NIMBYism and Neoliberalism: Categorizing and Confining the Unhoused

• In Event: Resisting with/for/as the non/Human in Late Stage American Empire

Abstract

NIMBYism frames unhoused individuals as an invasive species that runs the risk of overtaking and devaluing the neighborhood. Instead of a concern for housing those without access to shelter, people are often more concerned with where that cannot be housed and where they cannot erect tents and park vehicles. The desire to keep homelessness out of sight and out of mind overrides the desire to provide housing for the over 250,000 unsheltered individuals in the United States. The neighborhoods touting this rhetoric are connected to media outlets that stigmatize the unhoused and politicians that use the unhoused as a marker of failure. The moment of Late Stage American Empire includes the increased frequency and destruction of climate catastrophes, heightened housing precarity with rising rents, and continued racialized policing and incarceration. Homelessness will only be exacerbated by these issues, making the current moment critical to reject stigmatized notions of homelessness and redefine community, safety, and support.

This presentation explores how spatial limitations and anti-homeless rhetoric confine and define unhoused individuals in the United States. Works from the fields of Black studies, critical disability studies, homeless studies, and critical carceral studies will guide this project. Incorporating Sylvia Wynter’s work on the non/Human, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s connections between antiblackness and animalization, and Craig Willse’s theorization of neoliberal surplus lives, I explicate how unhoused individuals are systemically considered and maintained outside of humanity. This work expands Wynter’s discussion of origin myths and social codes to exemplify how the unhoused are categorized and treated. Jackson’s theory of the “burden of inclusion into a racially hierarchized universal humanity” (Jackson 2020) allows us to consider the violence of homeless management as they attempt, and often fail, to acknowledge and assist the unhoused. Willse argues that the homeless management industry is meant to “reproduce and extend the uneven distribution of life and death,” urging us to consider how reformative measures maintain the breadth and violence of homelessness. Together, these fields and theories inform how narratives are created and suggest how they can be dismantled and made new in order to adequately see and care for the unhoused.

Author

• Maya L McKeever, University of Southern California