Treating People Like Pollution: Homelessness and Environmental Injustice

Introduction

The environment is the entirety of the Earth's biophysical world. For us humans it is generally, according to Robert Bullard, “defined as being where we live, work, play, worship, and go to school.” ¹ Given this broad definition, environmental injustice exists when access to all the provisions that sustain human well-being, in those above-mentioned places and elsewhere, is unevenly allocated. Most scholarship in environmental injustice has focused almost exclusively on pollution, hazardous waste, or inequitable access to natural resources. This is for good reason. Disproportionate exposure to toxins can increase rates of illness, disease, and death, while otherwise negatively impacting the quality of life in entire communities. Also, inequitable access to natural resources—such as forests, fisheries, farmland, and minerals—can diminish a community's self-determination while reducing prospects for sustainable development.

While the focus on pollution, waste, and natural resources is certainly justifiable, we argue that it often leaves out another crucial aspect of our shared environment: the very space encompassing the community itself. In this article, therefore, we make the general argument that environmental justice concerns should be extended to include the capacity to access, and to visibly exist within, urban environments. We make the specific argument that community pressures—whether official or unofficial—to diminish homeless persons’ ability to visibly exist within the urban environment is an important, if under-recognized, environmental injustice. In other words, pollution disproportionately pushed on the poor is not the only kind of environmental injustice. Other injustices occur when poor people are themselves treated as a kind of pollution.

Overview and Introduction to the Study

Homelessness is a persistent and regular feature of the U.S. social structure, although its extent and regulation have varied over time. ² Most directly, it is caused by a combination of the lack of affordable housing, the lack of access to regular employment with wages high enough to make rent, and social policies regarding the treatment of individuals with substance dependencies and mental illnesses. Despite the structural roots of homelessness, U.S. society has largely failed to develop and implement structural remedies, meaning that cities across the nation have had to grapple with a relatively large and durable population of homeless persons over the past several decades. One response cities developed, especially since the 1980s, is to essentially “criminalize” the biological functioning of homeless individuals within their borders through “civility codes.” ³

According to a report by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, behaviors such as standing, sitting, sleeping, and eating are “so fundamental to human existence, that it defies common sense that they might be treated as crimes.” ⁴ Such behaviors are of course perfectly legal in a private residence. However, laws against sleeping or “camping” in public, vagrancy or loitering, or against sharing food in public make these biologically necessary behaviors illegal when performed by homeless persons who have no choice but to carry them out in the open. ⁵ While these laws are often justified in terms of protecting public safety, they are typically enacted “under the erroneous belief that using the criminal justice system to remove homeless persons from a city's commercial and tourist districts is the best method for improving the economic health of those areas.” ⁶

In this particular way, un-housed and visibly poor persons are viewed as outside the community, and as a threat to it. They become interpreted as a kind of blight that must be “cleaned up” before their presence begins turning people away from a commercial district or, as the case may be, causing declines in homeowners’ property values. After all, the view of homeless individuals as a kind of pollution is not only expressed through the passage and enforcement of these “civility codes” but also through the development of NIMBY (not in my backyard) movements that seek to shut down homeless service providers or to prevent their establishment in the first place. ⁷ As a result, when homeless individuals are viewed as pollution or blight, they face reduced access to the community resources—shelter, safe spaces, government services—that we typically think of as part of the human environment in U.S. society.

While the policing of homelessness has been well studied by sociologists and geographers, ⁸ we write here to highlight the environmental justice dimensions of U.S. homelessness policies. We also, however, complement previous research on homelessness regulation by focusing on a small U.S. city, rather than studying homelessness in megacities—such as Seattle, L.A., or Chicago—which is typical of most previous work on the subject. Our research location in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which functions both as a small urban center to surrounding counties and as a far-flung exurb to the Washington D.C. metro area, highlights both the ubiquity of homelessness and the widespread nature of exclusionary policies aimed at the homeless. Moreover, unlike many other previous studies, we combine interview data—based on discussions with 17 homeless and recently homeless persons, a city council member, a police lieutenant, and three homeless service providers—along with an archival analysis of NIMBY movements to show how neighborhood advocacy combines with city laws and law enforcement to target and exclude the visibly poor.

