I remember an acute sense of shame as a friend and I drove past a line of homeless people on Kirkwood Avenue this past June. I’d returned only weeks before from studying abroad in Argentina and hadn’t seen Bloomington since early February. I had seen this sight countless times in Buenos Aires – people living out of makeshift structures of trash, shopping carts and possessions – but never had the homeless situation in Bloomington looked this noticeably serious. Later at lunch, a friend caught me up on the drug overdoses that made national news and the consequential police ordinance to clear out Peoples Park.
The compassion extended to the homeless population in Bloomington has always been the city's silver lining. It was proof that the alleged liberal values of the community didn’t ring totally hollow.
This ordinance, which calls for increased downtown police patrols and citations, changes this. The police might state the action is intended to address complaints of "nuisance behavior, aggressive panhandling and drug abuse," according to WISH-TV, but the ordinance simply transfers these problems away from Peoples Park. The cleansing of the park is motivated purely by an aesthetic choice. The police action seems to indicate Bloomington condones class antagonism against the less fortunate.
These people would rather have the homeless out of sight and out of mind than burden themselves with solving the systematic causes of homelessness. We also cannot decontextualize Bloomington’s ordinance from the national trend towards the criminalization of homelessness. Numerous self-reinforcing factors have created the crisis of homelessness in the U.S.’s major cities since the 1970s. It is not accidental that the rise of homelessness coincides with the beginning of what serious historians understand as the neoliberal era, which was marked by a reduction in government spending and a move towards privatization.
In cities, expensive housing along with the gutting of municipal services and public housing synthesized with the 2008 housing crisis to create our current situation. The Annual Homelessness Assessment Report found that about 600,000 people are homeless every night. Homelessness in major U.S. cities is even more shocking. In 2015 rates rose 12 percent in Los Angeles and 14 percent in Washington, D.C. Cities in turn respond by passing anti-homeless ordinances and redesigning urban surroundings. Around the world, governments have altered benches to prevent people from sleeping and outlawed pushing shopping carts and sleeping in cars.
These factors combine with the malice felt towards the homeless in the general population, which is, unsurprisingly, generated by television and film stereotypes. Progressive news magazine Mother Jones recently published an article titled “Are People Disgusted by the Homeless?” evoked backlash from the very academics cited within it. The Mother Jones writer attempts to reconcile the study’s contradiction that people simultaneously support public aid to the homeless and bans on panhandling by concluding the homeless are disgusting. The academics posted a retort, claiming the writer had misconstrued their arguments to prove the opposite of their intention.
I ask anyone angered by this to support Bloomington’s homeless by whatever means, materially or politically. There are also campus groups, like Students Against State Violence, that work for the rights of the homeless in Bloomington.
