stereotypes of the underclass and risk travel widely, distributed and produced at national and even global scales, they are also experienced as viscerally local and intensely”

(Cahill 2016: 335). PTH’s focus on the visual responds to this local and visceral effect of the stereotypical image of marginality. While this may seem contradictory for a radical homeless organization concerned with material needs such as housing and policing to be so focused on the visual, PTH’s unusual approach aims to reframe the visual from

“seeing” (imagination, less material) to “picturing” (the material outcome of seeing). In relying on “picturing” rather than “seeing” homelessness, PTH deliberately manipulates the traditional gaze that disempowers and subjectifies: As bell hooks writes, “Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that contain it that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency” (hooks 1992: 116).

To understand the role of the visual, we have to think about moving from the

“gaze” or the “look” to the act of “picturing” through photography. This movement is why I discuss homelessness in the frame of visuality, rather than vision: as Nicholas

Mirzoeff puts it, “Visuality is very much to do with picturing and nothing to do with vision, if by vision we understand how an individual person registers visual sensory impressions” (Mirzoeff 2006: 67). Visuality itself, which, following Rose (2012) and

Foster (1988), I define as the set of practices and technologies that construct vision, relies

55 on technologies such as photography to enact picturing. The images produced by photography, including those considered journalistic and documentary (understood to directly reflect the reality of the person behind the camera lens, or to capture a moment and a place of wider importance) and those marked as artistry (meaning they are read in attempts to create meaning that moves beyond the direct representation of either daily or extraordinary events) themselves hold a crucial site of analysis.

The story of how photography and acts of picturing do violence by creating visual markers of marginality runs directly through the story of homelessness in the United

States. Tim Cresswell, in his extensive survey of the history of the photography of tramps

(who we would now understand as single, white homeless men) succinctly notes that “the history of documentary photography is one that makes marginality central” (Cresswell

2001: 173). Tramps, vagrants, and other impoverished and unrooted populations were, as

Cresswell demonstrates, some of the first subjects of the genre of documentary photography. Nobody demonstrated the consequences of this close relationship better than Jacob Riis, the Danish-American social reformer whose images were so influential in turn-of-the-century New York. Riis’ positioning of the camera highlighted both the darkness of the surroundings--a darkness long linked with poverty in the history of documentary photography--and the abjection of his subjects, with homeless New Yorkers usually positioned downwards of the camera lens (Cresswell 2001: 179). But it was only through the “discovery” of an early form of flash photography--and a dangerous one at that, with the photographer and his cronies setting fire to the dwellings of the people he photographed on at least one occasion--that Riis was able to illuminate his often- unwilling subjects’ lives for all to see (Leviatin 1996: 4).

Riis’ subjects frequently appear sitting in a dark dingy room, framed by walls with peeling paint. Alternately, we see repeated shots of children huddled above a metal grate, a shaft of light making especially solid the concrete barriers which frame the image. Absent their contextualizing notes, Riis’ photographs could be read as sympathetic portrayals of hardworking immigrants struggling to find decent housing, but his own writing puts paid to such a positive spin. Instead, Riis positioned his images as a wake-up call to city government to essentially disappear those who offend through looking unclean or untidy: “One may be permitted to hope that an era of better sense is dawning that shall witness a rescue work upon lines which, when the leaven has fairly had time to work, will put an end to the existence of the New York Street Arab, of the native breed at least” (Riis 1996: 197). Riis’ photographs, as his explanation makes quite clear, were produced with the intent to create visibility of something he believed to be invisible--the poor conditions in which recent immigrants to New York City lived and worked--with the goal of such images persuading the state to take remedial action that would end in the disappearance of such people (rather than the improvement of their conditions). This logic went on to underpin the three major eras of urban planning that followed, each carrying a particular spin on this visual logic of appearance for the purposes of disappearance: Urban renewal, planned shrinkage, and revanchism. In each of these eras, the kind of images produced by Riis reappear in ways that show their power: They can be mobilized, seemingly at will, to justify urban development that overrides the visual presence of destitution.

During the era of urban renewal, which began toward the end of the New Deal and continued into the mid-1960s, areas understood as blighted became targeted for

57 redevelopment. The outcomes for these areas represented different sides of the coin of destruction: Some neighborhoods, such as the area of Manhattan known then as San Juan

Hill, were destroyed to create new cultural institutions (in that case, Lincoln Center), while others, most famously the East Tremont neighborhood of the Bronx, met their end in the service of highways. Robert Moses, the planning mastermind behind urban renewal in New York City, mobilized photographs with abandon as a means to document the dereliction, and thus the readiness for “renewal,” of these areas (Caro 1973; Zipp 2010).

While Moses generally understood himself to be above public opinion (and, for a time, events proved him right) he still wanted to refigure the imagination of these neighborhoods: accordingly, to contrast the photographs of crowded slums that newspapers happily propagated as the “before” images, he produced his own “glossy brochure with Mondrian-like graphics on the cover, detailing seven major clearance projects in the works and plans for many more” (Flint 2009: 55). By using photographs to highlight the gap between current images of tenement housing (crowded, primarily for people of color, dense and dangerous) and his future renderings (open, spacious, largely white), Moses successfully created an image of urban renewal that helped to justify (at least for some) his callous displacement programs.

In the years following urban renewal, during the city’s fiscal crisis of the mid-

1970s, urban disinvestment hit low-income communities of color hard across the city, particularly in the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn. This gave rise to a planning agenda of what Roger Starr, at the time the city’s HPD chair, called “planned shrinkage”-

-essentially an organized program of state abandonment, in which the most troubled neighborhoods were to be gradually turned back to the land (Wallace and Wallace 1998).

During this time period (memorialized by Spike Lee in the film Summer of Sam) rising crime rates and a racialized discourse rendered these areas, and in particular the South

Bronx, as “dangerous” in public perception. Images became a crucial part of this imaginary, in particular pictures of burnt-out buildings and empty, ruined streets, a visual discourse that would later spread to Detroit in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis

(Kinney 2016). Conversely, these images also became partly responsible for the eventual reinvestment into the neighborhood; when President Jimmy Carter visited in 1977, photographs of him walking amidst the rubble became iconic and facilitated a rush of investment back to the area (Chronopoulos 2017).

If the previous two eras of development in New York diverged slightly from Riis in their visual regimes, this difference came in their focus on the built environment over images of actual people. The tactic of focusing on individuals, however, came roaring back during the era of revanchism, which began in the mid-1980s during the re- emergence of visible homelessness but reached its zenith during the 1990s and the mayoral administration of Rudolph Giuliani. As documented by many thinkers of the era, the visibility of homeless people, and the photographs of them propagated by tabloid outlets (especially the New York Post and the Daily News, who regularly competed with each other for the most brutally anti-homeless articles and editorials), became the key political image of New York City in the 1990s (Smith 1996; Smith 1998; Deutsche 1996;

Kawash 1998; Rosler 1991). The photography of revanchism was fully expressed through images depicting homeless people (nearly all of them Black) as alternately dangerous squeegee-men, desperately hopeless cases of mental illness, violent scourges upon housed society, and invaders of the city. As seen in the image below, it is no wonder that

59 in this environment, PTH formed under its original call to overturn the dominant imaginary of homelessness.

Fig. 3.1: What we’re up against: Bulletin board at PTH’s office. Photograph by author.

Contemporary homeless photography, such as the photographs featured previously, are but the latest manifestation of a long tradition of photography that leads everyone ranging from “social reformers” such as Riis, to professional anthropologists such as Philippe Bourgois (author of the visual ethnography Righteous Dopefiend), to active anti-homeless forces such as the SBA (the impetus behind the previously-

60 discussed Peek-A-Boo campaign), in search of the homeless to occupy their images. Like

Riis’ work, these other efforts cast homeless people downwards at the mercy of the lens, so that those taking the pictures might say something else about an urban environment-- that it’s unsafe, unclean, in need of attention. Photography has remained the weapon of choice for this effort, despite the onset of more “advanced” technologies, perhaps due to this continuity itself; if the SBA, as they implied, saw themselves as continuing a

Giuliani-esque tradition of “weeding out the bad guys,” it follows that they chose the camera, which was weaponized against homeless people throughout the heyday of revanchism in the 1990s (Deutsche 1996). In turn, the feverish anti-homeless tabloids of that era themselves built upon a previous two decades of images that designated particular parts of the city as dangerous and unsafe, a visual blight often associated with the presence of people who would eventually become known as homeless (Edwards

2012). Following these connections allow us to trace a genealogy of anti-homeless photography that connects Jacob Riis and documentary photography with present-day campaigns of hypervisibility such as “Peek-A-Boo.”

In other contexts, similar photographic traditions prevail, where visibly marginalized people become the center of the visual frame in order that their photographers might eventually imagine a city without them. Sometimes, photography itself is not the technology by which homelessness and marginality is captured and seen repeatedly. For example, Asher Ghertner (2015) describes the imagery of informal dwellings, reproduced through the discourse of “nuisance talk,” always described as both unsightly and unsanitary, as central to the process of citymaking in Delhi. Without the imagery of such sights, he argues, citymaking would lose its urgency and therefore much

61 of its political power: in other words, these images of a world-class city produce “a shared mode of aesthetic engagement with mutually recognizable visual markers of order and disorder” which then gives the state power in its role as resettler, disrupter, and destroyer of marginal living spaces (Ghertner 2015: 7). In the United States context, both

Cresswell and Susan Schweik (2009) argue that visual urban marginality, which they explore through the lenses of vagrancy and disability respectively, took form through laws and policies that focused on distinguishing the personhood associated with

“unsightliness.” Nor does the response to these images stop with legal mechanisms; as demonstrated in studies across North America, the sight of visible homelessness, particularly through squatters’ camps and other informal living arrangements, seems to draw development like a magnet, with both state and private capital locating such areas as vacuums for projects ranging from parks to airports to shopping centers (Kerr 2011;

Goldfischer 2019a; Hopper 2003). Such similar arrangements can also be seen in the

Global South, where camps become targeted for either removal or forced “upgrades,” each resulting in disappearance (Doshi 2013, Rolnik 2019). In each of these contexts, the act of picturing remains crucial to the process of displacement. It takes different forms and produces different geographies, but remains an important part of displacement across contexts.

Seeing and Knowing Homelessness

Michel Foucault, in The Birth of the Clinic, tells us that “visible forms take root in the invisible.” (Foucault 1973: 91). This observation, rooted in Foucault’s study of the institutionalization of the medical apparatus through the clinic, aptly summarizes the history of homeless visuality discussed above: Pictures of homeless people and other

62 visibly-marginalized city-dwellers serve to bring out the invisible so that it might be regulated and therefore moved according to the priorities of the state and private capital.

These images lead to particular kinds of regulation, many of which share another

Foucauldian premise: As Craig Willse (2015) has clearly demonstrated, the management of homeless populations through systems such as shelter, transitional housing, and street outreach enact biopolitical governance. Where Willse’s focus lies with these institutions,

I diverge slightly to think about how images and visions of homelessness make such management of surplus life even possible in the first place. This concern ties directly back to my initial question: If housing is the solution to homelessness, how is it that New

York City (along with nearly all North American cities) has instead made the management of homeless visibility its priority?

Foucault suggests a close, but not quite exact, relationship between seeing and knowing: He suggests that it is a “speaking eye,” an eye that combines the power of images with the language of discourse that connects knowledge and visuality (Foucault

1973: 115). Jacques Ranciere, in his work on politics and aesthetics, is even more circumspect, suggesting that “There is no straightforward road from the fact of looking at a spectacle to the fact of understanding the world” (Ranciere 2010: 75). Foucault, often noted for his geographic theories of knowledge, power, and vision (Philo 2000; Wright et al 2018), never argues for a direct connection between the three, but rather for their association through “everyday vision” (Foucault 1973: 166). Essentially, then, for these two postmodern thinkers, vision itself acts as a mediator that prevents a direct connection between seeing something and knowing something about it.

Yet the history of homeless images presented above, alongside Picture the

Homeless’ own theory of change (discussed in depth shortly), suggests that a strong connection does exist between harmful images of homeless people and the city’s failed policies that attempt to disappear the presence of homelessness through massive shelter creation and various policing tactics. We can follow this thread best by remembering the stated goal of Jacob Riis’ photography--using technology to make visible the very thing he aimed to disappear. At its root, we can understand this tactic as participating in what

Ranciere calls the partition of the sensible:

A partition of the sensible refers to the manner in which a relation between a shared common and the distribution of exclusive parts is determined in sensory experience. This latter form of distribution, which, by its sensory self-evidence, anticipates the distribution of part and shares, itself presupposes a distribution of what is visible and what not, of what can be heard and what cannot. (Ranciere 2010: 44).

The sight of homelessness in public urban space presents a perfect site of analysis through which to work the meaning of the partition of the sensible. The sensory experience of seeing homelessness creates a sharp divide in public spaces: those using the space for recreation or commerce (the official intentions behind the design of such areas) and those using it for life-sustaining purposes such as rest, bodily wellness and cleaning, storage of important belongings, and eating and drinking. As we shall see in a later chapter, these visible differences in the uses of public space both delineate homelessness and prefigure some of the state’s responses to it through green infrastructure as a site of disappearance.

Revanchism, or don’t look now?

In the 1990s, Neil Smith theorized revanchism as essentially a geographic technology for disappearing the sight of visible poverty, homelessness, and racial difference. The technology that made revanchism possible--the tactic of Broken

Windows Policing, concocted by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling-- relied on the codification of visible homelessness as a site of disorder and danger, therefore making it inextricably connected to the “quality of life crimes” such as public urination, sleeping in public, loitering, and the ever-vague ‘disorderly conduct.’ (Smith

1996; Smith 1998; Mitchell 2003; Vitale 2008; Camp and Heatherton 2016). As Rosalyn

Deutsche observed, in her work on the visual politics of New York City during this era, the transformation of homelessness from the realm of charity to the world of criminology had a particular impact on urban development:

By subsuming all of New York’s social ills under the category of crime, the rationale for revitalization reproduces and heightens the problems of poverty, homelessness, and unemployment. Simultaneously, it attempts to eradicate their visible manifestations (Deutsche 1996: 32).

Disappearance, in other words, is not simply about disappearance under revanchism, but always serves to pave the way for development by broadening the definition of spaces in need of revitalization. Here, of course, the logic of the previous visual regimes of development (urban renewal and planned shrinkage) remains strong. But it is worth noting the central fusion that revanchism produced between an epistemological and an ontological tension at the intersection of homelessness and development: just as Smith notes that the desire to “not see” homelessness and poverty remains central to efforts to invisibilize homeless people, so too does material urban development depend on the sight of homelessness in order to make its justification. In other words, following Deutsche

(and Daniel Kerr, who makes the same argument but using a historical case study of mid-

20th century Cleveland), urban development and revanchist visible cleansing of homelessness are completely twinned.

In the aftermath of the particular brutality of the Giuliani regime in New York

(and the hyper-revanchist administrations that mirrored it around the country), geographers and other urban thinkers wondered whether revanchism remained an accurate framework for ongoing anti-homelessness and racialized displacement in both public and private cityscapes. Frameworks of neoliberal urbanism (Brenner and Theodore

2002) suggested a softer (yet equally nefarious) form of anti-homelessness in which the movement of private capital through public-private partnerships became the main displacing force in public space (Miller 2007). The focus of much of this scholarship turned to thinking about the non-police interactions between street homeless people and the state. But the importance of the image of homelessness remained in this work. For instance, Del Casino and Jocoy (2008) argued that the emphasis on “chronic” homelessness during the George W. Bush administration (2000-2008), while presented under a passionate veneer of helping those who had been on the streets the longest first, represented an instance in which “historical representations of being homeless—as incapable, lazy, deviant, parasitic, diseased, etc...are being tied to recent neoliberal representations of citizenship, productivity, and accountability” (Del Casino and Jocoy

2008: 192). Meanwhile, Stacey Murphy’s description of the “post-revanchist” geographies of homelessness in San Francisco, in which the city’s visibility management strategy has turned from revanchism to a purported compassionate social welfare, hinges on the separation of the “hidden homeless” from those deemed more visibly in need of

66 emergency shelters (Murphy 2009)--a haunting prelude to the current hypervisible homelesness that has exploded in the wave of further land speculation.

The central theme, then, remains the visibility of homelessness--for cities, how to manage that visibility, and for people experiencing homelessness, how to both utilize and avoid becoming visible as homeless in strategic ways. Ranciere’s formulation of the

‘order of the police’ becomes incredibly helpful in theorizing a fraught homeless visibility. Recall that Ranciere’s partition of the sensible (discussed previously) rests largely on his idea of politics as the ability to intervene into the realm of the “visible and the sayable” (Ranciere 2010: 45). The ability, therefore, for homeless activists such as

Picture the Homeless to make a dent in the partition of the sensible--and therefore intervene in the dominant epistemology of homelessness--depends entirely on their movement out of and away from what Ranciere called “the part of those who have no part” (Ranciere 2010:44). As Kate Derickson has argued, the most important subjects of

Ranciere’s distinction are those whose positions in the city lie exactly where the order of the police tells us not to look: “Those whose identities, demands and material circumstances cannot be legible in a given order of the sensible are, for Ranciere, the privileged subjects of politics – they are the ‘part of those that have no part’” (Derickson

2017: 45). In setting up the order of the “police” as against the work of “politics,”

Ranciere makes a critical argument about the aesthetic relationship between these two forces: “It [the police] consists, before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or rather what there is not, and its slogan is: ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’ The police is that which says that here, on this street, there’s nothing to see and so is nothing but the space of circulation. Politics, by contrast, consists in transforming this

67 space of ‘moving along,’ of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens” (Ranciere 2010: 45).

Here we see a fundamental incommensurability between Smith’s revanchism and

Ranciere’s poststructuralist politics and police orders. For Smith, images of homelessness and other forms of urban disorder become highlighted, and have attention called to them, in order to pave the way for capitalist development and displacement. But for Ranciere, the role of the order of the police--which includes not just the literal police, but all forms of governance dedicated to maintaining the order of the day--works to divert attention away from visible marginalization. Both of these approaches would then have separate answers to the question posed earlier, as to how the city continues to invest in shelter and outreach instead of actual housing. Smith would argue that the city aims to create a political economy of shelter that feeds into rampant real estate development, and that in order to do so they call attention to homelessness as a pathological and social, rather than economic, problem--a convincing argument that has spawned strong currency within recent debates (c.f. Hennigan 2018, Mitchell 2017). Ranciere would more likely suggest that the state actually aims to normalize homelessness through its hypervisibility, so that at some point there may be “nothing to see there.” This argument has also been taken up through literature that engages the biopolitics of homeless governance (Willse 2015;

Lancione 2014). So which is it?

The evidence in my fieldwork suggests that above all, an epistemology of homelessness reigns that both enables development at a frenetic pace through denying the connection between homelessness and the luxury city, while simultaneously working to divert the eyes of New Yorkers away from the highly visible crisis. As will be discussed

68 in further detail in later chapters, urban landscape designers working to create new and renewed public spaces in New York explicitly stated that much of their design process focuses on mitigating, rather than disappearing, the presence of homeless people. But these interventions do not only occur at the level of the built environment. We can also see this flawed epistemology of homelessness at play at high-level city policy, through which the priorities of multiple layers of governance become clear: Visual mitigation, not housing provision.

How NYC Values the Visual of Homelessness

A recent policy shift demonstrates the visual hierarchy of homeless governance quite clearly. For the duration of his administration, Mayor Bill de Blasio has received harsh criticism from housing and homelessness advocates--both PTH and more mainstream organizations--over his handling of homelessness, which has seen the shelter population grow by over 25% since he took office in 2013 while the city’s total homelessness count rapidly approaches 70,000 (Splvack 2019, Blint-Welsh 2019). In response, the mayor has rolled out a series of initiatives--yet none of these efforts do anything to address the root cause of homelessness: a lack of feasible, accessible, low- income housing. Instead, these programs largely focus on mitigating the visibility of homelessness.

First, the administration created HOMESTAT, an algorithmic system modeled off of the NYPD’s COMPSTAT, the computerized crime-tracking system that provided the logistical support for broken-windows policing and the hyper-surveillance of people of color (Vitale and Jefferson 2016). HOMESTAT tracks encounters between homeless

New Yorkers and outreach workers, while also incorporating data from the city’s 311 system, the non-emergency hotline that anyone can use to “report” the presence of a homeless person, either an individual who “needs help” or an organized encampment. In tracking these encounters, HOMESTAT then uses an algorithm to tell both homeless outreach workers and NYPD officers where to focus their own interactions with homeless people. In doing so, it contributes to what Virginia Eubanks calls the process of “red- flagging:”

Marginalized groups face higher levels of data collection when they access public benefits, walk through highly policed neighborhoods, enter the health-care system, or cross national borders. That data acts to reinforce their marginality when it is used to target them for suspicion and extra scrutiny. Those groups seen as undeserving are singled out for punitive public policy and more intense surveillance, and the cycle begins again. It is a kind of collective red-flagging, a feedback loop of injustice (Eubanks 2018: 6-7).

HOMESTAT has never purported to be about helping street homeless people find housing. Instead, it forms part of what Eubanks calls the “digital poorhouse:” A suite of algorithmic digital tools that work to manage, rather than ameliorate, poverty (Eubanks

2018: 12). And in keeping with this role, HOMESTAT’s focus is on managing the visibility of homelessness through tracking encounters, where it could instead be used to ask homeless New Yorkers for more information about their actual housing needs.

