Complaint-Oriented “Services”: Shelters as Tools for Criminalizing Homelessness

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716221996703
• Subject Matter: New Perspectives and Methods

264 ANNALS, AAPSS, 693, January 2021

DOI: 10.1177/0002716221996703

Complaint-

Oriented

“Services”:

Shelters as

Tools for

Criminalizing

Homelessness

By

CHRIS HERRING

996703ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYCOMPLAINT-ORIENTED “SERVICES”

research-article2021

This article argues that the expansion of shelter and

welfare provisions for the homeless can lead to

increased criminalization of homeless people in public

spaces. First, I document how repression of people

experiencing homelessness by the police in San

Francisco neighborhoods increased immediately after

the opening of new shelters. Second, I reveal how shel-

ter beds are used as a privileged tool of the police to

arrest, cite, and confiscate property of the unhoused,

albeit in the guise of sanitary and public health initia-

tives. I conclude by considering how shelters increas-

ingly function as complaint-oriented “services,” aimed

at addressing the interests of residents, businesses, and

politicians, rather than the needs of those unhoused.

Keywords: homelessness; policing; social welfare;

poverty governance; San Francisco

In January 2018, Leilani Farha, the United

Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate

Housing and Human Rights, visited San

Francisco. Although she was deeply concerned

about the homelessness she saw, the true

American exceptionalism Farha found was not

its condition of homelessness but rather its

criminalized treatment of the homeless by

police officers and sanitation workers: “There’s

a cruelty here that I don’t think I’ve seen.

Sweeping people off the streets . . . whether

they live in tents on sidewalks or in their cars, is

cruel and inhumane treatment” (Gee 2018).

The same month of Farha’s visit, San Francisco

Mayor London Breed celebrated the city’s com-

passion and leadership in providing homeless

Chris Herring is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard

University’s Inequality in America Initiative and will

begin as an assistant professor of sociology at the

University of California, Los Angeles in 2022. His work

has been published in American Sociological Review,

Social Problems, City and Community, City, and vari-

ous edited volumes.

Correspondence: cherring@fas.harvard.edu

COMPLAINT-ORIENTED “SERVICES” 265

services. At the Mayor’s Martin Luther King Day Address, the director of the

HSH (San Francisco Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing)

exclaimed, “This year’s record funding level recognizes the great work that our

city and nonprofit partners are engaged in and a welcome investment in our work

on helping our homeless.” Indeed, San Francisco has more supportive housing

units dedicated to addressing homelessness and has invested more money into

homeless services per capita than any other major U.S. city (HSH 2017). In the

past decade alone, the city has invested more than $1.5 billion into serving its

homeless population, built or leased twenty-seven hundred units of long-term

supportive housing, and created more than five hundred new shelter beds (HSH

2017).

This simultaneous existence of interventions designed to help the unhoused

within shelter alongside efforts to criminalize their existence in public space,

exemplified in San Francisco, is a hallmark of contemporary homeless policy

across the United States. With the rise in “advanced homelessness” (Marcuse

1988) during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States responded in two

ways. First, federal and local governments invested billions in opening and oper-

ating emergency shelters across the country. Between 1984 and 1988, more than

thirty-five hundred new homeless shelters opened (Jencks 1995, 15).

Simultaneously, cities began passing anti-homeless ordinances—such as bans on

camping, sleeping, sitting, and feeding the poor—effectively criminalizing home-

lessness (Ortiz, Dick, and Rankin 2015). While there have been significant devel-

opments in promoting permanent supportive housing and increased resistance to

criminalization, shelters continue to open across the country (Henry etal. 2018),

and anti-homeless ordinances have increased more over the past five years as of

this writing than during any earlier period in U.S. history (NLCHP [National

Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty] 2019). In sum, criminalization on the

streets and temporary aid through shelter remain the primary treatments through

which the unhoused are managed in the American metropolis and have increased

in lockstep.

Shelter development and the rise of anti-homeless laws have been well docu-

mented by social scientists. However, the scholarship is much less clear about the

relationship between the growth and policies of homeless services in shelter and

the growth and policies of homeless criminalization on the streets. Social scien-

tists studying homelessness in public space have asserted the dominance of a

punitive and exclusionary approach marked by the surge of anti-homeless laws

and associated practices of banishment (Beckett and Herbert 2009) that have

become defining features of the “carceral” (Davis 2006), “revanchist” (Smith

1996), and “postjustice” (Mitchell 2003) city. Much of this scholarship situates

NOTE: I thank the homeless individuals, police officers, sanitation workers, social workers,

members of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, and city officials who allowed me

to spend time with them. I would like to thank Loïc Wacquant, Teresa Gowan, and Armando

Lara-Milan, who all provided helpful comments on earlier drafts as well as the editors of this

special issue. A grant from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and a National Science

Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant supported this research.