Treating People As Pollution in a Small U.s. City

Fredericksburg is a community that has an ambivalent relationship with homelessness. On the one hand, numerous churches work together to provide regular meals for poor persons. They also helped create, and continue to support, a homeless shelter and a separate homelessness services organization that pursues a “housing first” goal in the community, placing the most vulnerable persons in homes without first requiring employment or sobriety. On the other hand, when one begins looking, there is also a palpable sentiment against the homeless in Fredericksburg. Homeless individuals experience this unwelcoming sentiment every day. As one formerly homeless individual told us, “I see a bunch of discrimination and hatred against homeless people, because of their living situation.” Asked what was the hardest thing about being homeless, another recently homeless person stated that it is,

Another currently homeless person gave a similar answer, stating that,

The sentiment against homelessness is not only expressed in hostile looks or disapproving glances but also in the passage and enforcement of anti-homelessness laws and the consistent development of NIMBY advocacy that have diminished the provision of homelessness services in the community. In the remainder of this article, we will describe some of these laws and NIMBY movements, while explaining how they are experienced as a kind of environmental injustice for homeless persons.

Shelter and Life On the Margins

Fredericksburg, like many cities across the United States, has laws that prohibit people from publically sleeping in the city. One law on the books, for example, bans the use of an automobile as a “living or sleeping quarters on any street or other public property within the City in lieu of a hotel, tourist cabin, boardinghouse, roominghouse, or similar accommodations or in lieu of permanent housing.” ⁹ Another city code prohibits camping on public land without permission, along with “use [of] the property for living accommodations.” ¹⁰ These laws are clearly aimed at those who, without anywhere else to sleep at night, have few other options.

Through our research, we found that the law against camping on public land is selectively enforced. City police, in fact, do not actively seek out homeless encampments, but when they become visible, passers-by begin to call in to the department. City officials then, sometimes working with a local homeless services provider, take action to move residents out of the encampment. This policy means that while homeless persons are tacitly tolerated within city limits as long as their encampments are functionally invisible, the difficulties that necessarily part of living without access to heat, air conditioning, and durable shelter become even more severe.

A basic element of the contemporary human environment in the United States is shelter from storms and adverse temperatures, including access to the energy needed to heat or cool an indoor climate. This is obviously not something that many homeless persons enjoy, explaining why sleeping outdoors was itself discussed by some interview respondents as the most difficult thing about being homeless. One formerly homeless person stated, for instance, that the hardest thing, “for me, it was sleeping in the woods… I'm 27 and I will never go camping again for the rest of my life. I spent two years camping. I'm good… That's the past. And it's the worst time in my life.”

Another respondent agrees that protection from the elements is the hardest thing about being homeless, citing summer's heat: “In the middle of July, when it's baking hot I'd be sleeping in the van in the summer time. It gets hard in the summer time—no air flowing. Kind of rough.” One other person we interviewed described the difficulties of being outdoors in the winter, stating that in a recent cold period, “I used to set my alarm every 3 hours just to wake up and move around to get the blood circulating again to make sure you don't freeze to death while you're sleeping. So finding a safe place to sleep is a big deal.”

The hardships of life outside are compounded by Fredericksburg's policy of prohibiting visible campsites because it requires sleeping, as one person interviewed put it, “outside the public eye.” Living undetected for many homeless persons in Fredericksburg often means camouflaging campsites and sneaking into them when no one is watching. It also means that the campsites themselves, constructed in disused land near highways or riparian areas, must be located at the very margins of the community. Needing to sleep outside the city proper, far away from community resources such as church meals, social service agencies, and the library, causes pain to several of the individuals we interviewed who have disabilities from previous injuries, but still must walk or bike long distances into downtown from their encampments. Other homeless individuals we spoke with raised worries that city policies make them less safe. They feel vulnerable in the marginal, unseen places at the edges of Fredericksburg and prefer not to go there even if, through the selective enforcement of city law, these are the places where they are allowed to sleep at night.

Nimby Movements Against Homelessness Services and Their Consequences

There have been recurrent episodes of anti-homelessness advocacy in Fredericksburg's recent past, which have set very real limits on how, and where, services are provided to homeless individuals within the city. Perhaps most importantly, thanks to past NIMBY advocacy, the city's homeless shelter is isolated from city neighborhoods in an industrial park.