Outreach workers, as the front-line staff of this system, have become the pawns in de Blaiso’s obsession with the visibility of homelessness, and as such are put in an impossible position. They know that offering the same inadequate services to the same people will go nowhere: in a bold and unusual move, an anonymous group of outreach workers came together to pen an article in Gothamist upbraiding the mayor for his focus

70 on outreach instead of providing legitimate housing (Outreach Workers 2019). As one former outreach worker told me in an interview:

I walk past a woman now every day in the financial district, and she was still there back then [when I worked in homeless outreach]. And she’s still there because none of the things that I or anyone else could offer her--temporary shelter, a case manager, a diagnosis--are anything like what she needs, which is housing (Interview F 2018).

While they work directly for one of the nine nonprofit providers that hold the city contracts to do outreach across the five boroughs, outreach workers are also subject to the whims of changing DHS policies and technologies. As such, the implementation of

HOMESTAT caused many outreach workers to be called away from their usual rounds anytime the system detected a spike in activity for a particular area. For instance, an outreach worker attempting to build relationships with people on the Upper West Side could suddenly be whisked away to a round in Midtown, and thus lose any semblance of trust with previous clients (Interview F 2018).

Perhaps the policy most illustrative of this dual visual epistemology--of both managing the sight of homelessness without providing housing while trying to normalize its presence--is the murky DHS sightings policy. While not officially defined by either

DHS or any of their contracted outreach providers, it is well known amongst street homeless New Yorkers that outreach workers need to see people a certain number of times--usually between 3 and 6, but sometimes more--and mark them as visibly homeless before they can offer official services such as case management and transitional housing.

This policy--discovered through extensive informal outreach by Human NYC, a new organization working to create reform within the homeless outreach system--relies heavily on a visual epistemology of looking homeless:

As they describe it to us, the “sightings” process requires them to be seen, often times with stipulations requiring them to be in the same spot or bedded down with their belongings, a certain number of times by outreach teams. After completing the “sightings” process, people expect to move forward one way or another in the “street-to-home” process that would help them secure housing (Human NYC 2020: 1).

Forcing street homeless New Yorkers to essentially prove their status through multiple encounters with outreach workers serves to reify their indelible presence in the landscape.

Again, this kind of action does nothing to end homelessness, but does everything to ensure that the focus of policy remains on the visibility of homelessness, even as it reinstantiates said visibility.

Finally, driven perhaps to desperation in their final years of power, the de Blasio administration has consolidated their obsession with visible homelessness into two initiatives: a Joint Command Center (JCC) and Outreach NYC, a program that essentially turns a wide swatch of city employees into mandatory reporters of visible homelessness.

Based in-part on a panic over the sight of homelessness on the city’s subway system, and created in conjunction with an aptly-named “homeless diversion pilot” (Goldfischer

2019a), the advent of the Joint Command Center allows nearly any city office with any stake in managing homelessness--outreach teams, NYPD, transit police, Department of

Mental Health and Hygiene, and of course DHS--to access live video, streamed 24/7, of several key areas within the subway system (NYC Mayor’s Office 2019b). At the JCC, officials then direct outreach workers and police to certain areas and even to individuals based on what they see on camera. It is a panopticon to make Foucault proud, and a surveillance system that even the city itself refers to as the “eye in the sky” (NYC

Mayor’s Office 2019a). And in its role as such, it surveills homeless people, using the

72 data generated through HOMESTAT and the sightings process, while gathering more data and creating more situations for the criminalization of homelessness.

Where the JCC seems designed to continue the logic of revanchism, the invention of Outreach NYC instead points to the overall trend in homeless policy, towards visual mitigation, the epitome of Ranciere’s order of the police. By turning 18,000 new city employees into mandatory homeless outreach reporters, and asking them to call 311 or submit a service request to create more data every time they encounter a visibly homeless person, the mayor has effectively freed the rest of the city to go about its business with homelessness as sight-unseen. That is, if all of these employees handle their new duties, housed New Yorkers need not worry about the sight of homelessness--it becomes normalized, part of bureaucratic duty, the same as potholes or litter. In other words, a visible inevitability. Crucially, the Parks Department, with 1,100 new employees now expected to report the sight of homelessness, represents the largest departmental contribution to Outreach NYC (NYC Mayor’s Office 2019b). This designation tells us that the city understands the new frontier of homelessness to take place within the realm of green development, a topic we will return to in the next chapter.

All in all, these interlocking engagements demonstrate that only people who have never experienced homelessness would craft such policies. The stubborn insistence of the city to focus on visible street homelessness, and to do so in ways that reify its visual discourse while simultaneously doing nothing to actually alter the production of homelessness, shows a deep unwillingness to listen to, see, or trust the stories and experiences of homeless people themselves. In short, homeless knowledge remains locked out of policymaking. In what follows, I show how Picture the Homeless,

73 alongside their allied groups, attempt to shift this situation through an organizing approach that relies on a highly visual theory of change.

The use of visuality at Picture the Homeless

The act of “picturing the homeless” has historically done much work at PTH itself. As

Lewis notes in her powerful oral history, the image of the two co-founders and their own use of the idea of seeing homeless people as key to political struggle remained central over the interceding two decades:

Picturing Anthony and Lewis as social justice leaders is an invitation by PTH to see both homeless people and the systems they intersect with through their eyes. It is an invitation specifically to other homeless folks to stand up for their rights, just as Anthony and Lewis did. The invitation extends to all community members, to picture the homeless differently. (Lewis 2018: 46).

The role of this act of “picturing” the “homeless” brings race into clearer focus within

PTH’s analysis. Lewis sees it as central, noting that for many of PTH’s longtime members, nearly all of whom are Black, “PTH’s use of representation and visuality…resulted in race being at the core of PTH’s analysis” (Lewis 2018: 47). My experience at PTH over the years bears this out, especially in my work with PTH’s civil rights campaigns, where, as noted above, the importance of visuality has its strongest defender in the organization.

For example, in the summer of 2018, when beginning a campaign called

“#FreeToPee” that focused on increasing access to public bathrooms across the city, members and staff quickly realized the central role played by officer discretion in who got tickets for public urination, and where those tickets were handed out. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of such interactions occurred in majority Black and Hispanic

74 neighborhoods, including East Harlem itself (Mulligan et al 2019). We then spent a whole meeting crafting a messaging strategy around who benefits from the lack of public bathrooms, which then allowed members to directly confront the commissioner of DOT about the role of race in the struggle for homeless survival: When the commissioner claimed, with a wry smile, that “DOT isn’t really in the bathroom business,” she was met with a sharp rejoinder: “Oh, so then are you in the business of creating race-based discrimination in public space?” (Meeting A 2018).

Another crucial reason that picturing homelessness has remained part of PTH’s theory of change lies in its ability to directly address injustice in two crucial ways: through responding to the ongoing dehumanization that homeless people experience every day from the sharp gaze of the public/housed eye, and in framing the harmful visuality of homelessness as something that cannot be separated from material injustices such as anti-homeless policing practices and housing speculation. Stories of individual members in the PTH archives demonstrate the power of friendly eye-contact and basic respect in letting people know that the office was a safe space, and that organizing practices could act as a remedy to the “disregard in the eyes of people in public spaces who refuse to physically come near them or even make eye contact.” (Lewis 2018: 51).

But it also remains the case that this behavior—fear, disgust, and sometimes even abject terror of homeless people—is rooted in racialized laws that produce homelessness as the terrifying opposite of both property and citizenship (Blomley 2009; Kawash 1998). In particular, PTH has always been fascinated by the evolution of what Susan Schweik

(2009) writes about as the “ugly laws.” These laws, which criminalized “unsightly” appearances, largely arose in the late 19th century at the level of municipalities in the

United States, and, while ostensibly aimed at controlling the movements of people with disabilities and “vagrants” who were seen to capitalize on physical deformity through panhandling, also intersected with an enormous array of crucial political moments, from the US invasion of the Philippines to racialized and gendered ideas of domestic labor.

PTH argues that their members regularly face the contemporary equivalent of the ugly laws: “move-along” orders designed to target people who ‘look homeless,” destruction of property and personal belongings of anyone who lacks private space, the ‘sightings’ policy that ties street homeless people to particular places in order to receive services, and so many more. Because anti-homelessness itself is so bound to the visual, they argue, the response must be equally visually-oriented, but in a positive, rather than punitive, approach.

PTH’s theory of change relies on producing counter-visuality. Along with feminist geovisualization and other praxis components of what Katz (1996) called “minor theory,” counter-visuality calls the viewers’ attention to the negative space, to invisibilities, and to the things normally not considered part of the visual frame (Azoulay

2015; Hochberg 2015; Mirzoeff 2011; Schept 2014). And like counter-mapping, it becomes realized through empirical political practice that goes hand-in-hand with the retheorizing and re-imagining that helps create different images and ways of seeing

(Maharawal and McElroy 2017). This means working directly against Ranciere’s previously discussed “order of the police”—the tendency to divert attention and eyes away from the root cause of injustice by assuring people that there’s “nothing to see here.” In fact, PTH has protocol on both responding to harmful images and producing their own images. To produce these images means a political alignment with other

76 grassroots social justice groups who don’t necessarily focus on homelessness, instead of working within “the system” of shelters and service providers, where homeless people are not members but rather clients. Like many similar groups, PTH takes to heart the need to reflect structural change in everyday practices: as Dean Spade so wonderfully puts it, these practices “can’t be something we come back for later” (Spade 2015: 37).

These commitments led to a relatively non-hierarchical membership structure that shares much with liberation movements around the world, in which those most impacted by an issue--in this case, homelessness--take ownership over decision-making structures and organizing practices (Horton and Freire 1990). In the image below, I map out how

PTH’s internal structure functions on a basic level:

Fig 3.2. PTH’s Structure.

Members of PTH come from a range of experiences of homelessness. Some have only briefly been homeless, and never unsheltered; in fact, several PTH members who came to the organization during my time there didn’t even know their housing situations of couch-hopping or doubling up with family members counted as homelessness until they became involved with the organization. On the other end of the spectrum, some members of PTH have been unsheltered, or street homeless, for well over a decade. Other members, perhaps the general majority, have been in and out of the city’s shelter system multiple times, a situation that gives them more knowledge of the shelter-industrial complex than most administrators (and certainly more than policymakers).

This experience and organic knowledge is central to the organization because of their insistence that homeless people ought to be the experts on homelessness. Not simply a point of pride or maneuvering, this claim comes with an implication well understood by members: Homeless New Yorkers, shut out of decision-making processes, become the subjects of a system that sees them as, at best, clients, and at worst, units from which profit may be extracted (Picture the Homeless 2017). This is where “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu” becomes very powerful, a mechanism for survival more than simply a nifty slogan. But for homeless New Yorkers, meaningful representation in decision-making spaces goes far beyond simply calling up the Department of Homeless

Services (DHS) or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to demand inclusion in meetings. And for PTH, while loud public protest often works as an effective tool (coupled with well-placed media attention, made possible through years of carefully-cultivated relationships with journalists), simply camping out in front of NYPD headquarters or staging a sleep-out on a plot of land being sold to developers, while

78 effective tactics, cannot exist on their own or in a vacuum. Instead, the work that PTH does to make these tactics work in concert with one another boils down to a project of knowledge creation: Starting with what members know based on their own shared experiences and dissecting, analyzing, and amplifying that knowledge until it becomes organizational knowledge, shared by all members at PTH no matter their level of engagement or personal experience. In other words, PTH creates a narrative together, a discourse that can then fuel an organizing campaign as it moves through its different stages, and makes up a broader theory of change.

Fig. 3.3: PTH’s theory of change.

In the above model, the blue triangles represent the regular points of action undertaken at

PTH, while the green squares show the intended outcomes from each set of actions.

Popular education encompasses a range of activities that themselves are rooted in the

79 popular education cycle (developed by Paulo Freire) that attempt to help individuals experiencing a specific form of oppression to understand their individual experience in conjunction with others and in the context of a broader system such as racial capitalism.

While much of this work happens internally and is geared towards newer PTH members, popular education also takes place aimed at the broader public, because its goal--helping people see homelessness systemically, rather than as an isolated individual or broadly pathological problem--applies not just to homeless people but to all New Yorkers.

Homeless-led community organizing, the next step in this model, represents the range of activities that grow out of popular education and are more action-focused: Press conferences, forming productive relationships with allied organizations and (sometimes) legislators, actions such as sit-ins or takeovers that reconfigure public space while dramatically calling attention to PTH’s view of a given issue, and so on. This mirrors most standard iterations of community organizing in New York City in plenty of ways, but differs, again, in its leadership and therefore the standpoint epistemology that it epitomizes. There are several groups that do similar organizing work around similar issues, but none of them explicitly focus on producing homeless knowledge in the way that PTH does. Homeless knowledge is produced through reports, which are largely created using a critical participatory action research approach (Fine 2015). This methodology (abbreviated as CPAR), which allows members to work from what they already know based on experience to deepen that knowledge using surveys, ethnographic observation, and other easily accessible tools. These reports--chief among them Banking on Vacancy (2011, an examination of all the vacant land and buildings in NYC that could easily house more than double the number of homeless New Yorkers) and The Business

80 of Homelessness (2017, studying the political economy of the city’s shelter system and how money gets generated for large non-profit providers through keeping people in shelters)--have been extremely impactful, leading to policy change and becoming used as evidence by progressive policymakers to support useful legislation (much of which also is drafted by PTH members).

Producing homeless knowledge, PTH argues, remains necessary before meaningful policy changes and legislative victories can be won. This means that they cannot put out fires as quickly, perhaps, as other groups who are willing to have an organizer make unilateral decisions in pressing moments of crisis. But it does mean that the legislative efforts that they put their shoulder into strongly have potential for lasting transformational impact. Such policy changes, such as the introduction of the Community

Safety Act in 2013 (created in collaboration with Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition that PTH helped to found), the Housing Not Warehousing Act of 2018, and the end of the city’s cluster site shelter policy (which had paid private landlords above- market rates to transform rent stabilized apartments into shelter units), all focused on directly combating anti-homelessness. They also created more opportunities for PTH to then organize directly to abolish the conditions that produce homelessness in the first place--the privatization of low-income housing, inability of homeless and low-income

New Yorkers to control their own land, and the prioritization of temporary shelter over permanent housing. Passing such legislation gave PTH members and staff windows to think about and attempt to enact alternative futures, such as the East Harlem Community

Land Trust, the city’s first CLT focused explicitly on homelessness.

Baked into all of this--and represented in the last green box in the model--is

PTH’s belief, reiterated several times already in this study, that material conditions cannot change until images of homelessness shift in a politically productive and liberating direction. To explore this more in-depth, I synthesized many of my fieldnotes and observations into an argument that PTH makes about their work. These are, of course, my words, but as evidenced below, each of my formulations draws heavily on

PTH’s own words and actions.

The argument, then, goes as follows for PTH:

1) Material conditions of anti-homelessness won’t change unless acts of

picturing also shift away from criminalization and toward structural causes of

homelessness

2) To create this shift, we have to produce a counter-visuality that operates at

two interlocking scales: the political (expressed through the image protocol) and

the everyday lives of homeless folks (expressed through recognition and being

seen as fully human)

3) Homeless-led community organizing can fuse these two practices, using

images both as “evidence” and giving homeless leaders the tools to explain

exactly why ideas of unsightliness are flawed and to instead call attention to

where we really should be looking.

In what follows, I examine each of these statements and detail how the organization centers visuality in their work.

Material conditions of anti-homelessness won’t change unless acts of picturing also shift away from criminalization and toward structural causes of homelessness

At a meeting towards the beginning of the “Free to Pee” campaign, when members were plotting out the rationale and logic of their approach, I noted the following analysis that members arrived at in my fieldnotes:

1. Gentrification is about increasing the private over the public. This is closely related to the discomfort that white people feel when encountering homeless black and brown folks. So a public bathroom pushes back against this loss of public space and the increasing limiting of public resources to wealthy people only. 2. Removing homeless people from public space is like internal deportation. Everybody has a right to the city, including tourists but also homeless people. People of color, working class people, gender nonconforming, etc 3. Police need to meet their quota of tickets. So they target people of color to fill these. 4. Some parks are spaces where people shit and piss outside, because there are no bathrooms open overnight. But they are getting stricter, making people show ID to use the bathroom. Part of pushing for public bathrooms is pushing for public parks, not public-private parks.

The strain of visibility runs clear through this analysis. Members argued in this meeting that in order to materially create more public restrooms and fewer public urination tickets for homeless and otherwise marginalized New Yorkers, they would have to change perceptions about both the need for public bathrooms and the discourses that surround images of people who spend their lives in public, especially people of color. The work conducted in the campaign that followed, accordingly, stuck close to this messaging.

The work of shifting visual imaginaries away from criminalization and toward structural causes does not only happen within PTH campaigns, but also takes place extensively during meetings and conversations the organization has independent of particular organizing efforts. Whenever PTH invites outsiders into their space--whether these are college students, urban designers, or allied groups--they always begin with a go-

83 around question: “When you think of homelessness, what image comes to mind?”

Inevitably, most people mention a street-homeless person on the subway or on the sidewalk, sometimes even discussing a person who they see everyday. But the image always returns to an individual. When the circle concludes, whichever PTH member is leading the discussion shares that their image of homelessness, and the image that the organization is working toward, is a vacant building or an unused plot of land. This intervention reorients the visuality of homelessness away from the problematic racialized image connected to the dominant epistemology, and instead asks interlocutors to think structurally about how they might “see” homelessness differently.

To create this shift, we have to produce a counter-visuality that operates at two interlocking scales: the political (expressed through the image protocol) and the everyday lives of homeless folks (expressed through recognition and being seen as fully human)

PTH’s ability to analyze harmful images and in turn move them towards a basic politics of recognition was on full display in the below twitter exchange, from 2018:

Fig. 3.4: From @pthny twitter, September 19 2018. Screenshots by author.

This series of tweets, in response to a viral article about a homeless man being shamed for shaving on a New Jersey Transit commuter train en route to a job interview, perfectly encapsulates PTH’s image protocol, and shows how they create a counter-visual idea of homeless images. But this counter-visuality is not confined to social media; it happens through the everyday interactions that PTH has with others (described above), through their insistence to journalists that the images accompanying their articles about homelessness reflect the basic humanity of all homeless people without creating a spectacle of pity, and in their organizing practices, which often directly intervene in the field of vision surrounding homelessness.

Homeless-led community organizing can fuse these two practices, using images both as

“evidence” and giving homeless leaders the tools to explain exactly why ideas of unsightliness are flawed and to instead call attention to where we really should be looking.

In the summer of 2016, Picture the Homeless began a campaign to push back against

“move-along orders,” in which homeless New Yorkers were coercively moved out of public areas by NYPD officers who told them things like “the people who live here now

87 don’t want to see people like you around.” People who received “move-along” orders were not actually breaking the law, but they nonetheless found themselves being told by a police officer that they had to leave. In order to combat this and to raise awareness, PTH held an action in Midtown Manhattan, on the front steps of the central branch of the New

York Public Library. In my fieldnotes, I described what happened next:

On a sunny Tuesday in August of 2016, we gathered together in East Harlem and boarded the 4 train downtown, disembarking at Grand Central. To a person, we wore the light blue colors of Picture the Homeless, the organization that has brought us all together: homeless, housed, multiracial, a mix of genders and visible identities. Together we poured out of the train at Grand Central and walked over to the steps of the New York Public Library on 5th Avenue for a rally. Several members and leaders spoke, calling attention to the ongoing anti- homeless policing and the advent of hotspots. Particularly, PTH members at this event highlighted the visual underpinning of these violent spatial practices, noting that people are told to move along because they look homeless, despite the recent victory of a bill which prohibited discrimination in policing practices based on housing status. After the speakers finished, we fanned out to all four corners of Bryant Park, a well-known public green space behind the library. There, we deliberately disrupted the flow of pedestrian traffic at busy intersections, informing people waiting for the light to change that the NYPD could order them to leave the sidewalk if they “looked homeless” and asking them if they know that areas with people who “looked homeless” were being designated as hotspots.

By actually giving fake “move-along” orders to random New Yorkers in a dense and wealthy neighborhood, PTH did two crucial things. First, they allowed their members-- currently and formerly homeless New Yorkers--to reset the terms of their own visibility, and to defy the image that circulates and confines them. Secondly, they actively made housed New Yorkers rethink--if only for a brief moment--their own visual conceptions of homelessness and public space.

It is this latter practice, of redirecting the vision of housed New Yorkers, that PTH has particularly excelled at. In two key campaigns—one that forced NYC landlords to register their vacant property with the city, paving the way for it to be potentially re-

88 appropriated as low-income housing, and another that put community land trusts (CLTs) on the map as a viable solution to homelessness—staff and leaders successfully forced political leaders to publicly reframe the image of homelessness—from a person to a structural condition caused by commodification and speculation. This reframing--which moves from “seeing” to “picturing”--is a practice of reorienting visual analysis. PTH are not the only group to attempt such a maneuver. To further contextualize the practice of pushing the viewer toward a more complete picture of homelessness, I now turn to a feminist photography project from the late 1980s, Melissa Shook’s Streets are for

Nobody.

Reorienting Visual Analysis

Consider the difference between the following two images, both portraying homeless people in the United States:

Fig. 3.5: Photograph from “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too” Campaign, c. August 2015.

From author’s screenshot.

Fig. 3.6: Photograph by Melissa Shook, from “Streets are for Nobody” (1989). Courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson AZ.

