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Early in the morning, before traffic fully claims Bloomington’s streets, the sidewalks reveal their overnight transformation. A bench serves as a bed. A sleeping bag lies folded against a lamp. A shopping cart waits in an alley. These scenes are familiar to anyone who walks to campus at daybreak. By mid-morning, they have mostly vanished.
A sidewalk is among modern life’s humblest achievements: concrete poured flat asking little more than that we pass over it on the way to class, to work, to one another. Yet even such an ordinary invention prompts grand questions. Are public spaces defined by their intended use or by the way we use them? Bloomington, like cities across Indiana, may soon be answered for. Senate Bill 285, currently moving through the state legislature, would ban public sleeping, effectively banning homelessness.
To test where the outer bounds of public space lie more carefully, we can imagine an otherwise-roofed child. In the morning, this child patters the sidewalk to school. At noon, it becomes her playground. Her kickball and chalk obstruct grown townies’ right of way, but this offense hardly merits civil doom. Finally, she sets up an after-the-bell lemonade stand. In doing so, she violates several local zoning ordinances. Still, most passersby would permit the venture.
Throughout the day, this child has stretched the limits of what one can do on a sidewalk. It could be argued she should be restricted from certain of these activities in a public space — “move playtime to some private place.” But custom should protect her from the worst penalties a mayor could bring: American children have always played on this country’s sidewalks. Or else, the artist of essentially American scenes, Norman Rockwell, could not have portrayed them doing so.it.
The right to roam and the right to use and profit from the resources common to all people together form an ancient inheritance. Despite these collective rights, the United States’ tendency — against its better minds, like Rockwell, mind you — has consistently been to exclude. This was the effect, for example, of midcentury residential planning. Suburbia’s invention of the backyard raised the picket fence around the house and separated home life from spillover into or from public spaces, such as sidewalks.
Indiana’s legislature now proposes to further this trend. SB 285 starkly contrasts lawmakers’ recent move to free our state’s children. The Indiana Senate voted unanimously for HB 1035 on Feb. 10 to restore their right to roam and use public space, even without adult supervision. But once the child has grown, legislators squirm at her remaining on the sidewalk, it seems.
Would society cease to function if everyone adhered to a universalized norm of using the sidewalk not merely for transport, but for play, commerce, puttering around and even sleeping? Surely, there is room enough for us all; houses occupy much more space than people.
Sen. Cyndi Carrasco, R-Indianapolis, one of the bill's authors, said public sleeping must be banned — more, policed — to help some of the most vulnerable people. And yet, like the child of Rockwell’s America, homeless people are members of society. Yes, sleeping in public stretches the outer bounds of how we can use public spaces. But what about public sleeping extends beyond the right to use shared property we all should have?
The target of the ban cannot be the act of public sleeping itself — go, enjoy shut-eye near the park — but instead the situation of the people who perform the act. In effect, SB 285 bans homelessness.
This legislation represents a modern instinct that treats social ills like homelessness as outcomes of policy failure. In such thinking, allowing people undergoing homelessness to use public spaces equates to our tacit endorsement of the issue itself. The implied solution, then, is to explicitly forbid such use of public spaces, even if we lack the shelters to fit all those who would need them.
The rival instinct similarly argues that if homelessness exists, we permit it. To this opposing camp, however, this failure is because we do nothing to address an insufficient housing supply, underfunded services and unjust systems.
Both of these instincts spring from a utopian impulse that believes willpower and resources can ultimately resolve all of our problems. In some possible world, homelessness will be dealt away once and for all because of what people possess a capacity to achieve.
Some forms of human vulnerability resist technocratic repair, however. No perfect scheme can deliver us from a world of scarcity. Greed will remain. Just so, there is no legislation so smartly worded, or economic market designed so fairly, as to preclude people falling through the inevitable cracks of society.
The best things in life appear when we do not arrange them, and the worst things, too. This kind of vulnerability describes our condition and is neither curable nor conquerable. The hurt it allows must be governed, accommodated and, where possible, healed. However, the effective method is also a vulnerable one, closer to home and furnished with a human face. Locals, in their own communities, should be the ones worrying about how their sidewalks are used, not the state in a blind come-down.
Stated simply, Love thy neighbor. That’s ultimately what the sidewalk is for.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a sophomore studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
