America is currently lousy with tents in public, from city sidewalks to college campus quads, sheltering the dispossessed and the dissidents and everyone in between. For many officials, this is starting to make for a tense situation.
Both major political parties routinely describe themselves as big tents, though the current occupant of the White House may be wishing for less of those these days. City mayors certainly are, and they’re making efforts to show voters that they are doing something.
“We will be relentless in our efforts to help people into safer, supportive facilities, and make our neighborhoods cleaner and healthier for everyone,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed promised in a news release touting a reported five-year low in public tents in early May.
Breed is running for reelection in what polling suggests could be a close one, as voters of the Fog City have shown a recent willingness to throw the “bums” out of office. One of the candidates she is up against is Mark Farrell, a former appointed mayor and city supervisor who ushered in a law to get mentally ill people off the streets and into treatment.
Many other big city mayors are touting measures to sweep out homeless encampments, from Seattle’s Bruce Harrell to New York City’s Eric Adams. Adams’s efforts have been seen as largely ineffective, and may be contributing to his current cratering in the polls.
The Washington, D.C., city government has said it is planning on sweeping out four homeless encampments, three in Northwest and one in Southeast, any day now, once the weather improves.
Last year, President Joe Biden’s administration pledged to significantly reduce homelessness, possibly to soften bad news it knew was coming. The Department of Housing and Urban Development also found the highest number of homeless ever in America, at over 650,000 people.
If the homeless had their own city, it would rank somewhere between Las Vegas and Boston for sheer numbers, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, and may grow bigger this year. That adds up to a lot of urban camping.
Whether or not sweeping out homeless settlements amounts to playing whack-a-tent is an open question. Homelessness is a multifaceted problem. Some critics are currently making the case that facing up to one of those facets, the tight housing supply, is extremely important in pumping up the numbers. By and large, they argue the cause of that tightness is too much regulation.
“At every step of constructing new housing units, builders face regulation,” Andrea Smith, a policy and research manager for the Building Industry Association of Washington state who has herself experienced homelessness, told the Washington Examiner.
She added, “From rezoning applications, permits, project financing, insurance premiums, building codes, and impact fees, all of these are either lengthy or expensive to achieve because of an underlying policy decision.”
The White House’s answer is ever more money for affordable housing. Vice President Kamala Harris pledged an additional $5.5 billion in grants to “increase access to affordable housing, invest in economic growth, and address homelessness in communities throughout America” on May 7.
That may not be enough for voters, however. A pair of social scientists found that the public wants both assistance for and distance from the homeless, in a noted article for the journal Political Behavior.
“Federal, state, and city governments spend substantial funds on programs intended to aid homeless people, and such programs attract widespread public support,” wrote Scott Clifford and Spencer Piston of Texas A&M and Boston University, respectively. “In recent years, however, state and local governments have increasingly enacted policies, such as bans on panhandling and sleeping in public, that are counterproductive to alleviating homelessness. Yet these policies also garner substantial support from the public.”
The political scientists chalk the support for more punitive policies up to disgust. In their telling, this has to do mostly with disease avoidance, but the rise of crime over the last several years surely factors in.
“[W]hile most of the public wants to help homeless people, sensitivity to disgust drives many of these same people to support policies that facilitate physical distance from homeless people,” Clifford and Piston explained.
The Democratic National Convention is being held in Chicago this August, which threatens to put tents front and center. The city’s universities are currently host to a large number of anti-Israel protest campers. Several local homeless tent cities have also proven resistant to sweeps.
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Local voters, like national voters, are not at all keen on encampments. One poll by the Illinois Policy Institute found that Chicagoans opposed progressive Mayor Brandon Johnson’s humanitarian plan to house migrants in heated tents over last winter by roughly 2-to-1.
President Joe Biden’s reelection sales pitch is that his administration has put America back on track. The camps suggest a different story. For reasons of national security, Chicago tent crackdowns will be coming this summer. Those crackdowns threaten to spark more protests and greater unrest.
