I have long been a critic of the unscientific and excessive use of the idea of things existing in a spectrum. The idea that neurological disability and sex exist as spectra has had serious negative social effects. People who are simply a little socially maladroit or have minor sensory deficits have used the “autism spectrum” idea to self-diagnose their way into communities of the disabled whose political and social spaces they then dominate, allowing them to redirect accommodations for people with serious, crippling disabilities towards themselves.
And those who follow my writing in Feminist Current or track my daily activities on Twitter know how I feel about the social impacts of “sex is a spectrum” on women, gays and lesbians. In addition, “sex is a spectrum” is also unscientific by conflating the biology of sexually dimorphic species with that of clownfish and slugs. The “sex spectrum” has opened the door to progressives embracing a pseudoscience defended by an orthodoxy in a similar way to the effects of climate denialism on the credulity of conservatives.
But today, I would like to dust off the idea of spectra to talk about a phenomenon that we have organized into a binary, which is, in fact, a spectrum: homelessness.
Of course, homelessness is only a spectrum if “home” has a definition appropriate to such an analysis. In fact, the idea for this piece came to me because I spent time thinking about the implications of my favourite definition of home, that of American literary giant Robert Frost, “Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Upon contemplating that quote, I realized that almost everyone living in a neoliberal economy today is homeless, to one degree or another. And that shocked me.
Over the past decade, I have spilled much ink on this blog discussing Enclosure, the process by which feudal title was transformed into fee simple title, permitting the mass evictions of European peasants, first in England and the Netherlands and then, century by century, extending its geographic scope.
Enclosure spelled the end of the medieval socio-economic order and began the transformation of Europe’s economies from feudal to capitalist economies by way of an intermediate system known as mercantilism.
In the feudal economic order, holders of productive agricultural land were lords of one kind or another (barons, counts, seigneurs, etc.) and their land tenure was contingent upon their protection of the peasants living on it on behalf of the crown. When feudal lands changed hands, their new lord received them packaged complete with the peasants living there. These peasants, in turn, owned their homes, their tools and enjoyed permanent tenure over the land their homes occupied. Medieval villages, furthermore, also typically had a Common, a bunch of arable land that people who lacked customary rights to feudal land could occupy and raise food upon.
Medieval Europe also had big, capacious family systems that did not just include extended family members like aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby; the term “gossip” originates from the words “God” and “sibling.” The common term for most friend relationships was not “neighbour” or “friend” but “gossip,” someone to whom one was connected through a shared godparent, usually a respectable commoner with a high-status job like miller or smith who was sought out as a god-parent by the children of parents of lower status.
Families faced considerable social pressure to house their poorer members and it was viewed as a black mark against every member’s respectability if one member of the family were sleeping rough. Particularly women bore the brunt of this social disapproval in that their duty to keep those with addictions, dementia, madness or just bad seeds housed and fed. But what this community disapproval meant was that relatives, both real and fictive (i.e. gossips and godparents), were under tremendous social pressure in their communities to house members of their extended family systems if that person could not keep themselves housed.
In addition to these structures, medieval society did also have long and short-term emergency housing. A significant portion of the places medievals called “hospitals,” were not medical treatment facilities but the equivalent of things we call transition housing, supportive housing and emergency housing today. Anyone willing to spend a certain number of hours praying for the souls of donors’ families to be released from Purgatory could become the resident of a residential hospital. In other words, prior to Enclosure, homelessness was not an experience it was easy for regular people to fall into and the danger of becoming homeless did not shape people’s consciousness.
I have written and spoken more about this elsewhere and so I will quickly summarize the transformation Enclosure wrought in people’s housing security. First, many peasants were evicted from their lands by members of the gentry whose used new forms of land title under which there were no feudal obligations to those already resident upon it. At the same time, monastic lands and village common lands were also seized by the crown and their residents, evicted. The hospitals were also shut down. New laws were then enacted criminalizing begging and sleeping rough. And penalties for robbery and trespassing were significantly increased. And homelessness was born! There were thousands upon thousands of people for whom there was no home that was obliged to take them in.
During the first phase of the Cold War, the West’s primary strategy for winning hearts and minds was matching whatever claim of equity or generosity the communist world made, but within the capitalist world, resulting in the birth of the “the welfare state.” Indeed, one of the first parts of the welfare state to be built was the bureaucracy ensuring that returning war veterans would not be sleeping rough by the thousands of World War I veterans had.
Some welfare states like Canada even wrote a “right to housing” into our laws. But whether de facto or de jure, welfare states built housing on a large scale and ensured that social assistance and minimum wage rates were sufficient for low-wage and unemployed people to obtain housing.
But, as we know, the West’s strategy changed during the second phase of the Cold War, in the first half of the 1970s.With the rise of neoliberalism, the guarantees of the welfare state began to be cut away and, for the first time since the 1930s, “the homeless” became an identifiable group. Contemporaneous with the election of Ronald Reagan and the acceleration of neoliberal reform in the Global North, the first food banks also appeared.