In 2002, Fredericksburg's homeless shelter operated downtown. However, its ability to continue doing so was put in jeopardy when the owner of the building it operated from declined to renew its lease to redevelop the property. Consequently, the shelter embarked on a multi-year search for a new location. The shelter raised the money necessary to construct a new facility, and only needed city approval for its new space. ¹¹ However, homelessness advocates encountered resistance wherever they looked to locate in the city. A newspaper reported that, during this period, shelter administrators “looked at about 50 locations, many of which did not work out because neighbors did not want the shelter nearby.” ¹² Ultimately, the shelter chose two potential locations within the city, but neighborhood opposition in both areas convinced the city council to deny the shelter a special-use permit that would be necessary to build its facility on any parcel of land within the city other than in an industrial park far apart from residential neighborhoods. ¹³ With no other options, the shelter built its new facility there, with new neighbors that included other “undesirable” land uses such as a metal scrapyard and recycling center, warehouses and distribution centers, and a large wood mulch processing and packaging center. The current director of the shelter describes the history of the move, as recounted to her by the previous director, this way:

Indeed, the shelter's current location presents serious problems for shelter residents compared to something located within the city itself. At the time of our interview, only 7 of its 64 residents had cars. Everyone else must either scrounge rides from friends or family, or use public or nonmotorized transportation. However, the city bus only comes infrequently to the shelter. Also, due to the bus system's limited routes that require numerous transfers, shelter residents must be prepared for a slow-going journey involving long wait times. The shelter's director, for instance, estimated that it takes 2 hours to travel from the shelter, through the city, to the major retail district, which is one potential area where residents can find jobs. While the bus system is slow, walking or bike riding from the shelter would require a journey of several miles and crossing a busy highway, which would be difficult for most adults, let alone for families with children.

More recently, in 2015, a NIMBY campaign blocked the relocation of another homelessness service provider in Fredericksburg. The downtown service provider—which offers mail, showers, food, laundry, and social services to homeless individuals—sought a larger building to add a job help center, a small medical clinic, a space for a Veterans Administration social worker, an area for adult education, and an office for housing assistance. ¹⁴ In response, the city council—citing the many negative comments they were receiving from constituents in e-mails and at a public meeting, effectively blocked the move by creating new zoning requirements that would now mandate a special use permit for the service provider's relocation. ¹⁵ Anticipating a drawn-out and contentious process that might fail due to the community opposition, the service provider opted not to move and to instead stay in its current location where it continues its work for the homeless, but on a more limited basis than what its administrators think is needed.

As both these examples indicate, there is consistent pressure in Fredericksburg to curtail services for the homeless, or to at least keep services out of the city proper. When taken into consideration along with the laws banning public sleeping, it is reasonable to say that homeless people are being treated as though they are a kind of pollution within the city. However, Fredericksburg is not unique in this regard. Our research in this small city, taken in conjunction with previous research in large cities across the United States, demonstrates that exclusionary pressures and policies exist throughout the country. Indeed, one surprising finding from our research is that several of the individuals we interviewed who had previously experienced homelessness in other cities reported that Fredericksburg is, in comparison, actually a better place to live because it offers more resources, such as community dinners, and because of its small size makes it easier to navigate compared to larger cities.

Why It Matters: Homelessness and Environmental Injustice

To say that the homeless are treated as a kind of pollution is to say that they are not viewed as members of the community in which they live. Frequently, they are not viewed as people at all, but as undesirable aspects of the urban environment that should be removed or, at the very least, subjected to heavy management and largely kept out of sight. However, aside from these similar dynamics, in which both homeless persons living in a shelter and polluting and/or unsightly facilities can find themselves neighbors in an industrial park, why else should homelessness be viewed from an environmental justice perspective? We argue that when visibly poor persons are seen as contaminants, city policies are enacted that deprive them of basic aspects of the contemporary human habitat. The experience of homelessness itself, in communities without adequate policies to provide housing for all, means living without protection from extreme temperatures and other adverse environmental conditions. The passage of laws that attempt to pressure visibly poor persons from communities adds to these hardships, we found, by forcing homeless persons to build encampments in the unseen fringes, which are potentially less safe than other areas in the city. These laws also require homeless persons to live farther away from the community services they rely upon. The development of NIMBY pressures, we found, further diminishes the extent to which these services are provided and, in the case of Fredericksburg's homeless shelter, pushed it to the city's margins as well.

A founding principle of environmental justice is that the environment is not some place “out there,” but is, as we've already said, all the places where humans work, sleep, eat, play, and otherwise carry out their lives. Environmental injustices happen when people are deprived of the clean air and water necessary to perform these necessary activities. However, we further argue that space itself is another crucial aspect of our shared environment, without access to which people's ability to survive, let alone prosper, is severely diminished. In this regard, paying attention to homelessness and cities’ homelessness policies underscores David Pellows’ argument that environmental justice will not be achieved for all people through the establishment of more stringent pollution laws alone. ¹⁶ While such policy making certainly helps, achieving true environmental justice also requires an acknowledgment of all people's human rights, the first and foremost of which is that no person should be treated like pollution. All people have a right to visibly exist and take part in the communities of their choice.