In the former photograph, many archetypes of visible homelessness swarm to the forefront of the image. The figure--seemingly male-bodied--sits with his head angled downward, against a wall in a New York City subway station. He is surrounded by at least three cardboard signs with writing on them, a litany of heavy winter coats, and multiple forms of luggage (including a large suitcase on which he rests). The ground on which he and his possessions sit could not be called clean; there is litter, ranging from small waste items to larger plastic bags. The image contains all of the major signifiers of visible homelessness in the North American context, and indeed it exists in large part to reinforce these tropes: It was taken in the summer of 2015 by an unknown photographer as part of a campaign called “Peek-A-Boo, We See You Too,” in which a union of the

New York Police Department, in the midst of a political tussle with Mayor Bill De Blasio over policing practices, put out a public call for New Yorkers to document the sight of homeless people as evidence of the city’s decline and return to the so-called “bad old days,” a reference to pre-Revanchist and pre-Giuliani New York (Goldfischer 2018).

These signifiers--luggage, the downward gaze, cardboard signs, and sitting on the ground or on a possession--were present in nearly all of the photographs, suggesting that these items and positionings remain central to the dominant way of knowing what homelessness looks like publicly.

Contrast this image to the second, which depicts a woman and a child sitting on a picnic bench. This image has no direct signifiers of homelessness. A woman sits on a wooden park bench, with a small child standing near her feet. Their only visible possession in the frame is a baby bottle, on the park bench next to the woman. The ground is leafy, and they appear to sit in a city park of some kind. The two people in the photograph angle toward the camera, giving the sense that they knew of the photographer’s presence and had consented to the capture of their images. Nothing in this image suggests that its two subjects live without a permanent roof over their heads—and yet, in fact, they are just as homeless as the man in the previous image. We know this because the latter image comes from the photographer Melissa Shook’s 1989 project

“Streets are for Nobody,” in which she interviewed and photographed homeless women in several US cities.

Shook’s project aimed to address the invisibility of homeless women in the 1980s, at a moment when the national conversation on homelessness centered almost exclusively on unsheltered single men. But crucially, the photographs in “Streets are for Nobody”

92 also intervened in the visual knowledge politics of homelessness in US cities, and not only through centering women[e1] . Shook’s work breaks the mold of homeless photography both through its topic matter and through its technical choices. As alluded to previously, the invisibilization of homeless women accelerated throughout the 1980s as an inevitable outcome of the hyperfocus on homeless men (Pascale 2005). But perhaps more importantly, these photographs refuse many of the tropes connected to documentary photography, and in particular images that attempt to depict marginalization. A professional photojournalist described the technical components of what he called

“poverty porn” in an interview:

You think of whiskers and hair, and dirty pores--these are very fine features. A photographer will shoot in tight--then crank the shit out of the contrast so it hyper- accentuates those details to make it seem grittier and darker than real life (Interview E, 2018).

To see the role of such photographic techniques in the dominant visuality of homelessness we need look no further than the New York Times, which for the last three years has run at least one article on homelessness in New York City featuring images that fit this description--that is, when their faces appeared at all.

Fig. 3.7: Photograph in New York Times, January 8 2018. Screenshot by author

But in Shook’s work we see a deliberate refusal of this approach. All of the women photographed for “Streets are for Nobody” pose in natural light, in environments that have meaning to them. Crucially, Shook gives each photographic subject the ability to control her own narrative through accompanying text. For example, when Shook explained her project to would-be subjects, she always used a close variation of this explanation:

It’s an exhibit of photographs and interviews of women who have been or are homeless, and it’ll be at the Boston Center of the Arts, probably in March. And I’m just trying to let women speak for themselves about what their experience of being homeless is like and what experience they had (Shook 1989; CCP Archival Collection).

Accompanying the photographs are quotes and explanations from the subjects as to why they chose particular locations or poses for their images. In the transcripts accompanying

94 the photographs, from which Shook chose quotes for the exhibit and, later, the book, her subjects elaborate more closely on their theories of visuality, or the problem of looking homeless. Many of these reflections powerfully guide us toward a theory of homeless visuality from a homeless perspective—and crucially, a perspective marginalized even within the discourse of homelessness, which was (and in many ways is) heavily focused on single men.

Karen Dunton, a woman photographed several times in Streets are for Nobody, explains the paradox of being both seen and invisibilized as homeless succinctly:

The woman in one of my groups who was very surprised when she found out that I was living in a shelter because she said ‘you don’t look like you’re living in a shelter’...it’s just ordinary people who end up there one way or the other and there is no way to tell by looking at somebody whether or not they’re homeless. But I had thought that way before I went into the shelter too. I think I always assumed too--that they were only these ladies with six bags sitting on the bench with three coats on talking to themselves (Dunton 10: CCP Archive)

Fig. 3.8: Image of Karen Dunton by Melissa Shook (1989).

The images of Dunton in Streets are for Nobody deliberately reflect her own analysis of homeless visuality. She sits on a couch on what looks like an outdoor porch, in the midst of conversation, appearing to be explaining something. It’s an image of everyday conversation; but as she reminds Shook in the transcript, not everyone has such a right to this form of leisurely outdoor socialization:

A couple of friends of mine who are still at the shelter had gone down to the Boston Commons a couple of weeks ago and were sitting on a bench. They weren’t drinking, they weren’t causing a problem, nothing….and a police officer came up and told them that they had to move and they asked why and he said “we don’t want you bums hanging around the Common. This is for people who pay taxes and live in the city of Boston. I see you here all the time. I see you more than I see my family” (Dunton 7: CCP Archive)

This incident, which presumably took place in the late 1980s, is eerily similar to an episode of my own fieldwork in 2016, in which an NYPD officer told a homeless man in

East Harlem that the reason he needed to move along from a bench was that “The people moving in around here don’t want to see you anymore.” These recollections and experiences show that the harmful images of homelessness implant an imaginary that—at least on the part of the police, who patrol public space to look for signs of disorder— produces direct exclusion for homeless people. And yet the disparities suggested by

Dunton in her narrative—between those who do and do not appear homeless, a correlation that often fails to relate to actual material circumstances—suggests that the image of homelessness might be what Stuart Hall (1996) called a “floating signifier,” able to shift and change over time in order to maintain its power under differing social geographies.

Conclusion

This shifting capability of the image of homelessness is exactly what confounds and intrigues PTH, and is why they see the act of picturing as a way to resist the floating signifier of “seeing” homelessness. Shook’s work demonstrates through artistry the possibility that PTH’s activist work strives for in the setting of contemporary New York

City. Picturing homelessness differently doesn’t only make an aesthetic impact through forcing viewers to think more critically about unconsciously-held biases or assumptions about homeless people. It also presents the possibility for a different kind of community organizing where the act of picturing plays a central role. This is therefore a more epistemological kind of organizing, and one that inevitably does a better job of actualizing the idea of “member-led” that so many local groups claim, but so few enact effectively. And finally, PTH’s success over the years demonstrates that the act of picturing has clear material impacts as well, when paired with effective organizing and good political strategy.

But PTH also knows that urban geography plays a role in setting the dimensions and meanings to which images of homelessness become attached. In conversations during my initial fieldwork phase, PTH began to realize that the problem of “seeing homelessness” became more acute in some kinds of spaces than others--specifically, the city’s plaza program was causing a ton of trouble for homeless New Yorkers. It is from this vantage point that my study of green anti-homelessness begins.

Chapter 4: “We Too are Ecological Engineers:” Homelessness, Sustainability, and

Green Infrastructure

Introduction: “The Merchants’ Center for Exercise and Vegetables”

One hot Wednesday in July of 2016, a group of about seven people sit down at two small, yellow-painted tables on a large slab of concrete in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. The concrete slab has recently been power-washed— one can still see the stains of the powerful jet sprays on the tan-grey ground. But the ground is about the only thing that resembles the city’s famous concrete jungle. To the side of the brightly colored tables, several large planters with verdant horticulture dominate the view, evenly spaced to form a boundary around the large slab. In the center of the area, immediately in front of where the people sit at the tables, several card tables

98 sit, filled with the fresh fruits and vegetables that signal a summer farmers’ market in the

Tri-State area: tomatoes from New Jersey, vegetables and fruit jams from the Hudson

Valley, and artisanal bread from Brooklyn. About an hour previously, before the tables and the products for sale were unloaded from a truck on Park Avenue, the ground was covered in brightly-colored yoga mats, as an instructor led a free light fitness class. An hour later, a jazz quartet will replace the farmers’ market. Overhead, the sky is bifurcated by two enormous horizontal structures: train tracks, carrying suburban commuters out of the city into Westchester County and Connecticut. And from one of the large poles supporting these tracks hangs a sign, bearing the green insignia of the city’s Department of Transportation (DOT) and informing the reader that they are at the Uptown Grand

Central Plaza.

The people sitting at the table all wear light blue t-shirts that say “Picture the

Homeless” on both front and back. They are there representing themselves, as currently or formerly homeless New Yorkers, but also as members of an organization with the same intriguing name, whose offices happen to be located half a block away from the plaza. The group is about evenly split between men and women; they are mostly middle- aged, and all present are Black or Hispanic. They are there because, in part, the mission of Picture the Homeless (PTH) is to defend the rights of homeless people to exist as themselves in public space, and because the groups that govern the “plaza”—the DOT and a new Business Improvement District (BID) also called Uptown Grand Central— recently attempted to disappear about a dozen homeless “regulars” who spent many years hanging out, eating, drinking, and occasionally sleeping in the area now known as the plaza, arguing that their presence prevented the BID from introducing more ecologically

99 sustainable activities into the community. In response to this claim, PTH organized an action called “They say gentrify, we say beautify,” during which members carried out their own idea of a sustainable activity--planting and replanting greenery along the edges of the plaza.

The business of the plaza generally carries on that day without much interruption.

PTH brings some flyers to hand out to passerby, and some seem interested in the organization’s work and its message (“Don’t talk about us, talk with us!”). I am there too, primarily to take photographs, but also to take notes on what happens, notes that we all then debrief and add to as a group afterwards. The plaza manager, a young white woman who is also the sole paid employee of the BID, keeps throwing us looks when she isn’t fussing over the greens on the table or handing out her own flyers. She knows who we are, having been in several tense meetings already, and knows that she can’t do anything about our presence, which was the entire point of PTH’s “sit-in,” an action that repeats at least twice a month that summer. They aim to make two interrelated points: The erasure of homeless people can never be complete, and the image used to attempt to erase the homeless can only ever be a partial “picture” of homelessness itself.

At the debrief after the action, one Picture the Homeless member half-jokingly suggests that the space we spent two hours in used to be a plaza for homeless folks—a place for refreshment and enjoyment amidst the madness of the city—but that now we ought to give it a new name to more accurately reflect its main use: “The train station at

125th is now the Merchants’ Center for Exercise and Vegetables.” The question that most bothered the group, though, was whether those in charge had got the message they intended to send. Another member noted that “They didn’t even pay that much attention

100 to us, they were more interested in the damn plants” (we had observed the plaza manager straightening and tending to the horticulture multiple times in our two hours there). This observation later took flight in another PTH member’s argument in a documentary filmed the following summer, when he noted that “The city counts trees, but doesn’t have a clue how many homeless people there are” (Wolff 2017). Was the visibility of homelessness, connected (in PTH’s analysis for nearly 20 years) with policing, race, and capitalist development, becoming intertwined with something else, another form of public space management that paid more attention to planters and trees? And how do the sustainability activities already practiced by many homeless New Yorkers--cleaning parks and keeping public spaces clean, recycling cans, reusing discarded materials, and other activities that

PTH members have categorized as “ecological engineering”--become caught up in or moved aside by the city’s altered development approach?

In this chapter, I aim to answer this question while expanding the conversation about what various scholars have noted as “green gentrification” (Checker 2011; Gould and Lewis 2016) or the “green gap” (Anguelovski et al 2018) to focus on homelessness in public space. The impact of green urban infrastructure, as part of a broader agenda of sustainable development, has been well-documented as a trigger for displacement via gentrification in cities across the global North and South, in locations ranging from New

York and Atlanta (Curran and Hamilton 2013 , Immergluck and Balan 2018) to Delhi and

Sao Paulo (Doshi 2018, Ghertner 2015, Millington 2018). The framework of “eco- urbanism” (Gandy 2015), established in part to explore the collision of environmental and social subjectivities within urban development regimes, has also been recently rethought as a “from below” approach to urban environmental governance (Lin and Kao

101

2019). Meanwhile, geographers who study urban political ecologies and environmental justice have also recently begun to think about homelessness and houselessness through that lens, moving to understand homeless theorists as environmental experts (Goodling

2019a; Speer and Goldfischer 2019; Goldfischer et al 2020). This article aims to bring these approaches together by centering homelessness--and particularly street homelessness--in attempting to trace the ramifications and impact of what I call “green anti-homelessness.” In doing so, it makes the argument that green anti-homelessness impacts homeless New Yorkers in public space through two key strategies: Visual mitigation, in which horticultural elements and environmentally-focused activities become deployed to shift the eyes of the housed away from their homeless neighbors, and sustainability codification, in which the already-existing sustainability practices of unhoused New Yorkers become devalued in favor of those associated with the legitimacy granted by the state and private capital.

In what follows, I first explore green infrastructure as a site for theorizing homelessness, both spatially and epistemologically. Drawing on theory from within urban political ecology and geography more broady, I show two key areas of work that the framework of green anti-homelessness expands and augments: Studies of “green” vs

“grey” epistemologies, and studies of the urban exclusions brought about through climate change. I then lay out the rise of what I call the green anti-homelessness agenda in New

York City, which contains many resonances with green development in other locations but follows its own peculiar trajectory, which must be made clear in order to understand its direct impact on homelessness. The green development agenda is largely expressed through the production and maintenance of green infrastructure, and so I focus on this

102 particular mechanism in tracking how it impacts my homeless colleagues at Picture the

Homeless. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I then discuss in-depth the two key impacts of the city’s ecological development agenda on homeless New Yorkers: the redistribution of the value associated with sustainable activities, and the mitigation of the visual presence of homelessness. Finally, I conclude with thoughts on the powerful implications and possibilities that arise from studying urban greening efforts from a homeless perspective.

Homelessness and Grey vs Green Infrastructures

Homeless people are rarely consulted or understood as experts on anything, but when outside entities in governance, business, and academia do acknowledge their expertise and experience, such recognition tends to take place in two distinct and limited arenas: Housing policy and policing practices. Scholars who work closely with activists have noted how homeless expertise can alter city housing policy to lower reliance on shelter (Hopper 2003; Willse 2015), while thinkers immersed in studying policing highlight the centrality of homelessness in both the rise and fall of Broken Windows policing (Camp and Heatherton 2016; Vitale 2008). But because of their association with the built environment, homeless people rarely get construed as environmental subjects, despite the crucial role played by parks and green development projects in public space, policing, and the political economy of housing. Even more crucially, as I explore partially through this article, homeless New Yorkers have theorized their own sustainability practices--from can recycling to the cleaning and greening of public spaces--under the heading of “ecological engineering,” a framework that dovetails with how city agencies

103 think about their own practices of green infrastructure creation. This makes the absence of homeless voices in urban green development even more troublesome.

Urban political ecology scholars have long argued that social and ecological innovations into the urban must be understood through a socio-environmental lens that accounts for the inseparability of human and more-than-human realms. Foundationally,

UPE blends a Marxian critique of development and nature--especially through the idea of

‘metabolism,’ an idea that extends across systems of capital accumulation and ecological maintenance--with broader studies of urban infrastructure and the production of space

(Williams 1980; Smith 2008; Swyngedouw 1996; Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003;

Gandy 2002; Kaika 2005). Within this framework, infrastructure, both green and grey, plays a prominent role.

Meanwhile, in work on homelessness, infrastructure has been theorized as a barrier to the “right to the city” that homeless movements often struggle for (Speer 2017), a part of false rationalizations for the destruction of belongings and materials (Herring

2014), a key component (through tent cities) of homeless communities’ right to self- determination (Sparks 2017), and as a key visual differentiator between different forms of homeless geographies (Goldfischer 2019b). While none of this work directly addresses green infrastructure, theorists within environmental studies have examined the impact of watershed infrastructure on homelessness (Palta et al 2016) and as will be discussed shortly, extensive work has examined the impact of urban responses to climate change on housing (but, crucially, not homelessness). Staying close to the theme of infrastructure in examining this literature helps to focus our investigations on projects that impact homeless urban-dwellers while simultaneously allowing space for homeless activists and

104 writers to speak back, as many people in this position already have uses for and ideas about infrastructure, both green and grey.

Crucially, infrastructure carves out its own political space as both a visible and invisible object of governance. As Keller Easterling notes:

For each technology in infrastructure space, to distinguish between what the organization is saying and what it is doing--the pretty landscape versus the fluid dynamics of the river--is to read the difference between a declared intent and an underlying disposition (Easterling 2014: 21).

The underlying disposition of infrastructure, which Easterling suggests falls outside of the public intent of projects as projected by designers, administrators and governing agencies, and users, calls to mind Wakefield and Braun’s (2014) suggestion that UPE scholars should look for the dispositif of the ecological city. Focuault’s framework of the dispositif (roughly translated to apparatus), they argue, suggests a pathway for studying key urban ecological components--such as green infrastructure, or resilience campaigns, or environmental development projects--not as a coherent whole governed by a singular set of priorities, but rather as a somewhat discoherent set of contradicting actions and inactions (Foucault 1980; Wakefield and Braun 2014). In other words, we must look at the contradictions between the intent and actual impact of infrastructure--and in this case, particularly green infrastructure--in order to understand how socio-ecological interventions into the urban reverberate into unexpected realms such as the visibility of homelessness. And in turn, such investigations can lead to a better understanding of how seemingly coherent top-down planning processes are inevitably shaped by the grassroots, in this case the sustainability practices of homeless people.

In many ways, then, what follows should be understood as a case study following the dispositif of urban green infrastructure, from the perspective of homelessness in New

105

York City. While very little work in geography and urban studies to date has focused on this particular intersection, my intervention here should also be understood as related to two recent streams of thought within urban political ecology literature: The epistemologies associated with green infrastructure and other forms of ecological urbanism, and the attempts to integrate social justice with environmental justice through climate change adaptation efforts. By situating my project as adjacent to and connected with these two streams of thought, I hope to then bring attention to what I call the mode of urban green anti-homelessness as a framework for scholars to continue to see other unexpected relationships that arise when one considers interventions such as green infrastructure not as solely the provenance of state and private capital actors, but also-- inevitably--as the product of already-existing sustainability practices created by marginalized people in the city.

Epistemologies of Green

As suggested by the opening anecdote to this chapter--and as will be discussed in- depth throughout the upcoming empirical examples--homeless ideas of sustainable urban practices differ dramatically from those coming from governing actors. The gap between these ideas is so large that it became clear quite quickly that completely different epistemologies informed these two ways of thinking about both sustainable urbanism and green infrastructure.

In recent years, urban political ecologists and geographers have made strong strides in charting out these epistemologies of urban greening, much of which has been focused on the case study of green infrastructure. Michael Finewood, for example, argues that the transition to green infrastructure for stormwater management in Pittsburgh in the

106 mid-2010s, rather than giving credence and legitimacy to a “green” epistemology, instead functioned to reconsolidate the power of the “grey” epistemology:

Green infrastructure approaches (whose intentions are to expand practice and participation) are framed by dominant grey epistemological approaches. In this view, alternative and creative forms of greening the city may not necessarily represent a more democratic process, but instead reproduce uneven urban landscapes under greener cover (Finewood 2016: 1001)

The idea that infrastructural shifts carry with them unchanging political power structures, and indeed become the vehicle for many of these shifts, holds a key place in the heart of

UPE research (c.f. Gandy 2002; Keil 2003; Meehan 2014; Truelove 2011). And examinations of green infrastructure through critical race and feminist lenses in case studies from around the globe provide powerful examples from which we can form a critique of development politics that attempt to utilize environmentalism as a cover for ongoing projects of racial capitalism (Ranganathan 2014; Doshi 2013; Safransky 2014,

Hardy et al 2017). But Finewood’s focus on epistemologies helps call our attention to a more grounded politics, one that perhaps might originate with those subjugated knowledges, rather than with conflicting visions between the state, engineers, and environmental advocates--all of whom, in the big picture, share relative positions of power.

Where might a “green” epistemology differ from a “grey” one in meaningful ways while resisting incorporation, keeping in mind the goal of investigating the incoherences inherent in a multiple knowledges framework? Recent work that begins with marginalized environmental knowledges suggests some answers. Erin Goodling’s work, in particular, utilizes both frameworks of “knowledge from below” and critical environmental justice to interrogate how houseless communities in Portland, OR and on

107 the West Coast more broadly are both impacted by environmental degradation and themselves articulate a resistance to the inevitable usage of environmental logics as a justification for displacement and removal (Goodling 2019a; Goodling 2019b). Goodling suggests that studying fraught intersections of environmental and housing justice alongside marginalized groups can lead to a process of collective history-making that might help “stitch people together across difference, contributing to fights for a more just, green future.” (Goodling 2019a: 21). Similarly, Jessie Speer and I have suggested that homeless people, through their extensive experience of living in parks and appropriating urban natural environments for survival, ought to be understood as environmental experts in their own right. Drawing on homeless memorists’ writings, we argue that

Memoirs of homelessness highlight a range of largely unrecognized values of green spaces in cities, and that these values directly oppose those often articulated by the state and private capital. For people without property, urban green spaces can provide privacy, survival, and solace in the face of extreme surveillance, deprivation and violence. In contrast, city governments often value urban parks as sites of leisure, consumption, and increased property values in surrounding areas (Speer and Goldfischer 2019: 2).

