(Dis)Empowering Homeless People

Abstract

This article examines the occupation of Atlanta’s Imperial Hotel by homeless people in the summer of 1990. This dramatic event represented the apogee of homeless empowerment in Atlanta during the last thirty years. It allows us to examine a “poor people’s movement” that wielded the power of disruption to put the issue of affordable housing on the agenda of the city’s governing regime. The Imperial takeover also provides an opportunity to consider the short-term factors that momentarily opened a space for such disruptive action and the long-term restructurings that ultimately disaggregated and disempowered homeless people.