The Homeless Industrial Complex
The spectacular sweep of the park was not a failure of the city’s system to address the crisis of homelessness, but that system working precisely as designed: Promises of housing provide the legal and rhetorical cover for police to purge unhoused people from public space, while interim housing, on its surface a humanitarian project, functions as an arm of the prison system, used not to help unhoused people but to warehouse them.
The Enduring Fiction of Affordable Housing