When penalties are framed as protections: Street-level bureaucrats and the expansion of homeless governance in the US

Abstract

Research has long identified street-level bureaucrats (SLBs)—often police—as key intermediaries shaping the governance of homelessness. Rising rates of unsheltered homelessness in the US implicate new public and private actors in these processes. This article broadens the focus of existing research using 42 interviews with SLBs in a mid-size US city to analyze how they interpret tent and vehicle encampments, and how they make decisions about displacement. These SLBs are from varied government and nonprofit agencies including parks, waste management, and public works, and generally lack training and official protocol to guide their interactions with the unhoused residents they regularly encounter in their work. We identify a common heuristic these SLBs use, interpreting encampments as posing urgent threats to three public priorities: safety, sanitation, and the environment. These ostensible threats and the correlated urgency of remediation guide their decision-making regarding encampment displacement. This heuristic allows SLBs to align with local progressive values, while obfuscating their role in penalizing people without housing and undermining efforts to resolve homelessness. These findings highlight another way in which SLBs’ interpretive actions perpetuate inequality, reproduce enforcement patterns across protective and punitive regulatory agencies, and shape priorities in the expanding field of urban homeless governance.