This formulation--as expressed through the writings of people who experienced homelessness in a variety of US cities, and echoed in my own fieldwork with Picture the

Homeless in New York City--shows a glimpse at what a green epistemology might look like. In this set of knowledges--which, most crucially, center on already-existing practices, rather than new innovations--green urban features and green development become valued not by their efficiency or even their traditional sustainability metrics, but rather by their ability to aid in a reoriented vision of ecological urbanism that values use over exchange, and materiality over aesthetics.

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Such analysis creates the possibility that, in the case of homelessness and green urbanism, the epistemology might begin not from an overt environmental lens, but rather from the related realms of justice for housing deprivation, the right to public space, and to liveable infrastructure of any color. Beginning not from EJ but rather from a related justice struggle also opens up conceptual possibilities within urban political ecology to become more inclusive of historically-underrepresented ideas of sustainability

(Goldfischer et al 2020). And a shift to a more intersectional understanding of green urban development, beginning from the grassroots, also creates an opportunity for more attuned knowledge; as George Lin and Shih-Yang Kao note in their recent intervention for a grounded eco-urbanism, such an approach “is more attentive to the diversity, heterogeneity and contextual sensitivity of urban change” (Lin and Kao 2019: 2). Eco- urbanism from below, while a new framework, might easily expand to include homeless environmental knowledge and practices. Importantly, this framework intersects with climate change studies that have also begun to consider, out of bleak necessity, the impact of urban resilience and adaptation efforts on marginalized populations. While not specifically focused on homelessness and green infrastructure, these interventions serve to further underscore the importance of thinking about urban ecology from the margins.

Climate Change and Exclusion

Responses to climate change--and in particular, those responses that originate from within hegemonic modes of governance--have been productively critiqued by geographers and urbanists in recent years. Many efforts falling into this category can be understood as a form of socioecological fix, which James McCarthy defined as initiatives that encompass “a way to renew accumulation on a more socially and environmentally

109 sound basis” (McCarthy 2015: 2491). Writing about early proposals for a Green New

Deal (GND), McCarthy notes that “What matters for the present argument is that all of these proposals see the social and environmental dimensions of contemporary crises and proffered fixes as inextricably linked” (McCarthy 2015: 2491). While much of his broader argument concerns non-urban scalar fixes such as major energy transition programs, subsequent work expanded the socio-ecological fix to encompass the specificity of urban green infrastructure development. Ekers and Prudham argue that socioecologial fixes should be understood as:

spatial fixes seen as metabolic processes involving the production of space but also necessarily the transformation of socionatures, whether in urban or rural settings, and whether such transformations are recognized as socionatural in the ideological registers of everyday life (e.g., hydroelectric or irrigation dam infrastructures) or not (e.g., transportation and telecommunications infrastructure) (Ekers and Prudham 2017: 1381).

Green infrastructure projects--in this case, the plaza program (understood as a transformation of socionature from the ‘grey’ concrete of an ‘unusable’ space to the

‘green’ plaza with horticultural installations and health-driven programming), and urban landscape transformations such as the High Line (taking an old rail track that no longer provided visible benefit and transforming it into an ecologically-minded public space) qualify as excellent examples of socioecological fixes.

The exclusions produced by these projects--which, as I argue below, construct homeless and marginalized uses of these public spaces as either value to be reappropriated or visibilities to be mitigated--must be understood in the context of the literature on climate gentrification and exclusion. Jennifer Rice’s work, in particular, stands out in this field for its clear focus on the impact of low-carbon urban development on the lives of marginalized urban residents--particularly those at risk of displacement

110 from green development. Calling this phenomena “low-carbon” gentrification, Rice and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that desires to participate in a low-impact, low- carbon urban lifestyle, and the projects that arise to fulfil them--an impulse itself that is shot through with racial and class-based implications of privilege--are decidedly productive of displacement and produce even further uneven environmental impacts

(Bouzarovski et al 2018; Rice 2010; Long and Rice 2019; Rice et al 2019). Carbon gentrification falls into a broader pattern of development that Long and Rice call “climate urbanism:”

Indeed, the rising popularity of luxury eco-districts draws sharp contrast to the increased vulnerability experienced by poor neighbourhoods, and is indicative of rising segregation during the transition from sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism. In the era of sustainable urbanism, the ability to lessen your ecological footprint was a privileged position based upon education, income, and access to green infrastructure, amenities, and services. Under climate urbanism, this trend is likely to intensify. The ability to live a climate-resilient lifestyle is still a matter of income, education, and access, but now carries the security of living in insulated districts that are less susceptible to climate hazards. The implications for vulnerability should be apparent. Poorer areas tend to be home to ‘at risk’ populations, have decreased access to city services and amenities, and are often more susceptible to environmental hazards such as flooding, landslides, subsidence, etc. (Long and Rice 2018: 11).

The exclusions produced by climate urbanism, then, must be understood as simultaneously social and ecological in nature. Green infrastructure, as a crucial component of climate urbanism, therefore also produces mixed socio-ecological exclusions.

To date, however, very little work has focused on how these exclusions impact homeless people, and in particular street homeless people, who are already more vulnerable to both policing and climate-change related disaster. Significant work, however, has focused on the adjacent field of housing within climate urbanism. In

111 addition to Rice’s work in Seattle, additional studies set in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, and Barcelona (to name just a few) have demonstrated the direct impact of ecological gentrification via climate urbism on housing: land values rise, gentrification ensues, and those who replace longtime residents, as people with access to capital, ultimately impact the environment more detrimentally (Shokry et al 2020; Immergluck 2009; Safransky

2014; Anguelovski et al 2018). Most interestingly, a major platform of the Green New

Deal calls for housing justice as a necessary component of urban environmental justice.

This call has been articulated by actors ranging from left-wing politicians such as

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who represents the district that I live in, an area divided between Queens and the Bronx), to academics such as Daniel Aldana Cohen, and activists such as the Homes Guarantee movement. Proposals have included a full carbon retrofit of public housing across the United States, building 10 million new carbon-free affordable homes, and decarbonization of new and existing permanent supportive housing (Capps 2019; Aldana-Cohen 2019; People’s Action 2019). While all of these frameworks pay lip-service to ending homelessness, none of them contain any substantial focus on people currently experiencing homelessness, and especially people currently on the street. This absence animates the urgency of my research.

The Logics of Green Urban Development

The city of New York has made a decisive turn toward green development projects as a value-generating mechanism. In early 2019, for instance, New Yorkers were treated to the opening of the Hudson Yards complex, a behemoth redevelopment project that--thanks in no small part to $2.2 billion city dollars in tax increment financing--claims to create the most “connected, sustainable, responsive and efficient neighborhood in the

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U.S.” by, among other innovations, saving 24,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions and reusing 10 million gallons of stormwater (Fisher and Leite

2018; Hudson Yards 2018). The buildings and spaces that now constitute Hudson Yards are completely enmeshed with the city’s other hypervisible green infrastructure project-- the High Line Park, an abandoned rail line converted into a linear park that attracts millions of tourists each year and exponentially raised the land value in its surrounding neighborhoods. Not all green infrastructure projects in the city happen on such an enormous scale, however: projects such as rainwater recycling installations under highways and train tracks, and even smaller land areas converted to green public space under the city’s plaza program play similarly crucial roles in land value and urban development. Overall, 66 out of the 103 projects sponsored since 2005 by the NYC

Economic Development Corporation (EDC), the city’s official development arm, have featured ecological renewal or revitalization as a significant component (NYC EDC

2019). But these projects share something in common, besides their stated goal of positive environmental impact and unabashed advocacy of higher land values for the benefit of speculators and property owners: they comprise evidence of a mode of development.

If, as James Scott (1998) argues, the broad thrust of planning works toward a goal of making people and their spatial relations legible and visible to governance, then we should understand modes of urban development as the sets of practices that drive this attempt. Modes of urban development are not necessarily limited to particular locations at particular times, but rather contain continuities and discontinuities that link them together across historical and geographical frameworks. For example, Neil Smith’s model of

113 revanchist development, in which narratives of racialized fear and material violence by both public and private actors against low-income and non-white New Yorkers can easily be understood as the dominant mode of development during the 1990s, in the era of what

Smith called “Giuliani Time,” because its core premise of the vengeful recapture of land held such political sway at that time (Smith 1996; Smith 1998; Deutsche 1996).

Revanchism had a particularly painful impact on street homeless people, who are simultaneously confined to and prohibited from public space (Mitchell 1997; Vitale

2008). In contrast, the present mode of development in the city prioritizes the role of green development and the increased prominence of neoliberal urban planning practices over hyper policing (Larson 2013; Brash 2012); this suggests that revanchist development is no longer the dominant mode of development in contemporary New York

City. But this does not mean that its logics of exclusion and revenge disappeared; indeed, they often still find expression in urban politics (Goldfischer 2018). When we look at changing modes of development, we are looking for things that stay the same nearly as much as those that change.

Attempts to mobilize the state apparatus to assist in “cleaning up” areas show us one of those very clear continuities. As Neil Smith famously argued in his earlier work, the root of uneven urban development lies in the manipulation and segmentation of urban natures, defining particular kinds of ecological value and their relationship to capital

(Smith 2008). Urban development in North America and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries largely played out around a battle for natural resources, with the creation of water supplies and public sanitation as key sites of contestation where we can discern an ecological interest within urban development (Gandy 2002; Kaika 2005; McWilliams

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1945). Yet all of these efforts largely intervened in the visibility and value of natural elements such as water, trees, grass, and topography, and as such they took place in service of a larger development agenda--whether revanchist, modernist, or another mode.

The need to create new development in order to “clean up” continues to underpin contemporary development in New York City.

Geographers and other environmental thinkers have thought extensively about the role of environmental logics such as preservation, conservation, and restoration in gentrification and urban renewal. In environmental gentrification, for example, a mismatch arises between efforts to address environmental degradation and social inequality: as Noah Quastel puts it, “the recent surge in environmental awareness and governance in cities has not been matched with an analysis of (or practice reflecting) concerns of inequality, gentrification, and other social dimensions that can accompany changes brought by new environmental realities and concerns” (Quastel 2009; 696). In order to negotiate this difference, activist groups--especially groups of low-income residents of color most at-risk of displacement--often adopt an organizing strategy of what Curran and Hamilton (2013) called “just green enough”:

Activists in Greenpoint want to achieve the cleanup of Newtown Creek while maintaining its industrial base, a strategy designed to put a stop to speculative development attracted to a neighbourhood experiencing environmental improvements. Ideally, cleanup of Newtown Creek will be just green enough to improve the health and quality of life of existing residents, but not so literally green as to attract upscale “sustainable” LEED-certified residential developments that drive out working-class residents and industrial businesses (Curran and Hamilton 2013: 1028).

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The threat of green gentrification shows that urban environmental logics often take up the mantle of capitalist development, and with it the particular modes of value production that characterize the appropriation of land in cities.

In New York, the characteristics of green anti-homelessness include a focus on waterfront redevelopment, the creative re-use of old industrial spaces, and, most crucially, the generation of value through land use changes associated with the ecological components of such projects. For instance: much of the value captured through the High

Line project came about through land owners--mostly companies that owned parking lots and storage areas under the abandoned rail track--agreeing to sell their air rights, with the city incentivizing such collective transference of ownership (itself part of a larger rezoning) with tax-increment financing that both encouraged speculation and exponentially raised the value of the air (Interview A, 2018). Once 90% of the transferrable air rights in the corridor surrounding the High Line were sold, the city could then sell nontransferrable air rights--previously unusable due to zoning restrictions--back to developers, at a cost that ended up being $625/sq foot. But the local community board had pushed for a value of $800, arguing that proximity to three major ecological projects-

-the High Line, the Hudson River path, and the new Hudson Yards development--made the value much higher, an argument that they make repeatedly in correspondence over other air-rights related business (Community Board 4 2018). All of this value capture was justified in ecological terms: the High Line was not only a spur for economic development, but an ecological boon to an island increasingly at risk of climate change, capturing rainwater, returning “native plants” to their habitats, and creating a community park to combat obesity (David and Hammond 2011). And these narratives, in circling

116 around the project, helped to create more justification for the private acquisition of land by developers, who soon surrounded the area with (LEED certified) luxury apartments.

In a different case in Brooklyn, a group of designers wanted to experiment with capturing stormwater runoff under the Gowanus Expressway, by one of the most polluted bodies of water in the city. They received permission from the city, but not funding--for that, they had to turn to one of the most powerful private developers in Brooklyn, a group synonymous with gentrification in the south Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park:

Industry City Developers, who indeed ended up funding much of this project. The fraught choice--work closely with a developer whose presence would inevitably connect an ecologically beneficial project with displacement of longtime Brooklynites of color-- caused a reckoning:

For our project we had been looking for a while at the space under the Gowanus Expressway. Obviously it’s a seven, eight-lane highway and really dark. The environmental conditions are horrible, and all the storm water coming off there just polluting the neighborhood – anyway, so this had been a site of interest for us. When we decided to start a pilot project, we were trying to think about how to do this. It’s significant. You need to get someone to pay for it. So we approached Industry City, a developer. Andrew Kimball, who we knew; who heads up Industry City; agreed to partially fund the design work, and we had a grant from the New York Community Trust for green infrastructure; a significant grant...What we wanted to explore was how to take some of that storm water that’s coming off of the highway and actually retain it, so that it doesn’t cause overflows, which is a performative issue that is very real, and not greenwashing (Interview B 2018)

Here, a major constraint of green infrastructure appears: Its funding, particularly in low- income communities vulnerable to gentrification, becomes tied to capitalist developers.

The ability of these well-intentioned designers to create an intentional piece of green infrastructure that could (they felt) do more than simply alter the landscape depended on a rather unsavory collaboration:

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But then we knew it wasn’t enough, and we wanted to look at it holistically; not Just green infrastructure. We wanted to explore how you light the space for people. We wanted to look at the safety issues of this parking area that people there’s no sidewalks for some reason. Third Avenue is as fast as a highway. So there were so many things we wanted to look at, but we needed funds. So we went to Industry City. He basically said, yes; we’ll support the design, but we’ll also rebuild this [area] (Interview B 2018)

The designers of this green infrastructure knew that their partnership with Industry City, however reluctant, would lead to major local opposition. In order to assuage this blowback, the group attempted to build relationships with community members through a series of public meetings, during which they asked for feedback on several possible designs for the rainwater recycling system:

They’re like, don’t turn it into a park. So there was definitely, don’t turn it into park. There was, keep the parking. They wanted it to basically be better performing infrastructure and to not be a park and to not contribute to what they felt would contribute to gentrification (Interview B 2018).

In the end, a sort-of compromise occurred: The rainwater recycling system was built, displacing some of the parking but not completely taking over the area, while also creating more walkways across 3rd Avenue under the Gowanus. Those walkways, however, lead directly to Industry City, the mixed-use development behemoth that drove the rise in neighborhood land prices from the beginning in Sunset Park. According to the designers I spoke with in this group, such financial arrangements as they arrived at, with heavy contributions from private developers for public-facing green infrastructure, were not at all uncommon, but rather often carried the day despite misgivings and concerns about contributing to gentrification.

These examples illustrate a story told by many geographers and critical urban scholars under a variety of names. Proponents of green infrastructure--not just in cities,

118 but more broadly--have long argued that it can help produce value through its ability to connect landscapes and create the opportunity for more sustainable development

(Benedict and McMahon 2006; Young and McPherson 2013). Geographers and other critical thinkers have responded directly to these claims with many studies demonstrating that the benefits, both economic and environmental, of green infrastructure are distributed unevenly, in many cases exacerbating already-existing inequities (Finewood et al 2019,

Brash 2012, Checker 2011; Curran and Hamilton 2013; Immergluck and Balan 2018;

Loughran 2014). Eco-urbanist development, in which sustainability, carbon neutrality, green infrastructure, and other similarly eco-focused outcomes becomes the exact means through which value becomes both justified and actualized in the urban landscape. But how does this rising mode of development impact homeless people?

Homelessness and Green Infrastructure under green anti-homelessness

Green anti-homelessness, I argue, impacts homeless people in New York City in two key ways, each highly visually mediated: Through value-grabbing, which manifests as a redistribution of the value associated with sustainable activities, and through strategies of mitigation.

The uneven valuation of sustainability in Green Infrastructure

Through a vicious combination of the transformation of land and infrastructure from “grey” to “green” and manipulations of public space that attempt to alter the visibility of homelessness, green urban development creates a form of what Diego

Andreucci and colleagues call “value grabbing” (Andreucci et al 2017). Value grabbing, in this context, means the takeover of land not for immediate production or expropriation,

119 but rather for the imposition of a rent relation onto the urban ecological form: in other words, the replacement of one use value with another seen as superior. Value grabbing makes possible, at a larger scale, what Isabelle Anguelovski, Clara Irazabal-Zurita, and

James J.T. Connolly call a “grabbed urban landscape,” in which green infrastructure projects (located, in their case study, in Bogota) create a cityscape shot through with environmentally-motivated projects that cause widespread displacement and exacerbate socio-spatial injustices (Anguelovski et al 2018). The value grabbed through green anti- homelessness does not necessarily treat homeless people as “barriers” to value appropriation, as did revanchist development. Rather, green anti-homelessness impacts the visible presence of homelessness by reframing what kind of environmental activities can be considered valuable and therefore may be captured. When the environmental activities practiced by homeless New Yorkers came into spatial conflict with pending green infrastructure projects, those activities became devalued and sometimes made impossible due to value grabbing.

One of PTH’s earliest campaigns was in support of the “better bottle bill,” a legislative effort that solidified the rights of “canners,” or people who make a living by recycling plastic bottles and cans in exchange for the five or ten cents offered by the distributor once the bottle is returned. Not all canners are homeless and not all homeless people work as canners, but there is enough overlap that PTH membership chose to fight for canners’ rights. Early on, the organization made a strategic choice in framing how the idea of value entered the campaign, as relayed here by JR, one of PTH’s long-time leaders:

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I got tired of people having a negative connotation about canners. So I started telling people, ‘if you pick up recyclable containers, don’t use the language that your adversaries use.’ So I started calling myself, and I told [others] too--we’re ecological engineers...Even with the amount of people you see on the street, picking up recyclable containers, the majority of recyclable containers go to sanitation, they get sorted out, then the taxpayers of New York City pay for the transportation on a barge, then neighboring states like Jersey take our recyclable containers that we should’ve cashed in, and they put them in a landfill. Well, guess what happens to the landfill? Due to the weather, the soil--you got erosion-- that material comes back to the surface. If you do your research, you’ll see that most of the time with the zoning, marginalized communities are where the landfills are. And those children have respiratory problems. Disproportionately. (Interview C, 2019, emphasis mine).

The value that JR and other PTH leaders argue derives from the practice of “ecological engineering” is simultaneously economic and environmental. The state of New York concurs, backing up JR’s analysis with statistics showing that ecological engineering successfully saved 5.1 billion containers of all kinds from the landfill in the year 2016

(NYS DEC 2019).

The ability to generate value through what JR calls ecological engineering depended on several key factors: a knowledge of where bottles could be easily found in large numbers, the geography of redemption centers, and perhaps most crucially, the ability to store bottles safely near these centers, where the actual recycling of items for cash took place. While many redemption centers are part of supermarkets, for larger loads it was easier to go to a center with more physical space; hence, many of JR’s preferred locations were located on the physical margins of the city. His main redemption center was located on the far west side of Manhattan, in an area that touches the north end of what is now the Hudson Yards development. In order to successfully deliver large quantities of recyclables in carts and on foot, JR and his colleagues had a routine:

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We used to try to stay as close as possible to the place where we cash in. So we developed a pick-up route on the extreme west side, so that when we finished with the route, we would be in a good locale to cash in the next morning. So that’s how we wound up on the west side, to sleep…we’d do our count, and do our sorting, and then we’d go to the viaduct, and take shifts: one would watch and two would sleep (Interview C, 2019).

The viaduct mentioned here by JR is, of course, none other than the present-day High

Line. The people who advocated for developing it into a park did so because they (and the city, and indeed the rail company that owned it previously) saw no value in its previous state. Based on this account, we should understand the conversion of the viaduct into the High Line not as a production of environmental and ecological value, but rather as a redistribution--a clear value grab that took the means of value generation away from homeless canners and redistributed them to private landowners.

If we only analyze green infrastructure for its ability to produce value, then we tend to look at changing land values (they rise) and resultant gentrification and displacement. In Sarah Dooling’s (2009) framework, ecological gentrification does exactly this: homeless park-dwellers are evicted because their presence does not sit well with an environmental articulation of value. This is a logic of production out of emptiness, as Dooling argues that “marginal space has no current political value or symbolic value, and little or no economic or exchange value to entrepreneurs. From the standpoint of politicians, entrepreneurs and housed residents, marginal space is essentially valueless; it appears as abandoned space.” (Dooling 2009: 632). But what if we instead insist that value is not absent, but rather reappropriated and redistributed away from homeless people already using it in their own effort to both survive and create sustainable lives? This opens a different line of thought that leads us to not think of green infrastructure--parks, High Lines, plazas, Leed buildings--as not solely productive of, but

122 also extractive of, value. And that extraction, it seems, arrives through the state deeming some sustainable activities--a park with ecological installations and a compelling narrative about preserving original landscapes--as more deserving of protection than other activities, such as canning, that have a more measurable sustainability impact.