As former Vancouver city councilor Jean Swanson has remarked: there were still anti-poverty activists and campaigners for income equality in the 1960s and 70s. It’s just that there was no constituency of people called “the homeless” nor was their visible or widespread evidence of people sleeping rough in the city. There was still poverty just not the kind needed to recreate “the homeless.”
But what has received less attention is the way that major industrial mergers and takeovers began to place people who were housed in the homeless spectrum. The emergence of the Rust Belt in Anglo America and across Germanic Europe resulted from the violent consolidation of the auto sector and other areas of major industrial production.
Obviously, layoffs played a significant role, first as industrial producers downsized and supposedly cradle-to-grave careers suddenly stopped in mid-life. Much ink was spilled by neoliberal propagandists and media in creating sufficient consent for these changes and establishing new socio-economic norms that allowed non-industrial sectors to also engage in “downsizing,” “right-sizing” and various “efficiencies” designed to make workers more insecure, now that social expectations concerning the reliability and predictability of employment were being adjusted to the new economic order.
But what is often missed by those who recount this well-rehearsed story of the decline of the American working class is the impact of the economic restructuring on pensions. During the 1980s, the pension funds of workers became a thing it was acceptable to liquidate or sell during auto sector mergers. Even if one did stay in work until retirement age, one was no longer working at a cradle-to-grave job because the pension into which one had paid one’s whole career might be stolen by corporate raiders and looters.
At the same time, governments de-indexed or flat-out cut universal state pensions, causing them to decline against inflation while encouraging citizens to replace this rapidly declining retirement income security by investing in special state-sanctioned mutual funds designed for retirees. And I have written elsewhere about how government workers experienced comparable kinds of increased insecurity under neoliberal governments.
By the end of the 1990s, a simple stock market correction, a bad broker, a corporate merger, acquisition or raid could annihilate most of one’s retirement income. It seemed that there was only one place where one’s savings might be safe: real estate.
In most of the Global North, in spite of the causes and consequences of the 2007-08 financial crisis, real estate remains the main strategy and best bet one has for staying afloat in retirement. And because of that, people are willing to borrow larger and larger amounts of money to enter or stay in the housing market. The upshot of these changes has been that an increasing number of us now exist on a homeless spectrum.
Returning to the original Robert Frost definition, let us note that when people’s primary source of funds for surviving in retirement is one’s primary residence, retirement for an increasing number of us entails moving to a steadily smaller and/or remote dwelling, so as to access equity stored in the previous dwelling until one becomes a renter again.
Given that generational wealth transfer is increasingly necessary for younger people to obtain mortgages and purchase housing, this state of affairs prevents the downward transfer of family equity to younger family members, potentially locking them out of the housing market. And, for younger people who have experienced profound financial or medical reversals, even if they remain on good terms with older relatives, these relatives simply do not have surplus space to house them while they struggle back to their feet.
And whether young or old, let us be clear that many mortgage holders are little more secure than renters. A few missed mortgage or rent payments and it doesn’t really matter whether one is bound by a tenancy agreement or a mortgage, the effect is the same: your landlord throws you out. The only difference is that, for mortgage holders, one’s retirement savings vanish at the same moment one is evicted.
Other than those who own their homes outright or who are part of intact family systems with members who have both outright ownership and surplus space, the rest of us exist somewhere on a spectrum of homelessness: i.e. people who no one has to take in if things go wrong. No one is obliged to house victims of foreclosure or eviction.
Those furthest along the homelessness spectrum are those who are unhoused and sleeping rough but I would argue that degrees of homelessness now apply to a majority of the population. Next to those unhoused and sleeping rough are couch surfers; next to the couch surfers are those living in a vehicle they own; next to those sleeping in their cars are people in “supportive housing” (housing from which one may be evicted for such innocuous things as having guests or alcohol in one’s room); next to those are women staying with abusive men because their rent is being extracted in sexual favours; next to those are unemployed renters; next to those, unemployed mortgage-holders; and then the employed renters; et cetera; et cetera.
We now live in a society in which most people live with the consciousness that if things go badly, no one will take them in, that nothing more than luck (be it a large amount or a small amount) stands between them and sleeping rough with no ability to meaningfully own anything more than the clothes on their back.
This naturally engenders a profound sense of insecurity in people. Human beings are meant to have homes, not merely be housed. People need somewhere they know they can always go. If they don’t have that they become, as we have seen, more squirrelly, more desperate, less empathetic. People need a material floor to support healthy emotions; having a sense of homelessness pervade one’s consciousness reminds us that we lack that floor, that at any moment, the ground could open and we could fall, right out of society.
In 1994, Canadians were well into austerity when the Chretien government repealed the 1966 Canada Assistance Plan legislation that recognized every Canadian’s “right to housing” but it is an important symbolic watershed because it was the formal denial of the basic anthropological truth that everybody needs a home.
And this knowledge must form the foundation of land reform in this country.
