A year ago Arundhati Roy said “The Pandemic is a Portal,” in 2021 America’s counterpoint is “no it is not.” The delta variant feels like a letter to America’s parents that it flunked a test. The pandemic is more like a pothole, but not the kind curved into asphalt by automobiles, more the namesake kind, a hole tunneled into the earth by potters looking to extract clay. A man-made threat created from extractive, short-term survival strategies and fatal to those who wander into it. Or if it is the modern kind of pothole it would be more like the ones that swallow entire cars as onlookers take pictures with their phones and scratch their heads. The pandemic-pothole is an embarrassing morass from which it is difficult to get unstuck. And as always happens when you get stuck, life moves cruelly around you and you’re forced to watch and reflect on your stuckness until time’s gears eject you from the soft grip of the earth just as a vulture overhead circles in for a better look. Sorry, maybe that’s too much.
To signal that their cities are ripe for industry, mayors have begun ejecting people experiencing homelessness from centers of commerce; downtowns, beach boardwalks, plazas where they built small tent communities and have created support networks. In NYC, Mayor de Blasio started removing people from single hotel rooms where they were placed last year to make shelters less crowded. While not the city’s intent, the initial move to hotels last year also provided a modicum of privacy and peace of mind for people who would otherwise be relegated to crowded, violent dormitory-style shelters with dozens of people crammed into a room.
This is all being done to New Yorkers for facing a lack of housing. Many are people who’ve been evicted or asked to leave their homes because they can’t pay the rent, because of sickness, divorce, age-related disability or because the rent was raised beyond what their social security or disability payments can match. Some are folks who have been rendered unemployable by periodic jail and prison sentences. Some had addiction problems or mental illness that led to homelessness; some have addiction problems and mental illness as a result of homelessness. Some are survivors of domestic violence. These are all reasons for homelessness told to me by homeless people, although there are more reasons, and a lack of deeply affordable housing and supportive housing underpins the problem.
Tabloid reporting makes things worse. A string of news stories and editorials about violence against Asian Americans earlier this year led to more negative views of street homelessness and calls for criminalization, as several high-profile attacks were connected to people who were unhoused and had severe mental illness.
The rush to remove people from centers of commerce to enable tourism is a proud declaration to the world in neon supertitles that reads WE HAVE LEARNED NOTHING from the pandemic and WE LOOK FORWARD TO LEARNING LESS DURING THE NEXT PANDEMIC. If the overarching lesson of the pandemic was that caring for some human beings results in the mutual protection and safety of all human beings, the ejection of homeless people for the benefit of tourism shows an inability to even pantomime a vision for how we can prevent a plague let alone preserve a society. In NYC, the delta variant is raging and the city’s Department of Homeless Services said, essentially, that the removals should continue because they already started so why stop. Pretty airtight logic!! Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
The moves are cruel and not tethered to any concrete services, despite a superficial and easily disproven proclamation that they are being done compassionately. Every unhoused person I’ve spoken to has had their belongings thrown into the trash on multiple occasions. Everyone kicked out of hotels in NYC was told they could only take two bags of belongings with them. Everything else went by the dumpster. For this reason some mutual aid groups have popped up outside hotels where removals were happening to provide basic things: food, clothing, socks, tampons, bar soap. One woman I spoke to told me that she was brought to a shelter and immediately told there was no room, so she had to sleep on the shelter floor for several days before returning to the streets and homes of friends, an echo of what happened when the city cleared homeless people from subways last year, leading to crowds of people sleeping head to foot at intake shelter entrances.
The strategy is to clear encampments to redirect people to nonexistent services, and it is a cyclical urban phenomenon that happens whenever complaints about visible homelessness are raised near centers of commerce. The fiction that there are needed services on the other end of a police car or a Department of Homeless Services van provides necessary cover for homeless clearance. As sociologist Christopher Herring points out in his book “Cruel Streets,” “punitive policies against the poor continue to be driven by a symbolic politics for electoral advantage, but increasingly require the rhetorical and policy accoutrements of therapy to make them palatable to a liberal citizenry.” Often superficial services are tied to outdoor camping bans (ie. a street homelessness ban) and even used to justify them. When Los Angeles proposed an outdoor camping ban via ballot referendum, Herring says, “discourses of housing, shelter, and medical treatment were mobilized to support the ban.” Rather than providing proximity to services, shelter beds “are used as a privileged and increasingly necessary tool of the police to arrest, cite, and confiscate property of the unhoused.” People who bristle at moving to violent shelters with non-existent services are termed “service-resistant,” as if the act of resisting the shelter ecosystem, with its condescension, carceral structure and paternalistic surveillance is itself a psychic disorder.
Economic development, in the form of neighborhood beautification projects and commercial revitalization plans, can provide impetus for the displacement, harassment and criminalization of homeless people. Herring’s research shows how the proliferation of Business Improvement Districts - formalized collectives of small businesses funding and lobbying for neighborhood-level municipal services - over the past three decades coincides with bans on sitting outside, asking for money or sleeping in the vicinity of those B.I.D.s.
The hotel evictions in NYC were temporarily paused by a court-order until August 19 so the city could work out a more coherent plan for people with disabilities who need reasonable accommodation. As of now people with serious health issues are supposed to remain in hotels, but there are many examples of this not happening. As I wrote in 2019, NYC’s shelter system is not equipped to handle most disabilities. (let alone covid comorbidities.) The current court order is tied to a 2017 settlement that requires the city to provide reasonable accommodation to people in its dormitory style shelters - the same settlement has led to a years-long plan to upgrade many shelters. A lawsuit filed by the Legal Aid Society took issue with the city’s rushed plan to throw people back into shelters en masse, saying there was no method to screen people being moved to see if they needed to remain in hotels or be moved to a more accessible shelter. “Defendants are recklessly rushing the process. In violation of the Stipulation, Defendants are following political pressure to shut down the hotel program and move approximately 8,000 residents in a few weeks’ time,” according to the lawsuit.