“Space is easier to deal with than people:” green anti-homelessness and visible mitigation of homelessness

While JR and his colleagues could no longer use the former viaduct as a space for sleeping before work nearby, the relationship between homelessness and green development does not always require disappearance or removal. The city’s plaza program provides a neat demonstration of how green anti-homelessness also captures value through not disappearing, but mitigating, the visible presence of homeless people. Started in 2008, the plaza program is a classic neoliberal partnership: NGOs and Business

Improvement Districts (BIDs) apply to the Department of Transportation to manage small areas of land as semi-park public spaces. Plazas are characterized by the insertion of horticulture (in the form of planters, green barriers between traffic and pedestrians, and small but distinctive patches of rainwater-permeable pavement) into the streetscape. As one DOT planner put it, “We cover the roadway to create a visual distinction” (DOT

Plaza Workshop 2018). This visual distinction, it turned out, extends beyond the contrast between grey/green infrastructure to include the behaviors and uses contained within newly constructed plazas.

In 2015, a BID--which eventually began calling itself “Uptown Grand Central” in what they describe as “an effort to showcase all that is "grand" about Uptown, and put

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East Harlem on the map”--went public with a series of initiatives targeted at “greening” and “cleaning up” the area (Uptown Grand Central 2018). In practice, this meant that attempts to plant trees and flowers--part of the city’s broader green development agenda, characterized by development projects large and small that emphasize green infrastructure and other environmentally-friendly uses of public space--went hand-in- hand with the creation of a plaza on top of a gray concrete slab had been more or less left alone by those who govern infrastructure for many years, at the intersection of 125th and

Park Ave in East Harlem. While the soon-to-be plaza location did not lie at the geographic margins of the city, it did sit at its infrastructural edges--underneath a commuter railroad, removed from the bustle of 125th St and relatively hidden from view by the cavern of the Park Ave viaduct. As such, it became a popular gathering spot for a crew of 10-15 homeless East Harlemites, who joined PTH as members and were generally known as the “125th St Crew.”

Initially, the impulse of Uptown Grand Central was to attempt to evict these residents of the area undergoing development. But they ran into the organized resistance of PTH, and probably knew a losing battle when they saw one. Instead, turned to a strategy of co-option, hiring homeless people not affiliated with PTH to clean up the area.

This allowed the BID to claim that they were, essentially, addressing the root cause of visible homelessness by giving “local residents” employment (albeit at an extremely limited scale). In response, PTH organized their own greening effort of the neighboring blocks along 125th St--the aforementioned “They say gentrify, we say beautify” action

(Picture the Homeless 2015). Already, the terms of debate and material boundaries of the plaza were being set at the intersection of ecological value and homelessness.

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After nearly three full years of the plaza’s existence, this central confrontation within green anti-homelessness grew stronger. In August of 2018, DOT and the Design

Trust for Public Space (a civic design organization involved in some of the plazas) organized a workshop on the plaza program for “stakeholders”--local community groups,

BIDs, the NYPD, and one activist group, which happened to be Picture the Homeless.

The stated goal of the workshop was to “envision better plazas.” Nikita Price, as the civil rights organizer at PTH, received an invitation to this workshop. I came along, as did two

PTH members who had been involved in the struggle over the plaza.

The workshop was held at the National Black Theater in Harlem, a community space often used by local groups (including PTH) for events. After some food and milling about, attendees were ushered into the main part of the room, where tables had been set out. We were each assigned a table based on numbers on our nametags. Along with

Nikita and the PTH members, I had been assigned to a table that mostly featured other community groups representatives (as Nikita noted sardonically, it seemed to be the table they wanted to keep away from the cops, who were all seated en masse at a table on the far side of the room).

Several speakers then rose to give powerpoint presentations. A DOT employee, one of the directors responsible for the plaza program, first gave some basic background on the history and structure of the initiative. The program was established in 2008, he told us, and currently boasted 74 plazas. The DOT director then explained the three stages of plazas, which he described as follows:

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 Single-day plazas: “These are pop-up plazas, but they help us to see whether a

neighborhood could support a full-time plaza.”

 Interim plazas: “This is where we cover the roadway to create a visual

distinction.”

 Permanent plazas: “We understand these as fully incorporated pieces of

infrastructure.”

The governance of plazas takes place through a partnership between DOT and a community group. Crucially, most of the “community groups” that manage plazas are largely BIDs, as alluded to earlier--a meaningful distinction because BIDs are largely at the forefront of anti-hoemelssness, particularly in the western United States (WRAP

2019). It became clear quickly that this was not the only connection between plazas and homelessness that we would witness during the workshop.

DOT explained that, initially, they worked to enshrine plazas with behavioral regulations, so that there is a code of conduct. But when that was not “enough”, they signed a contract with the Horticultural Society of New York to manage the “high need” plazas. Crucially, the involvement of the Horticultural Society--a group that designs and manages botanical gardens along with planters and reseeding efforts in public spaces around the city--demonstrates that in the plaza program, the regulation of behavior falls within the realm of an environmental problem.

Very quickly, it became clear that “high need” meant “plazas with lots of homeless people.” Gale Brewer, the borough president of Manhattan, spoke of the three main nuisances of life in Manhattan that she believed were addressed well by the plaza

126 program: “Traffic, tourists, and people asking for money.” And then as an afterthought:

“Oh, bedbugs too. But the plazas are great for those because the chairs have no cushions!” To scattered laughter, she continued to make her argument: “Plazas are great, partnerships are great, we love partnerships and plazas. But homeless people take advantage of the opportunity for money and the opportunity to sleep at plazas. Our job is to figure out how to make the plazas welcoming for everybody.” In Brewer’s formulation, homeless people are not part of the “everybody”--an equation echoed in many realms, from the rights to property in public space (Blomley 2009) to the subway system, where homeless customers are discursively separated from ‘paying customer’

(Goldfischer 2019b). Yet she repeatedly stressed that she was not interested in disappearing homeless people--repeatedly reminding us of her legacy fighting against

Guiliani to preserve public space. And then she arrived at her key point: “Space is easier to deal with than people. The cops can’t do it all!”

As different plaza managers from all parts of the city went around the room sharing their struggles, a slide show played showing pictures of homeless people on plazas. This hypervisibility on homelessness--using it as a stand-in for problems both social (crime) and environmental (litter)--followed in the vein of a long tradition within

New York City politics, ranging from early 20th century social reformism to recent attempts to utilize photography to recriminalize homelessness (Goldfischer 2018). Other discussions of the socio-ecological dimensions of plazas continued to come back to homelessness, as one plaza manager mused that “Plazas can be living rooms for New

Yorkers, when it doesn’t smell like piss,” while another noted that she was surprised that even after all of their efforts to control the space through horticultural installations and

127 activities, “sometimes the homeless people still come across the street and hang out”

(NYC DOT Plaza Workshop 2018).

The connection between defining homelessness as a spatial-environmental problem and avoiding the revanchist/policing move towards removal took center stage during the next activity, when it became apparent that the other unstated goal of the workshop was to create language around homeless exclusion that avoided the brutality of revanchism and instead took root in the language of environmental design. While the speakers had been at the front of the room, staff had been placing large sheets of butcher paper up in the peripheral areas of the space. Each sheet of butcher paper had a word written on the top. There were sheets that said the following:

Vagrant

Quality of Life

Safety

Equity

Loitering

Homeless

Stewardship

High Need Area

The facilitator of the workshop now asked us to take a marker and walk around the room, adding our own definitions on sticky notes to each of the categories. The responses, I noticed, ranged from obvious reactions to coded language (one sticky on the “vagrant” category read “service resistant”) to indications of the emphasis on homeless mitigation

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(on “loitering,” a sticker read “lack of programming,” and under “homeless,” someone had written “epidemic). Meanwhile, on the “safety” category, that space had been filled to bursting by notes of positivity, including “comfort,” “human right,” and “safety is when people feel comfortable being in a space.” This activity made clear that Brewer’s remark about safe being “easier” to “deal with” than people--aka homeless people and their “intractable” presence in plazas--foreshadowed an entire approach bent on mitigating visible presence through a language that exuded positive public environmental benefits, provided that all present could conform to the standards of the housed public.

The remainder of the workshop passed in small-group discussion, during which many plaza managers wanted to have practical conversations on how to implement as many activities and programming as possible, while getting support from the Horticultural

Society on their green installations.

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Fig 4.1: Images from DOT Plaza Workshop Activity. Photograph by Author.

In a follow-up interview with one of the designers charged with facilitating this workshop, I learned that this particular form of green anti-homelessness was no accident.

The emphasis on activities within the plaza aims to alter the visibility of homelessness

130 without the punitive policing associated with the era of revanchism: As this designer put it, “everyone else is going to be there, and so it won’t matter that homeless people are there, because you won’t see them” (Interview D, 2018). This, to me, demonstrates the key moment at which green anti-homelessness departs from revanchist development.

Banishing homeless people and the unsightliness associated with them--for so long the central premise of urban development not only in New York, but around the world (cf

Ghertner 2015)--is no longer infallible, and therefore is no longer the sole centerpiece of urban development. Instead, the turn to green infrastructure has brought green anti- homelessness into power, an approach that has learned how to mitigate the presence of homelessness through environmental design, infrastructure placement, and organized activities--all of which reappropriate the value that homeless people found in these spaces away from them and toward both the state and private capital.

Conclusion: Who gets to be an ecological engineer?

Green anti-homelessness, I have shown, mitigates the visibility of homeless people in public space using ecological elements, while also codifying an exclusive definition of sustainability that degrades the value of grassroots environmentalist activities. In doing so, within the racial capitalism frame that we live in, means that it invariably sets up oppositions with implications far beyond homelessness itself. As discussed previously, people of color are wildly overrepresented in homeless populations, in NYC and elsewhere. The plaza managers are overwhelmingly white, and the infrastructure to support them (BIDs, city government agencies, private businesses) are themselves imbricated in structures of white supremacy, with BIDS in particular as focal

131 points for contemporary racist policing (WRAP 2018). Green anti-homelessness ought to also be understood as a particular form of environmental racism. As Willie J. Wright has argued, environmentalism in the US often replicates anti-blackness through its need to justify harm to Black communities first through an ecological lens (Wright 2018: 4).

Similarly, green anti-homelessness takes root in public space initiatives aimed deliberately at spaces understood as unsustainable and wasteful--nearly all squarely in communities of color. Furthermore, both the acts of mitigating visibility and codifying sustainability activities are themselves highly racialized, and could both easily be described through Wright’s framework of environmentalist anti-blackness. Green anti- homelessness can be used to show one particular way that what we could call “green anti- blackness” plays out in the public sphere.

Green infrastructure often purports to produce an evening of public space, claiming a kind of anti-commercialism in its purpose. Unlike the redevelopment of Times

Square, for instance, projects such as the High Line or the plaza program can claim the purpose of public enjoyment and ecological improvement over the uneven benefits of shopping districts or business-luring developments. But the premise of such projects relies on a handful of sustainability metrics that can’t possibly capture grassroots ecological engineering activities. Critiquing this premise of environmental sustainability activities is more complicated than asking who gets to participate in public spaces such as plazas, although that is important, and (as demonstrated by PTH in the anecdote opening this paper) can be politically powerful and generative.

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But thinking about shifting the meaning of ecological engineering from the nuts and bolts of green infrastructure production to the unseen and marginalized sustainability practices such as those performed by homeless New Yorkers creates an even bigger set of political and ecological possibilities. In the context of a Green New Deal where green development will surely accelerate, it becomes even more crucial to begin thinking of urban sustainability outcomes as tied to not just reducing emissions or creating new green space. How will the GND uplift and honor the sustainability practices already in place, particularly those taking place in the margins of the city? Beginning to address this question, with a focus on the already-existing practices of homeless urban dwellers, can move researchers, policymakers, and activists into an exciting new terrain of possibilities for urban sustainability practices.

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Chapter 5: Urban Green Design and the Visibility of Homelessness

Perhaps we could say that as New York City moves into the 2020s, its motto might be “notice no homeless.” But as I argued in Chapter 3, the city is failing rather significantly at their own stated efforts to produce a homeless-free landscape, due to an epistemology that understands homelessness solely as its visible difference from the rest of the “public” and not as a structural component to a capitalist housing system. To this point, I have endeavored to explain the way that the city’s political economy of homelessness coalesces around a particular visuality of homelessness, one that attempts to mitigate the visibility of a small but memorable, highly racialized, and extremely specific image of homelessnes. The exact mechanisms for doing so, however, have yet to be fully explored. In my fieldwork, urban design emerged as a crucial method by which this visuality, and its attendant political ecologies in the city’s green spaces, became enmeshed in the economy of the homeless image. While design is certainly not the only

134 tool at the disposal of those in power who wish to control the image of homelessness-- policing and the expansion of rules and regulations being others--design has the broadest reach in its ability to alter the urban landscape.

In this chapter, I fuse together insights from the two previous chapters--the centrality of visuality in the political economy and political ecology of homelessness, and the role of green anti-homelessness as productive of value reappropriation and visual mitigation, both of which impact the lives of homeless New Yorkers--in order to show specifically the role of green urban design in the management of homeless visibility.

Design, and green urban design more particularly, becomes a crucial vehicle through which green anti-homelessness practices modes of value redistribution and visual mitigation. Through the mechanism of CPTED, which stands for “crime prevention through environmental design,” designers and their clients produce an idea of the

“public” for whom designs cater, a public that more often than not finds its boundary at the category of homelessness.

In making this argument, I draw yet again on my ethnographic work conducted alongside PTH, in conjunction with primary sources: reports from city agencies, design organizations, and multi-sector partnerships focused on advancing particular visions of urban space, including green urban areas. I also rely extensively on interviews conducted with those on the “front lines” of green urban design work, from professional landscape designers, to urban planners, to politicians and public agency employees who deal directly with the fraught intersection of homelessness and green urban design.

Theorizing Design and its Absences

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Scholars have long understood the discipline and practice of urban design as inextricable from choices about visibility: whose visibility to highlight, whose to diminish, and what sorts of activities and ways of being to make visible at the expense of others. In 1850s Paris, for example, Harvey notes that the urban planner Baron von

Haussmann’s desire to clear industry out of the city center was both about aesthetics and getting rid of the political power of the working class; the two come together through

Harvey’s assertions about the production of space and its central role in social perceptions, functions, and limitations: “the spatial pattern anchors the moral order”

(Harvey 2003: 40). Yet in order for the spatial pattern to do this work, we have to understand how design influenced the sight of visible difference, in the form of race, class, and gender.

Harvey tends to subsume other forms of difference in favor of class. In trying to understand how Hassmann’s planning efforts, and the urban design that accompanied them, impacted Paris, he throws away other markers of difference in favor of class, and even more specifically, focuses on visible means of employment. From his view, the major difference becomes whether ones employment is conducted in public view or not; thus he can say that the visibility of poverty becomes a primary denotation of difference in public, and thus a useful means through which spatial design impacts a collective understanding of urban morality: “The “useless class” accounted for only a fifth of the lower classes, and many of them, like the ragpickers, were so impoverished as to be both passive and “inoffensive” (except for the sight of their poverty)” (Harvey 2003: 223). But other ways of seeing difference in public are just as consequential for the process of urban design, both in its planning, implementation, and impact. In this assertion I draw

136 inspiration from Heidi Nast and Audrey Kobayashi, who argue that corporealized differences such as gender and race must be “integral rather than incidental” to a history of vision (Nast and Kobayashi 1996: 76).

As discussed previously, the visuality of race in urban space plays out in close parallel to the visuality of homelessness--from the marking of difference to the productions of narratives that rely on white fear. Urban design plays a critical role in the production of racialized urban space, and therefore in Black urban spaces and a Black sense of place. As Katherine McKittrick reminds us, the project of Black geographic study is also a project about seeing urban space and landscapes more broadly from the perspective of its margins:

Reconstructing what has been erased, or what is being erased, requires confronting the rationalization of human and spatial domination; reconstruction requires ‘seeing’ and ‘sighting’ that which is both expunged and ‘rightfully’ erasable. What you cannot see, and cannot remember, is part of a broader geographic project that thrives on forgetting and displacing blackness (McKittrick 2006: 33).

Seeing the margins through race and gender means actively looking for erasure. And in the case of design, that means interrogating design processes--as this chapter aims to do-- to understand how they aid in these very processes.

Thinkers situated in the Global South have made crucial contributions in understanding the role of design as a process of city-making, racialization, and environmental delineation. From environmental subjectivities (Doshi 2013, Doshi 2018) to informalities (Roy 2005), to legacies of colonization in design (Ranganathan 2018), to the role of design in evictions (Bhan 2016) and ongoing violence (Weizman 2012),

137 design emerges as the perfect foil to urban planning, its willing enactor and creative counterpart. Design, however, also serves a crucial epistemological function, working to reorder not just space itself but the way we know and see it. In his study on the role of urban design in citymaking in Delhi, Asher Gherner lays out what he casts as a fundamental shift in the way that urban space is known and therefore constructed.

Building on but diverging from Harvey, he argues that the aesthetic, and particularly the visual, has replaced the rational mapping of the modernist city in contemporary urban governance--or, as he puts it, a “social order inscribed in public modes of viewership”

(Ghertner 2015: 6). Design is the process that makes these public modes of viewership possible, and brings concepts from the planners’ brainstorm into the architect’s drawing room.

Finally, design fundamentally exists in the realm of the environmental. Critical environmental justice literature generally grows out of work on environmental racism, and attendant efforts to understand the uneven impacts of both waste disposal and the uneven benefits of sustainability work (Bullard 2000, Agyeman 2005, Pulido 2000,

Pellow 2018). Scholars investigating urban political ecology, as discussed in previous chapters, have laid out the role of design in the production of uneven urban socio- environments (Gandy 2003; Kaika 2005; Swyngedouw 1996). But design does not only happen on a grand scale; as shown in this chapter, urban design relates largely to mundane environments in small, overlooked parts of the urban landscape. And to this end, urban design participates in and fuels what Willie J Wright has recently called the “ use of environmental habitats to commit and conceal acts of anti-Black violence” (Wright

2018; 1). This anti-blackness is built into the park system in the United States, and

138 becomes enforced, alongside anti-homelessness, through design processes that emphasize exposure and limit seclusion (Byrne and Wolch 2009). Crucially, homeless people become a part of this dynamic because of their position at the margins of the “public” and at the margins of what is commonly understood as the healthy urban ecosystem. As one designer noted in an article claiming to make a connection between increased green space and decreased crime, “If you grow up without any access to nature and are surrounded by trash, your outcomes are going to be less favorable than if you have these types of green amenities in your community" (Anuta 2018). Homeless people, as this chapter demonstrates, commonly become associated with both garbage and unhealthy environmental habits. As Brian Jordan Jefferson notes in his work on environmental rhetoric and enforcement, New York City has a specific history of “coding unsheltered homeless persons as one element among others in a series of trash items” (Jefferson

2015: 92). Green design, in particular, becomes the vehicle for the material enactment of assumptions about homeless people, about Black and Brown people, about gender nonconforming people, and about anyone at the margins of the urban. To understand how design goes about enacting these injustices, we begin with its foremost methodology:

CPTED.

Design, Visibility, and Homelessness: The case of CPTED

Eyes on the Street: Anti-Homelessness in Design

The role of urban planners and landscape designers in mediating the visibility of homelessness in public space did not come about in a disorganized or unstructured manner. Rather, similar to Broken Windows Policing, which arose from a collaboration between academic criminologists, sociologists, and law enforcement and morphed into

139 the major manifestation of anti-homeless policing (Camp and Heatherton 2016), anti- homeless urban design and planning also grows out of a particular framework: CPTED, or Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (pronounced “cep-ted”). CPTED brings together a series of design principles that landscape designers use to promote public safety, under the framework of crime prevention, through design. The basics of

CPTED revolve around the following principles:

CPTED has three key design approaches: territorial definition, access control, and surveillance. These approaches are implemented using three different methods categorized as natural (physical design upgrades), organized (human organizing and professional presence), and mechanical (hardware security). (Gehl Institute 2017)

The role of CPTED principles begins at the conception of public space projects, when designers have to set up basic sightlines and fill in areas between pathways with a combination of “street furniture” (chairs, food kiosks, and, less frequently, public bathrooms fall into this category). This is the basic physical design of a project, and tends to be produced in the early stages of the process. But CPTED principles continue through what designers call “activating the space.” As evidenced in the previous chapter, landscape designers understand activation to encompass a range of activities that promote a healthy engagement with a shared public space, such as farmers’ markets or yoga classes. And finally, many of the mechanical components of CPTED, which ominously often focus on surveillance such as high-powered lighting at night or actual policing hardware, tracks those using the space.

CPTED grew from two interwoven academic interventions: The idea of defensible space articulated by the architect and theorist Oscar Newman in 1972, and,

140 nearly concurrently, the criminologist C. Ray Jeffery’s book that coined the actual term itself (Cozens and Love 2015; Jeffery 1971; Newman 1973). Both of these works, in turn, were greatly influenced by the ideas put forward in Jane Jacobs’ (1961) magnum opus,

The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In this book, Jacobs used her own neighborhood in Lower Manhattan as a case study to argue that healthy urban areas have a clear delineation of public and private space, ongoing visible use of public sidewalks, and, most crucially, the idea of “eyes on the street:”

There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street...the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers (Jacobs 1961: 35).

We know that Jacobs’ ideas, and in particular, the “eyes on the street” framework, became enormously influential for urban planners in New York City in the subsequent decades, especially after her organizing work played a part in the end of Robert Moses’ urban renewal schemes (Flint 2009; Larson 2013). And we know that this nugget equally influenced both the formation of CPTED, and, later, Broken Windows Policing. But the question worth interrogating here is one that Jacobs leaves open and that both CPTED and BWP take as a given assumption: Whose eyes are “effective,” and who are therefore the “natural proprietors” of urban public space?

