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The war on unhoused people; and how the housing crisis is killing American art
It has been awhile since I ‘stacked, but then again, I’ve been busy. I was on vacation in late July, and since coming back I’ve been working on a couple of exciting projects at my day job that I’m looking forward to sharing with you all.
About that vacation: My partner and I took a long-distance Amtrak ride, from California to Denver to Chicago. (I completed the final leg coast-to-coast route on my own, traveling from Chicago to New York and working from there for a week.) As partial recompense for the long radio silence, here’s a little snapshot of the view outside my train window as we followed the Colorado River to Denver.
I’ll probably have more to say about long-distance Amtrak travel at a later date. For now, I’m just here to share a couple of recent pieces I’ve written elsewhere — that is to say, for real publications.
First, a piece for The Nation about how and why the politics of homelessness have taken an ugly turn over the past couple of years. I focus on a group of far-right propagandists who have succeeded in taking crypto-fascist thinking about unhoused people into the mainstream. I use that term, crypto-fascist, advisedly. From the piece:
Racism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t incidental to the anti-homeless smear campaign; they’re part of the point. Disgust with unhoused people is a gateway into an entire politics built around the murderous contempt for subaltern groups. Conveniently, Black and queer people are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness in America; to reactionaries, homelessness becomes both a consequence of their subaltern status and an explanation for it.
I don’t think the utility of the homelessness crisis as a far-right recruiting and propaganda tool has gotten enough recognition. Nor do I think the authoritarian right has faced especially effective pushback when it comes to homelessness. This piece is my attempt to help correct that.
More recently, I wrote a piece for The New Republic about why the housing crisis is ruining American popular art:
The American arts, as a number of commentators have observed, appear to be going through a period of stagnation. “My premise is that something is wrong,” the writer John Ganz wrote last September. “There’s something very slight and unsatisfying about recent film, television, art, architecture, design, fashion, cuisine—you name it. There are refreshing exceptions, of course, but they seem to quickly get counterfeited or compromised.”
My own premise is that this sense of wrongness is at least in part a direct consequence of the housing crisis. When high rents smother nascent art scenes, they also stymie the process through which American popular culture refreshes itself. It’s just another way in which the housing crisis has made us all poorer.
You may recognize elements of this argument — and even the Ganz quote — from my letter to the editors of N+1. But the argument in this piece is focused more squarely on housing costs and how they make it harder for artists to produce work that benefits the rest of us.
Since this piece is coming out Labor Day Weekend, I feel obliged to point out that the problem is actually bigger than art and artists. All kinds of people have vocations that aren’t super remunerative; some people are called to make sculptures, others to teach high school English, or open eccentric little shops. The housing crisis denies people the opportunity to contribute to our cities in whatever way they want to contribute. The New Republic piece is about how that degrades the quality of American pop culture, but the full societal cost we’re paying is really a lot more comprehensive and profound than that.
Have a great long weekend.