Treating People Like Pollution: Homelessness and Environmental Injustice

Abstract

Abstract

Achieving environmental justice does not only require the provision of clean air and water in all the places where people carry out their lives, it also necessitates access to the very spaces of the urban environment. Through our research based on interview and archival data in a small U.S. city, we demonstrate that homeless persons are often viewed as a kind of environmental contaminant that should be cleaned up or kept out, either through the passage and enforcement of “civility codes” that criminalize homelessness or through NIMBY movements that develop to prevent the establishment of homelessness services in particular areas. While such efforts fail to purge cities of the homeless, they do reduce the availability of homelessness services in certain areas and push homeless dwellings to the unseen fringes of communities. In this way, we show, when homeless people are viewed as a kind of pollution, city policies develop that diminish their access to the urban environment and the resources it provides.