Many homeless New Yorkers understand themselves as filling the role of “natural proprietor” in any given public area of New York City, most especially in park spaces.

As alluded to in the previous chapter, my colleagues at Picture the Homeless, in addition to thinking of themselves as ecological engineers, also understand themselves as the most

141 obvious stewards of the city’s public spaces. Homeless memoirists and tent-city dwellers have powerfully echoed this idea, including theorizing urban green spaces in which they lived unsheltered under a broadened idea of home, in which the homeless become the caretakers of these spaces (Speer and Goldfischer 2019; Speer 2017). Based on these grassroots theorizations, it becomes easy to imagine an alternate universe in which public spaces were designed with homeless people in mind, rather than in attempts to put them out of mind; in other words, a reordering of the hierarchy that places homeless people at the bottom of the list of those who are allowed to participate in public space. As Picture the Homeless members asked repeatedly during their conversations with designers, urban planners, and other city officials during the meetings I participated in: What is stopping us from designing a plaza for homeless people, or creating other forms of green urban space that value the contributions of homeless New Yorkers to our vibrant city?

Multiple times in my fieldwork, I encountered specific longings for this kind of shift in how designers and city officials understand public spaces, and in particular the public space projects that fall into the category of recent green anti-homelessness in New

York City. One landscape designer, for example, spoke to me about how anti- homelessness gets reproduced simply in the desired “target audience” of new public space projects:

So whenever you have a public space project, you're kind of always deciding who the project is going to accommodate, what kind of people do you want to attract to be here. And I would say that for sure, I've never heard anybody say that we want to attract the homeless...homelessness is tied to crime rate, homelessness is tied to drugs. Homelessness is tied to a lot of things that we don't encourage in public spaces. So what comes out from the client side is how do we make sure that the homeless aren't going to take over the public space? (Interview G, 2018)

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And nor was such an attitude confined to design projects and transactions taking place solely in the private market. As one landscape designer who formerly worked for New

York City Parks Department told me, the role of homeless people became central early in the design process:

I feel like the person without a home is an ideological figure which was very present through all of that; certainly in the Giuliani era, whether we loved that or not. It was almost one of the first things that came up. It was the easiest thing to bring up: What about the people that aren’t going to use this public space the way we want them to or the way that the powers that be want them to? (Interview H, 2018)

Neither of these designers felt particularly comfortable with the use of homeless people as the villains of public space and “bad” design that prioritized the wrong “users,” and yet they (along with others who I talked to who did not feel comfortable going on the record) saw the ongoing centrality of CPTED as blocking any sort of reorientation around public space that would allow homeless New Yorkers to be seen as benevolent guardians, rather than parasitic and undesirable users.

If we return to thinking about green anti-homelessness projects through the realm of visibility at the site of homelessness, we gain further insight into the development of this blockage. In the Parks Department, for example:

It just was like, if you proposed anything that had any whiff of grade separation or any violating of CPTED rules, they would just be like, what kind of moron are you; what kind of moron design idea is this. In some ways it seemed like the prime directive was around this kind of creating spaces that were pre-designed for self-policing and surveillance. Well, I guess the progressive version of it was self- policing and self-surveillance. The more regressive version was maybe searching and destroying undesirables. (Interview H, 2018).

It appears from these descriptions that, similar to the logic of Broken Windows, CPTED acquires a form of Gramscian “common sense” from which to operate relatively

143 unchallenged (Mitchell et al 2016; Gramsci 1971). But within CPTED literature itself, a debate has raged around homelessness, as designers (such as those with whom I spoke) attempt to balance the longstanding desires of clients (both public and private) to capitalize on the safety guidelines of the approach while also pushing back against the exclusion and anti-homelessness inherent to said guidelines. With that in mind, I now move to examine the CPTED literature and guidelines themselves. After this discussion, we are then able to look more closely at the way that CPTED manifests in several projects that PTH encountered during my fieldwork period, and to put forward an analysis of how these projects particularly encapsulate green anti-homelessness.

Conflict within: CPTED, Greening, and Homelessness

Even landscape designers who use CPTED with less skepticism than those with whom I directly discussed the issue have come to some awareness around its disproportionate impact on homeless people. In a crucial white paper written for the

International CPTED Association (ICA) in 2016, Gregory Saville and Randy Atlas--both enormously influential within the field of CPTED design--argue for the misplaced anti- homeless priorities of what they term as “First Generation CPTED.” The characteristics of First Generation CPTED are as follows: Territoriality, surveillance, access control, image/maintenance, activity program support, and target hardening (Cozens et al 2005).

The enactment of these principles demonstrates exactly how the visibility of homeless people as criminalized and racialized “others” comes to the fore in CPTED projects:

By optimising opportunities for surveillance, clearly defining boundaries (and defining preferred use within such spaces) and creating and maintaining a positive “image”, urban design and management can discourage offending. This is explained by the fact that offenders are potentially more visible to “law-abiding”

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others, and therefore, perceive themselves to be more at risk of observation and subsequent apprehension. Additionally, a well-maintained and appropriately used environment can signify that a sense of “ownership” and proprietary concern exists within the community. (Cozens et al 2005: 330).

We can see how this particular version of CPTED, when used in urban public spaces, fits neatly into the framework of revanchism. Examples of this kinship abound, from

Berkeley’s People’s Park (Mitchell 1997), to Los Angeles’ Skid Row (Camp 2012), to

New York’s Times Square, where “the letter and practice of law combined with the rhetoric and practice of design define, delineate, and reproduce imagined and actual public bodies and public spaces” (Miller 2007: 46). By bringing the mechanisms and law and design into tune with one another, and therefore creating further avenues of enforcement (through the methods described above), revanchist development relied on

CPTED just as much as it leaned on Broken Windows policing to manage the visibility of homelessness and other forms of public deviance.

But as noted above, CPTED practitioners draw a distinction between the form of the practice that props up the revanchist form of anti-homelessness, and the more contemporary practices that fall under the category of “Second Generation CPTED.”

Saville and Atlas go as far as to call First Generation CPTED tactics, including classic maneuvers such as spikes on public surfaces, “homeless reduction technologies” and acknowledge that they “relocate the homeless from one location of a city to another out of sight location, which is little more than using displacement as tool of forced relocation” (Saville and Atlas 2016: 10). In place of these punitive tactics, they offer a vision of a more compassionate CPTED, one whose primary goal revolves around an ethos of “do no harm” (Ibid: 2). The Gehl Institute, a major proponent of Second

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Generation CPTED in New York City, argues that such an intervention into CPTED revolves around broadening the idea of defensible space:

CPTED was developed under the premise that safe space is “defensible space.” Gehl Institute believes that, ironically, when spaces are designed to be defensive and uncomfortable to certain groups, they can become unwelcoming to everyone. The enhancement of an inclusive public life can positively impact the perceptions of safety and actual safety within a space. Removing barriers to participation in public spaces and enabling a wider range of people to enjoy the space is key to creating thriving, safer, and more just cities. (Gehl Institute 2017)

Second Generation CPTED is not so much a refutation of CPTED principles as it is instead a rearticulation of those same ideas--defining territory, controlling access, and surveillance--through a more inclusive lens. In other words, like Broken Windows

Policing, which evolved into “community policing” in order to avoid a full and radical reckoning with its racialized basis, CPTED has had to reframe itself.

New York City’s Neighborhood Plaza Program (NPP) presents a perfect case study for understanding the evolution of CPTED and how it can use the language of equity while perpetuating its own particular form of anti-homelessness. The NPP explicitly aims to address traditional inequalities in the public realm, both economic and ecological. Through the city’s Plaza Equity Program, many such plazas are explicitly located in communities that have histories of environmental injustice through pollution, or public space destruction through urban renewal. In aiming to reverse this legacy, the program “provides funding to under-resourced communities to support their plazas, providing needed funds for maintenance services, including daily cleaning, trash removal, furniture management, and horticultural care” (NYCDOT 2017). Taken on its own, this sort of equity program suggests an opening to think about how public spaces,

146 traditionally closed off to homeless New Yorkers, might be re-evaluated through a more inclusive mindset, understanding a diverse range of uses and needs beyond simply race and socio-economic status. As demonstrated in the ethnographic fieldwork of the previous chapter, plaza managers have a significant preoccupation with the presence of homeless New Yorkers, to the point of organizing specialized workshops and trainings on how to best minimize their visibility through activating the space. Yet in these equity and planning documents put forward publicly by both city agencies and private partners, the absence of homelessness practically screams off the page. Tellingly, in the Gehl

Institute’s 119 page report analyzing the NPP through an equity and participation lens fails to even mention homelessness once--even though the metrics measured included access, diversity, inclusion and belonging, and beauty, among others (Gehl Institute

2015). Second-Generation CPTED utilizes this language to argue that public space will be safer if we all participate, rather than create defensive spaces that make some folks unwelcome--and yet that big tent again fails to account for homeless city dwellers.

At a conference populated largely by landscape designers at Yale University in

March of 2019, my colleagues at PTH shared some of their own thoughts on the troubling relationship between a more-inclusive public design process and the ongoing exclusion- through-elision of homeless New Yorkers. I worked with them to organize and facilitate a workshop session, in which participants were asked how they might go about designing a plaza explicitly FOR homeless people. In crafting the conference workshop, PTH members ended up creating their own framework for what a homeless plaza might look like. The notes from this exercise went as follows:

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Plazas for homeless people: --Creating the situation where that’s even possible--begins with community engagement --Two definitions of welcoming: one for public, one for homeless --Homeless people want the same as everyone, but there are things that homeless people particular need: freedom from policing, an information station, not so many yoga classes --Highlight the differences in public space between parks and plazas--design differences relate to why --Reframing sustainability--who is allowed to be sustainable, what sustainability means --Shifting who receives the benefits of sustainability--from rich folks to poor folks

Aside from demonstrating PTH’s way of thinking through the problems that homeless

New Yorkers face in public space and what solutions look like from a homeless perspective, this exercise also highlights the key flaws with Second Generation CPTED’s approach to inclusivity in public space. As PTH members noted here, homeless folks have particular needs in public space that may not correspond to the idea of “we all” that plaza managers and the Second Generation CPTED guidelines advocate--for example, a resource center providing information about local housing and social service availability, while perhaps less aesthetically pleasing than horticultural installations or yoga classes, would form a central part of an inclusive plaza that included homeless New Yorkers in that definition. And crucially, just as greening and sustainability serve as guiding forces in both the Neighborhood Plaza Program and CPTED more broadly, they served as an anchor point in PTH’s own analysis of what a homeless-centered design project might entail--a complete reorienting of sustainability toward the perspective of those most marginalized from urban space.

The PTH members who attended this particular conference decided to flip the epistemological project on its head. Instead of lecturing designers for 30 mins about homeless folks’ needs and ideas, we gave a brief overview of the organization’s history and our basic analysis of the city’s plaza program (including some of the findings

148 presented earlier about the role of visual mitigation tactics in the plazas, gleaned from the aforementioned plaza workshop in August 2018). We then spent the majority of the session facilitating activities for the designers in the room, prompting them with questions drawn from the initial brainstorm. These activities evoked serious reflection amongst those present. One designer said that she had never thought about homelessness from a design perspective, instead always thinking about behaviors, and how to encourage or discourage them. Another noted that he now saw the inherent exclusivity of how his work projects framed the idea of “public” and felt like he would need “a whole new education” in order to unlearn these ingrained imaginations within design.

Afterward, PTH was the center of attention at the conference reception, to the point of being interviewed by the conference coordinators. As one PTH member then put it, it became very clear that the topic had struck a significant nerve within a subsector of urban design that understood itself as progressive, inclusive, and non-violent--in other words, we successfully showed how Second Generation CPTED remained firmly anti-homeless, and, for lack of a better phrase, folks were shook.

From its roots in Jacobs’ idea of “eyes on the street” to its contemporary form,

CPTED and urban design demonstrate the inextricability of seeing homelessness from designing public space. In one way or another, contextually and geographically dependent, designers must reckon with the sight of homelessness, and it is this sight that prefigures their ability to deal with the actual physical presence of homeless people. We can see this in how surveillance remains the central concept, both in the realm of perception and in the realm of materiality, in CPTED principles, and in how, supported by the supplemental interviews and activities cited above, the figure of homelessness

149 remains at the center of even a less-punitive CPTED vision of public space. Next we must better understand how the sight of homelessness becomes enacted and contested at the site of green urban design. To do so, I now turn to a succession of projects and efforts that I observed and participated in during my fieldwork. Each set of these experiences coalesces around a way that urban design enacts anti-homelessness: Relying on a narrow definition of “public,” solidifying certain designs as indicators of value, and as the backbone of community visioning processes that increase racialized policing in green spaces.

The Urban Design Forum Forefront Fellows: Troubling the “public”

In late November of 2018, I was approached by several urban designers who were taking part in a fellowship sponsored by the Urban Design Forum. UDF, as I discovered at the time, is a NYC-based membership-driven NGO that gathers architects, planners, and designers together in several capacities to produce reports, policy recommendations, and programming on issues related to urban design and environment. One of their key programs, the Forefront Fellowship, brings together a group of New Yorkers working in the design field to spend nine months researching and investigating a rotating issue or theme, culminating in a report with policy and design recommendations. In the 2018-

2019 fellowship year, the theme was “Shelter For All.” After an initial orientation process that involved heavy input (or, as some felt, propaganda) from the city’s

Department of Homeless Services--during which the Forefront Fellows were given tours of city shelters where they had to turn over their cell phones before entering a building, and were told that the most useful project they could produce would focus on designing a

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“21st century homeless shelter,” the Fellows split into groups based on focus area and began to hold conversations with outside stakeholders. The group that contacted me planned to focus on public space and design, and having heard about PTH’s work, reached out to see if they could meet with members and staff to learn more about their perspective on homelessness and urban design.

In our initial conversation, the Fellows approached me (in my role as PTH’s research associate/coordinator) with a set of questions that they wanted to discuss with

PTH members. Those questions went as follows:

History 1. How has public spaces in the City changed over the years for better or worse? Stigma 2. What do you think are the biggest stigmas that homeless people face? Design 3. Do you believe that our streets and public spaces should play a role in supporting the homeless? a. - If yes, ideally, how so? 4. What would a park that is designed to not exclude the homeless look like? a. - How about other spaces such as: Subway stations/transport hubs, public streets, spaces around shelters and housing, etc? 5. What are some spaces in the city that are exclusive/oppressive and should be changed? 6. Are there any successful spaces in NYC that you think do not discriminate toward the homeless? 7. What other amenities should be provided in addition to public bathrooms that would provide a more dignified everyday life for homeless people? Policies 8. How are public spaces currently policed? Are the homeless often asked to leave a space? Where does such behavior happen most (subways, sidewalks, parks, etc)? How often do homeless people get arrested? What are they getting arrested for? 9. How can street outreach be improved in the public realm? (E-mail Correspondence, December 11 2018)

PTH members met with several of the Forefront Fellows shortly after this correspondence to discuss these questions further and share their ideas based on first-

151 hand experience and the organization’s own approach to homelessness and urban design.

The clash of epistemologies between the approaches of urban design and homeless activism became clear almost immediately; in thanking PTH for meeting with them, one of the Fellows noted that “The work that you guys do for the homeless is legendary.”

Almost immediately, a PTH member responded “Well, we are the homeless.” This brief exchange--which was not the first or last time I observed a similar conversation between

PTH and its interlocutors--set a tone for the remainder of our interactions. In combination with PTH’s traditional go-around question (“What do you picture when you think of homelessness?”), it made clear that our conversations were not going to take place in the realm of design, but rather start from the realm of homelessness--a major shift for the

Fellows, who admitted as much (as one of them put it, “We’re all having our assumptions challenged right now”) but made a good-faith effort to begin to think of design from a homeless perspective.

During this conversation and those that followed, PTH members challenged the theories of urban design--many of them closely aligned with Second Generation CPTED-

-that seemed to animate the Fellows’ ideas of homelessness in urban public space.

Slowly, we chipped away at some of the core assumptions that seemed to animate the discipline and practice of design as it related to homelessness. What emerged most pervasively--and became the point on which the Fellows felt most challenged by PTH-- was the idea of the ‘public’ within design, the imaginary group of people to whom designers felt accountable in their work (beyond, of course, the people signing their checks). PTH members explained how design elements traditionally understood as beneficial in public spaces--bars on benches, soft forms of surveillance, a lack of

152 seclusion--actually narrowed the definition of the public to specifically exclude homeless people (Kawash 1998; Miller 2007). Yet some of the Fellows parroted a line that PTH has heard frequently throughout their 20-year existence: The presence of homeless people can prevent the “broader public” from enjoying themselves in public space. In response to this, PTH asked the Fellows to talk directly with homeless New Yorkers--and not just those on the street, but also those in shelters--to understand how they felt about public space, thus reorienting the question to begin with those most excluded from design’s idea of the public.

These conversations led to a reckoning and a split within the group of Forefront

Fellows. Ultimately, three of them chose to continue to investigate what they now called the “public realm” from the perspective of homeless New Yorkers. They commented that they were invested in resisting “the solution without thinking about the consequences,” and began a slower process of research (using PTH’s research methods protocol) to carefully work to understand the already-existing ways that the public realm produced a narrow definition of the public, while simultaneously understanding that homeless folks had their own ways of utilizing and re-appropriating spaces not meant for them. As one of them put it in a later conversation, the process meant a redefining of design: “And when we say solution or intervention or design, I just want to be thinking that it's system design or design as opposed to like, you know, brand new pop up in the sky.” (Interview I

2018).

After working with PTH on a co-design process, these designers ultimately produced a proposal for New York City to establish an Office of the Public Realm (OPR)

153 that would take responsibility for public spaces throughout the city. As laid out in the proposal, the OPR would effectively reign in some of the anti-homeless impulses of BIDs and plaza managers by creating a “public realm bill of rights” that would hang in all public spaces stewarded by the OPR (replacing current signage that delineates rules and regulations, telling people what they can’t do). The four goals of the OPR, as developed by the Fellows, emerged as follows:

1. Protect the human rights of people experiencing homelessness. 2. Connect people living in the public realm with services that they need. 3. Defend the dignity of people experiencing homelessness by addressing stereotypes and bias. 4. Welcome people experiencing homelessness without excluding other New Yorkers. (OPR presentation 2020)

Embedded in the last goal, of course, is the troubled definition of public that emerges as the heart of the design/homelessness relationship. Even in a mode of design that aims, in good faith, to begin from the needs and desires of homeless New Yorkers, they become separated from the “general public.” In attempting to reconcile this contradiction, the

OPR proposal notes that:

We believe successful public spaces have a balance of different users - they are not dominated by one user group, yet they do not exclude specific user groups either. To promote an inclusive public realm, the OPR can review and approve plans for new and renovated open spaces with an eye toward access, opportunities for social connection, and community-building. It can provide case studies of how other projects have achieved this balance, and strategies for how new open spaces can do so as well. (OPR Proposal 2020).

Arguably, the OPR, while beginning from a homeless-informed starting point, would continue to replicate the problem of homeless people separated from the idea of the

“public” without strong intervention to correct this tendency within urban governance.

The example of the OPR and the Forefront Fellows’ journey to it as a concept

154 demonstrates that design can work within the best of intentions--and even override some of its own tendencies to regulate visibility through separating homelessness from the overall public--only to to the degree that it must also manage the role of urban governance. To see how design and homelessness play out through governance, I turn to a different example from my fieldwork: PTH’s “Free to Pee” campaign for public bathrooms, and our extensive interactions with the Department of Transportation surrounding this effort.

Free to Pee Campaign: Design as indicator of value

Urban design processes enact anti-homelessness through their work to limit the definition of the public, and therefore narrow the benefits of urban public space to exclude homeless people. But design itself is also mobilized as a tool of governance strategies that accomplish one of the means of green anti-homelessness: The visual mitigation of homeless communities. Through PTH’s Free to Pee campaign, an effort to move the city to install more public bathrooms in public spaces, I participated in a number of meetings with the Department of Transportation (DOT), the city agency that now oversees many public spaces--including, crucially, the plaza program. Participating in this campaign alongside PTH provided ample data demonstrating a second enactment of urban design in producing anti-homelessness: The uneven valuation of public amenities and infrastructures.

In the summer of 2018, PTH members decided to begin a campaign focused on pushing the city to install public bathrooms in many public spaces. The impetus for the campaign came from members of the 125th St Family (see Chapter 4) who came to the

155 office with a spate of tickets for public urination. The tickets had been handed out within blocks of PTH’s office and very close to the new Uptown Grand Central plaza area, formerly the central hangout for this group of precariously-housed East Harlem residents.

In learning more about the plaza, PTH had discovered the existence of an old “comfort station,” which is city-speak for a public bathroom. The comfort station had been shuttered since the late 1970s, around the time that the former New York Central

Railroad ceded control of the 125th St-Harlem train station to MetroNorth, the commuter rail system connecting Manhattan to suburbs in Westchester County and Connecticut. At that time, instead of becoming the responsibility of MetroNorth (and, by extension, the

MTA, of which MetroNorth is just one component), the comfort station reverted to DOT control, because DOT governs all street, sidewalk, and “underpass” areas. The comfort station sits directly underneath the train tracks, and so therefore falls into the latter category. Wedged underneath the tracks and decaying noticeably, the comfort station became, for a time, a location to fulfill its original function as a bathroom--but on the outside, rather than within its walls.