Nearly all types of disabilities are untenable in much of the NYC shelter system, where there is often a lack of working elevators and railings and no room to store personal medical equipment or secure freezers to store medicine. In 2019 I wrote about a man who was ejected from the shelter because his oxygen tank was considered a fire risk. He has COPD and spent several nights sleeping on the subway.
The cruelty of NYC is how woven into the fabric of daily life the classism is; there are plenty of places to buy brunch but fewer places to sit outside to eat and even fewer to ask for money or food without threat of arrest. There’s market rate and near market rate “affordable” housing being built but a vanishingly small number of units built affordable for people with housing vouchers. For young professionals who move to the city and congregate, socialize and engage only with other young professionals, the displacement of homeless people can feel like something that is happening “over there,” in the realm of civic life and bureaucratic decision-making, behind a desk somewhere far away, when in reality your trip to the coffee shop was preceded by a political project to exclude people too poor to exist near it.
Here’s Some Stuff I Enjoyed Reading, Maybe You Will Too
In Curbed, I liked this breakdown of East River Park coastal resiliency project in NYC and all the turmoil surrounding it. I think to a lot of people on the outside this entire conflict is confusing - is the city really trying to destroy a park?? Are the protestors white middle class NIMBY’s or vulnerable seniors? Why is Eileen Myles involved?? The answer is Eileen Myles is involved because she lives near East River Park, the city is trying to elevate the park to prevent severe flooding which has already started, the park would be effectively gone for a few years but then it would be back, and the protestors are mostly good-hearted elderly white liberals who are experiencing a kind of climate grief they can’t quite pinpoint. The park and neighboring houses would be destroyed without the resiliency project and it’s possible the city’s plan is the best of several bad options. That is a hard sell, and the de Blasio administration has been notoriously bad at selling even the most saleable sells. While the pain of having a beloved park temporarily inaccessible is real, I think this piece illustrates what a lot of development fights look like these days; how there is a similarity in the types of rhetoric used to oppose them, the converging and conflicting interests and class dynamics at play, as well as a lack of good options.
“The Country To Come, and My Black Cuba” is a 2013 essay by Roberto Zurbano about the ongoing need for Black liberation after the 1959 Cuban revolution. This is the full version of an essay originally published in New York Times, but Zurbano took issue with the Times’ edits, including a headline change. I would also read this more recent statement from The Cuba Black Liberation Collective on the ongoing criminalization of Black Cubans.
If you want to understand more about the the U.S. role, specifically, in creating strife in Cuba, I would start with this Aviva Chomsky interview:
At The Baffler, Felipe De La Hoz gives context to turmoil in Haiti by spotlighting a history of US failures to support Haitian asylum-seekers
At New York Magazine, Christopher Robbins talks to non-profits using the “cure violence” model and finds that they’re, perhaps unsurprisingly, underfunded and overburdened with expectation. I highlight this as a good overview of the issues with rising gun violence in NYC. Also while the funding doesn’t match the need, I think a lot of people don’t know that NYC was spending $20 million a year on cure violence programs prior to the pandemic to some success.
In Bookforum, Rawiya Kameir reviews Daphne A. Brooks’ analysis of Black women musicians of the past 100 years or so, “Liner Notes For The Revolution.” Rawiya is an amazing writer and critic & reading this piece made me want to write more music and art and book criticism and reviews. Also made me want to read more of Rawiya’s writing.
Music I’ve Been Listening To
This is literally the only newsletter where you get policy analysis followed by good music recommendations. I literally don’t understand why I have so many less subscribers than Matt Yglesias…
Frederico Durand - Herbario (2021)
Anjimile - Giver Taker (2021)
Spellling - The Turning Wheel (2021)
L’Rain - Fatigue (2021) *This is one of the best albums of the year with a lot of rich sounds blending into something sweeping and cosmic. If you buy the vinyl it comes with a little booklet with fatigue remedies by Rena Anakwe, Rachel Day, Angel Deradoorian, Dyani, Joselia Rebekah Hughes (friend of the newsletter), L'Rain, and Ricky Zoker.
Green-House - Music For Living Spaces (2021)
Green-House - Six Songs for Invisible Gardens(2020)
Mndsgn - Rare Pleasure (2021) * I like this one a lot, it’s giving Thundercat vibes in the vocals but more avant-garde jazz
serpentwithfeet - Deacon (2021) *we love serpentwithfeet here at House of Tomorrow. I liked this though not as much as soil (2018)
Erika De Casier - Sensational (2021)
Little Simz - GREY Area (2019)
Aspidistrafly - A Little Fable (2011)
Vince Staples - Vince Staples (2021) you know Vince Staples already
Books I’m Reading
Sing Unburied Sing - Jesmyn Ward - It’s really as good as everyone says it is and the first truly absorbing novel I’ve read in years. A maybe depressing story with otherworldly gorgeous prose.
Poor People’s Movements - Frances Fox Piven/Robert Cloward - I’m still reading this and will have thoughts in a future newsletter!
100% - Paul Pope - A science fiction romance published by Vertigo in 2002. I love Pope’s artwork and the relative racial diversity of his cast (at least compared to other Vertigo comics of the era?), but I don’t know if I would recommend this due to hammy dialogue, tired gendered tropes and a story without much to say. In the backmatter, Pope says that he originally pitched this to Vertigo as a series of unconnected romantic stories in a futuristic New York City, a bit like a sci-fi “New York I Love You,” and I think that would have been a better idea! I’m a sucker for anthology stories, though. Maybe it’s just my attention span.
See You Next Time
See you next time