When Uptown Grand Central reached an agreement to open its eponymous plaza on the site, one of their first aesthetic interventions took the form of a mural painting over the comfort station. To PTH, this signalled quickly that the group had no interest in returning the building to its former function, despite simultaneous complaints about homeless people urinating in the plaza area. This contradiction emerged as central to the

Free to Pee campaign: The solution to public urination is to provide free bathrooms for all, and yet plaza managers and others involved in the design of public space resist these because of their association with the presence of homeless people. By diving headfirst

156 into this mismatch between political willpower and actual human needs from public space, PTH’s campaign generated crucial insights into how design, and particularly design guidelines in the plaza program, reproduce anti-homelessness through uneven indications of value.

Every plaza participating in the NPP program follows strict design guidelines provided by the DOT. Some of the guidelines follow a more traditional enforcement model that lays down acceptable and unacceptable behaviors within the plazas; for example, one such rule states that “No person shall spit, urinate, or defecate in or on any pedestrian plaza, except in a facility which is specifically designed for such purpose”

(DOT Plaza Rules 2016). They also limit the kinds of structures that may exist within the plazas, effectively banning any form of homeless encampment (“No person shall engage in camping, or erect or maintain a tent, structure, shelter or camp”). But these rules are separate from the plaza design guidelines, which set forward the priorities that DOT and their partners aim to follow in actually constructing a given plaza. These guidelines are far more open-ended; for example, “Design will strive to create environmentally friendly plazas that are appropriate to neighborhood context. Possible amenities may include tables and seating, trees and plants, lighting, public art, and drinking fountains.” (DOT

Plaza Guidelines 2019). This emphasis says quite clearly, through the medium of design, that recreational uses are valued far more highly than universal bodily functions.

When PTH met with DOT to discuss re-opening the 125th St Comfort Station, we met a hard wall of resistance. That refusal to negotiate operated along two intersecting lines of logic. The first came in DOT’s repeated insistence--spoken by the commissioner

157 herself--that “we’re not really in the bathroom business.” Unfortunately for DOT, it was quite easy to prove otherwise; DOT manages NYC’s very minimal presence (only 5 throughout the entire city) of Automated Public Toilets (APTs) as part of their street furniture initiative. When pressed on this, DOT representatives in a meeting admitted that the APTs existed as part of a “franchise,” but that they could do very little with them because of their own onerous design guidelines. While it is true that the APTs have their own set of guidelines having to do with distance from the street and proximity to water infrastructure, these requirements actually single out plazas as an ideal site for APTs--a fact to which DOT eventually owned, and, with PTH’s prompting, began moving to install one at the 125th St Plaza (Meeting A 2018; Meeting B 2019).

The second line of logic concerned the structural integrity of the long-abandoned comfort station itself. DOT argued repeatedly (although while refusing to provide any details) that the structure was unsound and could not be salvaged, and that they had already ascertained this truth through a structural integrity inspection done by contracted engineers. Yet across the street from the plaza lies the Corn Exchange Building, an old mercantile exchange building that, by 2013, had descended into a state of disrepair far worse than the unused comfort station; only the ground floor (out of 5 floors) even remained standing. In collaboration with private developers, the city rescued the building with $14 million of investment in rehabilitation and preparation for use as an office space

(NYC EDC 2017). PTH attempted to refute DOT’s logic about the comfort station’s uninhabitability with this example and an argument for the use value of public infrastructure: A public bathroom that saved homeless and Black and Brown New

Yorkers from the ongoing rise of overpolicing through public urination tickets has far

158 more value than a private building holding offices. Yet this argument ran into a wall repeatedly, and ultimately the DOT Commissioner told PTH that, because the design guidelines of the plaza focused largely on plants, trees, and seating for activities, that was their main priority.

This kind of double-maneuver within design as it relates to the desirability and visibility of homeless people--as opposed to planters and other hallmarks of green urbanism--is not confined to the plaza program. In a conversation with a staff member at the Bronx Borough President’s office, the topic of homelessness in park design arose, and so did the duality between design requirements and the need to manage homelessness through it. When discussing the presence of homeless Bronxites in St Mary’s Park, one of the larger and older parks in the South Bronx, the staff member noted that homeless people ought to be protected through park design:

By nature, people are like, “Oh, I don’t want the homeless person to harass the individual,” but sometimes mischievous folks who may or may not have been partaking in mind altering [substances], just be like, “hey, homeless person” and just in that mood and start harassing folks. It’s a matter of safety to me. That’s been, I would say, the biggest issue. Just on its face, you know, a regular neighborhood resident will react, “Oh, get the homeless out of the park.” But it’s where are they going to go? (Interview J, 2017)

But by the same token, he argued, designers must take safety into account, and use design to enhance the value of spaces whose natural “amenities” do not lend themselves so easily, particularly in linear parks or plazas that form below highways or under train tracks:

There is an overall safety concern. Any type of submerged space. We have below grade parks. There's one on 188th between Webster and Park Avenue, just south of Fordham Road. It's always been a hot spot, a concerning space just because something about being below grade makes people feel like there's less

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accessibility. People can see you less. There's less willingness to enter, so if something does go down, it seemed like, well, people are more likely to walk away, so there's that concern...But it's really about proper lighting, proper security. You know just when you look at say, Concrete Plant Park. That's below grade. A former industrial site. As long as there's secure access in the off hours when parks and employees aren't there, then it should for all intents and purposes be fine, in terms of safety issues. Even so, even if it's blocked off and there's adequate lighting, then one could argue that there's enough precautionary measures (Interview J, 2017).

Design, as these arguments go, can just as easily protect marginalized urban residents as it can exclude them. Such a statement would go in line with the broader definition of the “public” that, as shown above, tends to define itself against homeless people as its perpetual outside. Yet the more consistent function of urban design in public spaces--magnified through green urbanist projects such as plazas and submerged park spaces--lies in the realm of indicating value. Reading design guidelines, and listening to what political actors who interact and sometimes produce those guidelines, shows us that the shifting value within urban public spaces emerges in infrastructural possibilities-- where lights can be placed, where planters replace bathrooms, and where basic life functions such as urination become the privilege of those who can return to their home after utilizing public space. These choices, and the values that they shepherd through design, must be understood in their larger context: urban green development, and the green anti-homelessness that I argue it produces. To understand this, we turn to one final example: The role of two task forces and their attempts to reckon with homelessness in the gentrifying 125th St corridor.

“The Green Team” comes to 125th Street: Design, Parks, and Police

Two major state-driven development events have occurred in East Harlem in the past five years. The first, a municipal rezoning passed in 2015 that upzoned the

160 neighborhood was strongly contested by a coalition of community groups but ultimately shepherded through the city’s ULURP process by then-City Council Speaker Melissa

Mark-Viverito. The second, the extension of the MTA’s 2nd Avenue subway line from its current terminus of 96th St to a new multi-modal station connecting it with the 4/5/6 trains at 125th and Lexington and the Metro North commuter railroad at 125th and Park, currently projects for completion in 2022. Taken together, the rezoning and the extension of the 2nd

Avenue subway have created a perfect storm for the onset of a new wave of development in the eastern half of the 125th street corridor, essentially finishing off the work begun during the Bloomberg administration, when a rezoning along the central part of 125th St paved the way for the gentrification of much of central Harlem.

Picture the Homeless was well aware of this set-up when they agreed to take part in two very distinct but overlapping task forces in East Harlem in 2017. One of these groups, the 125th Street Task Force, emerged after the rezoning in response to more traditional concerns around homelessness and that major street: drug use, mental illness, and racialized fears of crime. However, as my ethnographic fieldwork demonstrates, this group soon began to intertwine environmental concerns with their admittedly-revanchist response to these social concerns, a shift that I argue could not possibly take place without the impetus of green anti-homelessness. Meanwhile, PTH was also asked to join another group, a gathering of stakeholders aiming to create a 125th St Community

Visioning Action Plan in the wake of the arrival of the 2nd Avenue subway. This latter group was organized by WE ACT for Environmental Justice; as suggested by the organization’s name, this task force explicitly centered questions of environmental and ecological health and well-being in their analysis and intervention in East Harlem.

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Participating in meetings as part of WEACT’s coalition demonstrated to me the centrality of the city’s green anti-homelessness agenda in future visions of the city. Taken together, these two task forces showed that the state, along with shadow-state actors working alongside it, understands the need to visually mitigate the presence of homelessness, and has chosen to largely rely on green anti-homelessness as the mode for doing so.

The 125th St Task Force began meeting in the summer of 2016, in response to the immediate crisis of K2 usage and the sudden attention to visible homelessness in East

Harlem (Goldfischer 2018). In the initial meetings I attended, the target was squarely on the back of local homeless communities, and the violent revanchism emulating from both local elected officials and non-official community members was shocking even to PTH, who has spent 20 years in similar battles. But by the time of my concentrated fieldwork in 2018-2019, the rhetoric had toned down, replaced with a focus on the design of urban spaces. In all my fieldwork, this shift within the 125th Street Task Force perhaps demonstrated the move to green anti-homelessness most clearly.

A meeting in early 2019 encapsulated the role of urban design as a means to modulate the visibility of homelessness in a gentrifying neighborhood while moving away from a reliance on Broken Windows policing. At this meeting, attended by a litany of representatives from city agencies (DOT, NYPD, DHS, Sanitation, Parks, and several city-funded homeless outreach providers) alongside local elected officials and local organizations including PTH, a community board member raised concerns about a park a block off the “homeless hotspot” at 125th and Lexington. After initially asking the NYPD to increase patrols in the area to monitor homeless people sleeping in the park, a staff

162 person representing local Councilwoman Diana Ayala instead steered the conversation to how park design might address this “issue” without police involvement:

In the summertime we hope to also increase programming a little bit more to make sure that safety for the children is going to be there also to promote positive programming. This is an idea from the councilwoman where we have positive programs. And I put some ideas there with the yoga classes or reading programs, book club or anything you guys might suggest and hope, because when folks see that they're continuous people there, I mean, folks come into the park and be envisioning that it will help the park in terms of not having certain things that shouldn't be happening. (Meeting B 2019).

At this meeting, and several others around the same time, the central issue that arose was this: How to control access to this park space without “kicking people out,” which, as one

NYPD employee present put it ruefully, “we just can’t do anymore--or at least not in the same way.” In that sense, the idea of using design, through street furniture to encourage active participation in the space, emerges as one solution to the lost “opportunity” (from the police perspective) of revanchist policies.

A tension emerged between two approaches: legislative and design-based interventions. A group of local residents advocated for simply designating the entire park area as a playground, when in fact playground equipment only covers about a third of the area. The Parks Department employees in attendance were clearly uncomfortable with this concept, which became popular with residents because it meant that only adults supervising children would be allowed in the space. Failing that, residents asking for a larger sign design, on the other hand, found much broader support amongst the officials present (and somewhat less amongst the residents). As one representative from the

NYPD put it:

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We’re very much in support of positive programming as those things are happening throughout the day. We can activate the park in that way. That naturally will help to keep people from going in there and doing those things because it’s an open park. And hopefully because there will be lots of people, they're using it in a productive way. And so, again, it's changing behaviors so people say, oh, that park’s not available, so we’re not going to go there. So those are just... there’s steps. But they're and they take a little while to accomplish new things, about 10000 repetitions to change muscle memory. Same thing with just human nature.

Activating the space, a fundamental tenet of urban design and Second Generation

CPTED has, as evidenced here, made it into the NYPD’s vocabulary for talking about how to prevent homeless New Yorkers from spending quality time in open public space.

And the fact that this entire conversation revolved around a park is not at all insignificant.

The importance of green space--in its many forms, from plazas to older parks to waterfront areas--emerged as crucial in the other task force that PTH participated in during this same timeframe.

WEACT is one of the older environmental justice groups in New York City, having cut their teeth in battles over air quality and pollution in Harlem during the 1970s.

Their involvement in the 125th Corridor in East Harlem, however, represented a departure from their work both locationally and methodologically. Rather than pushing the city in particular policy directions through a combination of community organizing and advocacy, WEACT decided to instead work within frameworks already produced by the city: The aforementioned East Harlem rezoning and the upcoming extension of the

2nd Avenue Subway to 125th Street. In their eventual report, WEACT acknowledged the negative changes to the neighborhood that would arise from these decisions:

The timing and combined impact of both projects are expected to spur a dramatic wave of new development that, without a guiding community-oriented framework, will likely result in inequitable growth, compound social and

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environmental challenges, and accelerate the decades-long trend towards gentrification and displacement in the neighborhood (WEACT 2019: 1).

Yet instead of looking to push back against the inequities inherent in these forms of top- down state-driven development, WEACT chose to create a steering committee in order to produce a report, which they called a “community visioning action plan,” an acquiescence to the inevitability of development, environmental degradation, and displacement. The report essentially aimed to justify particular angles and initiatives in the development process, chief amongst them an environmental justice perspective. So where did homelessness, long hypervisible in the neighborhood, fit into WEACT’s process and vision for East Harlem?

Similarly to the process with plazas and the 125th Street Task Force described previously, PTH participated in WEACT’s community visioning and steering committee from the beginning, and it’s likely that they were invited more out of fear at their exclusion rather than actual desire for a homeless perspective. In the initial meetings, which I could not attend due to my course schedule, a PTH member told me that homelessness immediately became the focus issue of a process that asked local residents and stakeholders to identify environmental concerns in the neighborhood. Of course,

PTH called attention to this dynamic, with the result that other participants became afraid to openly express their hostility: “The first time they said homeless 26 times, the second it was down to 17, the third it was 5, and by the fourth it was just ‘those people.’” By the time I joined the meetings, homelessness remained at the center of an environmental development agenda, but mostly unspoken as such, thanks to PTH’s intervention.

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In the spring of 2018, WEACT began to plan and implement a survey of people spending time in the area of 125th and Park Avenue--the hub of the proposed transit- oriented development arising from the extension of the 2nd Avenue subway. They very much wanted PTH to be the ones doing the survey, to the point that they offered to pay

PTH members $20/hour to do the survey. However, they also did not want PTH members to target homeless residents for completing the survey, instead asking them to focus on

“transit riders and local residents” (Meeting C 2018). But when PTH asked for a question about policing to be included in the survey, WEACT’s staff immediately overruled them

(so much for a community-based process in the steering committee!). When we returned to PTH’s office to report this offer, members and staff huddled and finally decided to send a terse email to WEACT demanding a shift in the orientation of the survey:

I just want to reiterate that it's very important that the policing question be asked in the general commuter/residents survey and not just in a specialized survey targeted at homeless people. We know from our work in the area that over policing is a major issue in the neighborhood--and does not only affect homeless people. This is, we think, one of the major reasons for PTH's involvement in this project, and so we want to make sure that the issues that affect longtime East Harlemites (including both homeless and housed folks) are included to do this survey justice. We also understand that the more "safe" commuters feel, the less safe homeless folks feel (this is backed up by years of our member's experiences as well as research done by PTH to combat the effects of broken windows policing). It would be hard for PTH to continue in the project if the survey doesn't address the needs of longtime residents; one way for it to do so is to ensure that the question of policing is raised here.

Similarly, we feel it would be unjust to homeless people to exclude them from the general survey, even if it's done by means of a separate survey that only targets them. This is a big part of PTH's mission, and one of the reasons that we're happy to be part of this steering committee--but we want to make sure that these concerns are able to be addressed in the survey.

We added a question asking about what people find good in the area because otherwise, this is full of leading questions that assume that the neighborhood only

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needs to be improved--when, in fact, we know that many things are "already great" about 125th St.

Finally, we questioned the final question comparing this corridor to Grand Central and Penn Station because it's a leading question (nobody will ever say that there are more resources diverted here than in those spaces), and we feel it adds little to the survey. (Personal Correspondence 2018).

After an increasingly angry back-and-forth over the phone, PTH won some of their concessions--they agreed to put a question about things that respondents liked about the neighborhood in its present state--but WEACT adamantly refused to allow the survey to be administered to homeless residents. And so in this way, commuters passing through the 125th Street Metro North Station became more important data sources than the homeless community living beneath the steps on which they walked.

Fig 5.1: Snippet from WEACT survey.

Unsurprisingly, then, the environmental priorities that emerged from the survey and made their way into the final community visioning plan did not reflect the homeless

167 perspective on sustainability and environmental justice demonstrated in the previous chapter. Instead, the report argued that “Core neighborhood challenges include high rates of asthma, substance abuse, homelessness, chronic disease, climate vulnerabilities, and poverty” (WEACT 2019: 9). And the three environmental priorities that emerged through the survey and became written into the report similarly reflected a housed, affluent perspective on urban environments. These three priorities were waste management, revitalizing green public space, and noise pollution.

It’s notable that East Harlem has one of the highest amounts of access to parks of any neighborhood in the city. In addition to Central Park, the neighborhood includes the

East River Park (a long stretch of landscaped green area along the waterfront, including a pedestrian and bicycle path), Thomas Jefferson Park (a large neighborhood park with a playground and several basketball courts), and Marcus Garvey Park (a 4 square block park with a promenade, amphitheatre, recreation center, basketball courts, baseball fields, and many walking paths). Nobody could argue that the neighborhood faces a lack of access to green space. Rather, the first two environmental goals identified by WEACT’s report--waste management and revitalizing green public space--reflect directly on the fact that most of the green spaces in the neighborhood remain relatively friendly to homeless

East Harlemites. As PTH has long known (and has been backed up by recent research),

NYC Parks employees often have tacit agreements with homeless park residents, resulting in somewhat of a “live and let live” environment that allows homeless New

Yorkers to be far more visible in traditional park areas than in newer green development projects (Krinsky and Simonet 2017). The displacement of homeless folks, historically and in contemporary New York, occurs through green revitalization and development

168 projects, exactly the sort implied as beneficial in the report (Goldfischer 2019a). Making waste management and green revitalization the top two environmental priorities in this report directly reflects the reality of green anti-homelessness as a new strategy for gentrification and development in communities with plenty of visible homelessness. And as such, the WEACT report and process gives us an enormously valuable insight into how such environmental justifications build the groundwork for the process of exclusion and mitigation through design explored in this chapter.

Conclusion

Green design emerges here as the glue in green anti-homelessness, and as the fulcrum that pulls together its two main functions: Mitigating visibility and reframing value through defining sustainability. And while the obvious anti-homelessness of previous generations of urban design may have been toned down through landscaping frameworks such as “second generation CPTED” explored here, the evidence here shows that designers should not be held innocent, despite good intentions and better engagement with homeless people. However, I find hope in proposals such as the Office for the Public

Realm, which begin from the belief that all urban design inevitably becomes anti- homeless unless concerted efforts characterize the project from the very beginning.

Homeless people have to be put in charge; not as “consultants” or “advisers,” but ultimately as the ones pulling the strings in public space design, if we are to successfully resist green anti-homelessness through design mechanisms.

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Conclusion

Writing in the epicenter of a global pandemic changes almost everything about the future research directions that I imagined discussing in this conclusion. The last two months of this process, which I had hoped might involve the opportunity to reflect on this dissertation project, instead provided an up close and personal view of a quiet and dead- feeling New York City. From my home and “office” in Elmhurst, Queens, situated just blocks from one of the city’s largest public hospitals, I heard near-constant sirens for about 3-4 weeks as COVID-19 patients were brought for treatment. It became very hard to see the bigger pictures of this project as my own uncertainty about a future seemingly stuck in limbo between academia and activism became magnified by the mass uncertainty that we all face at this time of writing, in mid-April of 2020.

About a month ago, New York, along with many parts of the world, was put under what essentially amounts to a “stay home” order. We are only supposed to leave our homes to shop for essentials such as food and medicine or exercise in uncrowded parks. Of course, the basis for such an edict begins with the assumption of having a home in which to stay. New York’s PAUSE order, as it is officially known, has laid bare the

170 centrality of safe housing as one of the most crucial determinants of health, wealth, and future upward mobility. As tracked by regularly-appearing statistics in local news coverage, the most impoverished and non-white neighborhoods in the city--primarily in

Queens and the Bronx--have been hit the hardest by the pandemic. Even more tellingly, statistical analysis has shown that the highest correlation amongst many factors--not just race and income, but also presence of service-workers and neighborhood density-- belongs to household size, a good measure for overcrowding caused by the ever- unaffordable NYC housing market (Dobkin et al 2020). In a sense, the longtime argument of housing organizers has been made for them in the flesh by COVID-19--the struggle to pay rent in New York City is literally one of life or death.

Homelessness, especially when thought of in its position at the bottom of the housing totem pole, becomes an even more extreme case of housing status impacting the ability to survive the pandemic. As homeless advocates predicted almost immediately, shelters became cesspools for COVID-19, with one shelter in San Francisco reporting a staggering 70 cases (Fuller 2020). Homeless advocates across the US, under the rallying cry “homeless can’t stay home,” have pressured cities to simultaneously ease homeless

“sweeps” that evict people from public space while temporarily housing both shelter and street residents in some of the many vacated hotel rooms across central business districts.

The response to these dual suggestions demonstrates the continued centrality of homeless visuality in the mode of urban governance, even amidst unprecedented crisis. Without fanfare, at the time of this writing, NYC has generally pulled back from move-along orders directed at homeless people in public space, although some harassment remains through the ongoing “diversion” pilot on trains. It’s not hard to hazard a guess as to why:

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Most public spaces where homelessness becomes visible (except the trains, which remain crowded with low-income essential workers) have by now emptied out. There’s nobody to see homeless people, and so the “live and let live” attitude that PTH has long called for now becomes an easy option for the city, as they divert policing resources to instead monitoring parks for correct “social distancing.”

Yet cities have been far more reluctant to take up advocates’ other main suggestion, housing homeless people in now-vacant hotels. The idea of housing homeless people in empty rooms and buildings most ironically directly reflects PTH’s longstanding project of “Housing not Warehousing,” the participatory action-research project from nearly a decade ago that began with counting vacant buildings in the city, resulted in a report showing that the city contained more than double the vacant apartments needed to house its entire population, and led to the idea (discussed in Chapter 5) of using the image of an empty residential tower as emblematic of homelessness. The COVID-19 pandemic has seemingly changed the perspective for other groups--now, the call to repurpose hotel rooms includes more mainstream non-profit organizations that once shunned PTH’s proposal of converting vacant buildings to housing as too radical.

Coalitions in New York and San Francisco including a mix of radical homeless activists and more traditional NGOs have pushed city governments to do just this with hotels in the midst of the pandemic, as a means to both get people out of epidemiologically dangerous shelters and to temporarily house those on the street. As of this writing, these groups had been advocating for four weeks, with only recently small victories accruing; in NYC, the administration relented to move the small number of 2500 homeless people into hotels, far less than the 30,000 hotel rooms called for by advocates (Gross 2020). It

172 seemed like the action that finally pushed the city into relenting (at even a small number) was a campaign that used online fundraising platforms to raise private donations in order to purchase hotel rooms for homeless New Yorkers. Whether in fear of lawsuits or in recognition of strong momentum swinging toward the idea of hotel rooms, this action forced the city’s hand.

The biggest question, of course, is whether this potential refiguring of alliances and relationship to the demand for homeless housing will hold sway after the first, most devastating wave of the pandemic, or whether we will return to something that more resembles business as usual, with most groups shying away from making the direct connection between the city’s political economy of housing and the direct needs of homeless New Yorkers. Will organizations that previously focused largely on shelter become committed advocates for actual housing? I suspect that no small part of the city’s reluctance to agree to place homeless New Yorkers in hotels lies from the fear that it might become an entrenched model, once the simplicity of housing as the solution to homelessness becomes more widely understood. But similarly, some members of PTH

(while publicly supporting the demands of the campaign) worry that when the hotels reopen and homeless people get evicted and return to streets or shelters, those who had been housed in this way will be placed in a second-tier and receive less priority in the search for actual permanent housing--in effect deepening the shelter-industrial complex.

Similarly, with regards to the visibility of homelessness in public space, questions abound about a post-COVID world.

While it’s hard to answer any of these questions definitively, I believe that we can draw some insights from the framework of green anti-homelessness as presented in this

173 dissertation. I want to understand green anti-homelessness as a framework that highlights the way that anti-homelessness is completely baked into nearly every urban process we might conceivably study. This project has aimed to illuminate the particular ways that anti-homelessness has become central to urban ecological governance, and in doing so tells us something about the violent exclusions that characterize such a process: the way that marginal understandings of sustainability become further distanced from ideas of economic and ecological value, and the way that the regime of visual mitigation deploys landscape design as its tool of choice. But much the same study could (and should) be made of public health governance in the wake of a pandemic. I think that we could use a similar research approach to understand the particular form that anti-homelessness will take in the COVID response. We know it will be there, and when we locate it, we can then say particular things about that response that will have broader implications for studies of urban public health.

To facilitate thinking about how this project might open pathways for thinking about anti-homelessness in other contexts, and also for understanding other forms of marginalization inherent in green development (and resonances across contexts), I now elaborate on some crucial themes that I see as emergent from this research. Some of these echo points already made throughout the project, while others suggest new lessons that didn’t emerge as clearly until I reflected upon the project as a whole. These themes also reflect some of the future directions that I’ve imagined for my own research moving forward.

Visibility and Encounter: The Right to be Unbothered

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The ability to control one’s own visibility to others remains one of the most critical and unspoken human rights of our era. And while entire debates rage about digital privacy and freedom from surveillance, and any attempt in the United States to use surveillance technology in order to track COVID-19 hotspots will no doubt face strong resistance, little conversation outside of academic work (Sparks 2010; Mitchell and

Heynen 2009) focuses on the struggles that homeless people face in controlling their own visibility. This project has demonstrated that the city remains more committed than ever to removing that ability, even as their tactics for doing so shift. Their response to

COVID-19 continues this obsession with seeing homelessness, as the temporary cease- fire along the lines of move-along orders demonstrates. Without a viewing public, there’s little point in working to mitigate the sight of homelessness.

But what will happen when the PAUSE order lifts and we all return to public space? Here it bears thinking about the broader implications of this project’s findings about the role of governance in visual marginalization. While this project has focused in particular on the visibility of homelessness, the attempt to mitigate the sight of undesirable people extends far beyond this one discrete category. As some of the background research and literature review for this project demonstrates, the category of

“unsightliness” shifts over time. It also intersects very closely with public health narratives; as Susan Craddock (2000) has shown, discourses of disease and contagion are closely tied to both images of deformity and the sight of illness in public. It stands to reason that the public recovery period from COVID-19 will also contain its own visual narratives of health, contagion, and danger, and that some people will fit these images more concretely than others. Since we already know that the disease has been far more

175 impactful for Black and Hispanic New Yorkers than for those who are White or Asian, it seems likely that any visual discourses that emerge around the disease during this recovery period will be highly racialized. Already in my neighborhood, which is split almost evenly between immigrants from East Asia and Central America, I notice unevenness in whose presence provokes passerby to walk out of the sidewalk to maintain a more-than-six-feet distance. When all the white Manhattanites return from their second homes in the Hamptons (to where they fled almost immediately), one imagines that this visual discourse will get reinforced in the city’s public spaces. Strangely, this could have a positive impact on homeless New Yorkers by creating more room for chosen invisibility, if wider berths in public parks become the norm.

Often, when people find out what I do for a living and where my work focuses, they ask me what they should do when they see a homeless person on the street. I usually tell them that these interactions are highly individual and personal, but also that they might consider a couple of things. Drawing on what I’ve learned from years of working directly with and alongside street homeless folks in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and New

York, I tend to first suggest that we have to acknowledge the humanity of people suffering in public. This means try to avoid the impulse to avert our eyes, which is deeply ingrained into our collective response to public despair, disability, and desperation. As individuals, we tend to look away from such things, to give them a wide berth, and to not then discuss them. One way of describing this action is that which reinforces abjection, which Julia Kristeva defines as “a vortex of summons and repulsion [that] places the one haunted by it literally beside himself” (Kristeva 1982; 1). The repulsion that lies at the heart of abjection seems to me the most consistently-accurate way to describe how

176 passerby treat homeless people in passing--a potent mixture of disgust and fear, always racialized and based on perception and behavior more than actual human interaction (Lee and Farrell 2003). This repulsion, as I have demonstrated in this project, becomes institutionalized at the level of city policy through the unremitting focus on mitigating visibility, rather than addressing the structural roots of homelessness and directly housing people.

Yet the alternate extreme--full acceptance of homeless visibility in public urban space--poses problems because it removes the ability for people to control their own visibility. As Tony Sparks has argued, many homeless activists fight for the “ability to not be visible as homeless” as a means to resist anti-homelessness in public urban spaces

(Sparks 2010: 845). Invisibility, different than marginalization, can be a tool to reclaim privacy and thus some element of humanity amidst environments of abjection. As a claim to privacy while living life out in public, Nick Blomley suggests “the right to be left alone” as a feasible way to think about a pro-homeless notion of privacy (Blomley 2005:

619). Yet arguably that act of “leaving alone” is exactly what green anti-homelessness aims to accomplish through its acts of visual mitigation, rather than disappearance. Plaza managers could conceivably argue that they are, in fact, leaving homeless New Yorkers alone by not calling the police on them, even as they utilize green design to create a landscape that moves around stationary people (recall the individual who noted that

“space is easier to deal with than people”). This may be leaving people alone, but it remains harmful, as shown through the exclusions discussed in Chapter 4. Leaving people “alone” also implies a certain brand of callousness that again dips back into the discourses of inhumanity that haunt the sight of public difference.

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A better frame to explore further might be the right to be unbothered. This framing leaves room for the acknowledgement of humanity, while moving from “left alone” to “unbothered” more specifically pinpoints the particular kind of anti- homelessness that results from many interactions taking place in public space. Further work on the right to be unbothered might also take note of its direct resonance with one of the major complaints made about homeless people by the housed population: that the sight of homeless people is “bothersome.” Protecting the right of homeless people to be unbothered by passerby--as opposed to protecting the rights of the propertied to be unbothered by the homeless--flips the terms of engagement that surround this encounter at present.

In thinking about visibility in public space, it becomes highly useful to turn to the idea of encounter, a relation that itself depends on the sense of sight, alongside other perceptive functions. Famously, Frantz Fanon theorized the encounter between himself--a black man--and a white child as a crucible moment in the production of difference. After he has been seen (“Look!”) and hailed (“A Negro!”), he tells us exactly what occurs after recognition has been called out, and the encounter has sedimented:

And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. (Fanon 1967: 110).

This embodiment of the encounter, beginning with the visual but ending up in Fanon’s own body, has been termed ‘the epidermalization of the racial look’ by Stuart Hall (Hall

1996: 20). Epidermalization, for Hall, represents a way of underlining Fanon’s own core concept--that ideas of the body, constructed through sensory mechanisms such as vision,

178 are always constituted with and alongside race, and therefore should be read through encounters as constituting a “marker,” not “evidence,” of the production of difference

(Hall 1996: 20).

In much the same way, encounters that surround homelessness in public urban space should be understood as markers of difference, not evidence. The sense of vision, as I have argued throughout, underpins the marking of difference between homeless and housed New Yorkers, a difference that in turn acts as a key ingredient in modes of governance such as green anti-homelessness. When plaza managers use non-punitive second generation CPTED design to mitigate the visibility of homelessness, they are setting up encounters to proceed in a particular way: designed to lower the possibility of actual, human encounters between housed and homeless. When the MTA deploys police and outreach workers to “divert” homeless people into shelter, they are utilizing an encounter to demarcate difference (after all, one of the supposed behaviors that requires

‘diversion’ is taking up more than one seat on the train with luggage--yet tourists will never be asked to go to a shelter). When police execute move-along orders against homeless people who are doing nothing illegal in public space, they create a marker of difference between those who are welcome and not welcome in public sight. And in doing so they reinforce the distribution of the sensible as described by Ranciere, the

“nothing to see here, keep on moving” aesthetic that now characterizes anti-homeless policing.

To understand these instances, which this project brings to the fore, as markers rather than evidence of difference means to get very clear about the materiality of homeless visuality, as PTH has been trying to do for many years. Ultimately, the

179 difference made by the visuality of homelessness as a marker must be understood as an intertwinement between epistemology with material impact and a material difference with epistemological consequences. The material difference--the ability to go home to a secure dwelling--drives the image in its historical rootedness, as I show in Chapter 1 and

Chapter 3. But the ontological status of homelessness cannot be fully encompassed by the material fact of roof or no roof; many PTH members are now housed but still get treated as homeless in public space, marked as different due to how they appear to the rest of the city. The knowledge of homelessness, driven by its visuality and solidified through encounters, presents one of the thickest barriers to actually ending the material condition of homelessness--as evidenced through the city’s complete reliance on controlling visibility rather than producing housing. Ultimately, The Difference that Seeing Makes is about this space in between epistemologies and ontologies of homelessness, and seeks to show one particular way that the ability to know homelessness through images and encounters becomes mediated: green anti-homelessness.

Defining Sustainability

Green anti-homelessness does not only carry forward epistemologies of homelessness that call for mitigation of unsightliness. It also, as I have shown, advances a very narrow definition of urban sustainability. This definition hews closely to what Bruce

Braun identifies as the “technocratic” idea of sustainability that relies on urban planning and design to achieve environmentally-beneficial outcomes, rather than a more political understanding that would see sustainability as completely interwoven with social and economic justice (Braun 2005: 640). The idea of sustainability that I have shown as

180 emergent from New York City’s recent environmental development agenda largely sees sustainability as taking place through green public space, green infrastructure, and encouraging environmentally-friendly economic activities such as farmers’ markets. And as shown, in enacting this narrow idea, it in turn devalues other forms of sustainability, especially those that emanate from the margins, such as those that PTH members consider “ecological engineering” such as can recycling and waste repurposing.

Following a theoretical pathway centered around the narrowing of sustainability would yield interesting further research. Of all the components of this dissertation research, the narrowing definition of sustainability seems ripe with the most potential for transnational resonance. The dissonance between indigenous environmental knowledge and developmentalist visions pushed forward by state and NGO actors has long carried fascination for theorists (c.f. Scott 1998). Ideas of sustainability, in particular, form massive epistemic divides between development regimes and those at direct risk of displacement (de la Cadena 2015). Conversations between PTH, myself, and activists from other contexts--especially Brazil, where longstanding movements for land rights are now embracing an ethos of grassroots environmentalism as their land is destroyed by governmentally-backed burning--have led to ideas for transnational research in this area.

Moreover, such a project would solidify the connection between homelessness and the environment within environmental literature, the sphere where it has the least purchase at the moment. When I have given versions of this dissertation as talks at environmentally- focused conferences, the idea of a broadened definition of sustainability always seems to rise to the forefront in conversation. The body of literature understood as “critical environmental justice” itself has called for a broadening of the idea of environmental

181 justice (Pellow 2018). Broadening a definition of sustainability might therefore fit nicely within a mode of literature that aims to always connect the environmental to the social while keeping close eyes on the way that “green” can often be mobilized as a form of injustice, masquerading under good intentions. Homelessness, in this way, becomes an analytic through which to see a broader trend within urban ecological governance.

Yet I also want to waive a small flag of caution to myself and others who might jump down this research pathway. We need to know so much more about how dominant ideas of sustainability are formed, and in particular the history of those ideas forming off the back of what governmental agencies call “frontline communities”--the people most impacted by a lack of sustainability. This dissertation did not aim to produce a genealogy of urban sustainability, but one needs to be done before attempting to rigorously theorize homeless sustainability more broadly. It might be that the seemingly-obvious connections between the homeless sustainability practices that PTH understands as “ecological engineering” are not, in fact, as closely related to the Global South practices of ragpicking and waste-recycling that they seem so akin to, despite their seeming similarities and shared devaluation. We need so much more information before making that connection. Instead, I think we stand on safer ground with this strand of research if we begin with epistemology. The epistemological divide that I witnessed throughout my fieldwork between PTH and its governmental and NGO interlocutors, I believe, gives us the strongest vantage point to begin further investigating the narrowness of urban sustainability as enacted by most mainstream actors. As a final example, when PTH planted flowers along 125th Street as part of the “They say gentrify, we say beautify” action, the leadership of Uptown Grand Central (the local BID controlling the 125th St

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Plaza) offered no resistance, and in fact tried to claim a partnership that didn’t exist during media interviews. And yet, these flowers only lasted about a month before being torn up by employees of Uptown Grand Central--not because PTH had planted them with a definite political purpose, but because they did not fit into the official design guidelines provided by DOT for the plaza program, which calls for only a certain kind of planter and certain kinds of plants. This experience is of course highly illustrative of green anti- homelessness, but also calls our attention again to the ways that epistemologies of sustainability become limiting in both their conception and in their enactment. Any future study of these ideas of sustainability, and how their narrowness impacts the material conditions of homelessness, might begin best from this epistemological perspective.

New vs Existing Urban Practices

Finally, the framework of green anti-homelessness also shows us the implicit preference for new development, new activities, and new forms of urbanism contained within urban governance. Even leaving aside the epistemic divide between PTH members’ ideas of sustainability and those presented by city agencies, an even bigger difference remains crucial: There is nothing new or shiny about the already-existing sustainability practices that homeless and other marginalized communities do as a matter of survival. Much of the “value” understood to emanate from the city’s green development agenda seems to require a veneer of newness, which means (in practice) that somebody making a substantial salary in an office near City Hall is either appropriating the ideas and practices that come out of low-income communities and spinning them as original, or, more likely, that the folks meeting to plan such “new” initiatives are entirely

183 ignorant of these projects’ relationship (both conceptual and material) to already-existing practices.

Much of the impulse for “newness” in planning and environmental initiatives leads directly to displacement, because of its propensity to literally replace old sights with new. As Ipsita Chatterjee has shown in her work on development and planning in

Ahmedabad, India, displacement’s role as the underlying logic of capital accumulation is made and re-made again through urban planning itself--the initiatives that seek to renew and replace the city on a regular basis in the name of development (Chatterjee 2014).

Green anti-homelessness follows this same logic, but its displacement is often incidental rather than direct, at least in the context of New York City. The need for newness in green urban development has brought us the High Line and Hudson Yards; unlike the creation of parks in the 20th century, there were no homeless encampments or shantytowns on these sites before their redevelopment. The city could claim that they displaced nobody directly (although even the creators of the High Line have now acknowledged their role in the indirect displacement of thousands via the gentrification spurred by the project). But as I have shown here, the displacement instead took place indirectly, through the loss of space for the vital ecological and economically beneficial activity of can recycling. The impulse for new sustainability practices, and the total disregard for already-existing ways of living, remains a strong connection between green anti-homelessness and other forms of capitalist urban development.

To explore this theme further, more ethnographic work that details how exactly that “newness” becomes codified is needed. I inadvertently got a glimpse of one of the processes that structures this through a fellowship that I received to join a non-profit tech

184 incubator in Brooklyn for three months as I was finishing up the research for this project.

The fellowship brought together a mix of professionals: Designers, ‘product managers’ (a title that seems to be a one-size-fits-all for corporately-jargoned professional bosses), and engineers. The fourth group were called “experts,” which included me, and comprised an interesting mix of different activist backgrounds (and me as the token academic in the room). The theme of the fellowship focused on housing in New York City, and the goal was to quickly generate ideas for tech-based solutions to housing injustice. While highly skeptical of the project, I did my best to educate my colleagues about the histories and geographies of housing in the city and to bring in PTH as subject matter experts (thus getting them paid for their time). I expected, and found, an epistemological divide between those with an activist background and those coming from the more corporate world. But what surprised me most was that I somehow got a glimpse, through one process that we all learned to use during the fellowship, of how ideas emanating from people directly impacted by an issue become codified as new and therefore worthy of planning initiatives: Civic service design.

The process of civic service design, as taught to us that summer, seemed to combine basic qualitative research methods with the sort of research that goes on in marketing firms about group preferences for products. A group of people directly impacted by an issue were brought in, and we were told to design activities to get them to share their experiences and ideas. Everything was written down on sticky notes (I learned that this world has a great preference for sticky notes, reasons unknown) and placed on butcher paper. The next step then was to thematize the data, meaning to place the sticky notes into roughly-similar groups and to name those categories accordingly. But this is

185 where the process diverged wildly from the community-based research and popular education that I am trained in: This process of thematizing, which is where all the analysis springs from, happened after the group of directly impacted people left the room! This was unbelievable to me; I pushed back, arguing that it was impossible to do good analysis when enforcing such an artificial separation. But no, apparently our ability

(not at all trained, simply due to power and privilege) to analyze people’s ideas and sentiments after they had left the room was a key component of civic service design.

Eventually, once ideas had sedimented and gone through an internal (again) selection process, the directly-impacted folks would be brought back, and asked to give feedback and share their preferences amongst several ideas. But by then, it was too late: The ideas were no longer their own.

Civic service design is wildly popular across New York City agencies and NGOs these days; in fact, the only interviews for non-academic jobs that I’ve had came about because of my (however brief) exposure to it. And there may be some benefits--after all, it’s more engaged with actual day-to-day existence than the traditional model of ‘white- man-behind-a-desk-with-a-map.’ But I saw firsthand exactly how the ideas brought by people directly impacted by housing justice became rebranded as “new” and “different.”

And so it is not hard to see how this process might take place around green anti- homelessness. As I was concluding my research, the Parks Department had hired a “civic technologist” (as those trained in Civic Design are often called) to run a project in the

Bronx to consider “revitalizing” an old park area, often frequented by homeless New

Yorkers. It seems plausible to imagine that they will no longer be directly excluded from the planning process--after all, the plaza workshop that I attended during my fieldwork

186 also reached out to local homeless residents. But will their ideas remain their own after the civic design process ends? Or will they too be subsumed into a planning process that transforms ideas from lived experience into “new” ways of creating urban sustainability?

This process suggests that we have far more to learn about green anti-homelessness through ethnographic work focusing on its processes and the day-to-day modes of governmentality that produce such narrow ideas of sustainability. Doing so, in partnership always with homeless activists, provides one strong future research pathway for a more socially, environmentally, and epistemologically just city.

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Appendix A: Interviews

A. Interview with Community Board 5 official. August 3 2018. New York, NY B. Interview with landscape designer #1. October 15 2018. New York, NY C. Interview with PTH member JR, March 11 2019. New York, NY D. Interview with landscape designer #2. October 15 2018. New York, NY E. Interview with professional photographer. September 27 2018. New York, NY F. Interview with former outreach worker. November 20 2018. New York NY G. Interview with landscape designer #3. September 24 2018. New York NY H. Interview with landscape designer #4. October 18 2018. New York NY I. Interview with Forefront Fellows. December 11 2018. New York NY J. Interview with Bronx Borough President Staff Member, August 16 2017. Bronx, NY.

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Appendix B: Meetings

A. Meeting with DOT Staff, September 26 2018 B. Meeting with DOT Staff, February 1 2019

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