9-27-15 New York:
Murray Hill has a quality of life problem. After growing worried about the neighborhood’s homeless population, residents started a
Facebook group to share photos and report incidents they thought might affect public safety or general quality of life.
The Village Voice’s Madison Margolin recounts how one of the group’s admins decided to go a step further and built an iOS app called
NYC Map the Homeless, making it possible for residents to upload photos of homeless people tied to specific locations and tagged with labels such as “encampment,” “aggressive panhandling,” “NeedsMedicalAid,” and “Threat.”
The app’s creator, 25 year-old engineer David Fox, says he hopes it will bolster data about homeless people in the area. “I’m not living under the impression that completely ignoring homeless people and giving them privacy is somehow helping them live good lives or bringing us any closer to actually helping them,” he told Margolin.
Paradoxically, many residents blame service providers aimed at helping the homeless for the perceived jump in the homeless population. “You can’t just give people a meal and turn them loose on the streets until the next meal if those people are dangerous to the community or if they’re going to go out and urinate, defecate, masturbate, and have sex in public,” Janet Martin, a member of the Facebook group, told Margolin. “That isn’t right.”
Arguments like these point to a fundamental paradox of homelessness. If a person can be defined by their lack of a private residence, then every aspect of their life must, by axiom, take place in public. A person without a home has no choice but to urinate, defecate and masturbate outside of the home. These behavioral outcomes are made inevitable by the social disenfranchisement that comes from wealth. And efforts to criminalize these behaviors as assaults on the quality of life of others can be traced back to the joint development of modern government welfare programs and the lifestyle surveillance that accompanied them.
In
a survey examining the American cityscapes over the last 50 years, University of Michigan professor Heather Ann Thompson and Rutgers University professor Donna Murch note how aid programs developed as part of the War on Poverty in the 1970s and 1980s were used as pretext for unannounced home visits to evaluate the living circumstances of aid recipients.
After that practice was abandoned in the mid-70s, a new kind of “redetermination program” was implemented, with scheduled appointments that relied on “forms of state and community surveillance that encouraged neighbors to report recipients as ‘welfare cheats.’” These programs often lead to counterintuitive outcomes in which ”many of the nation’s poorest people [were] subjected to prosecutions that left them further marginalized from the mainstream economy with little hope of legal employment.”
These strategies had been particularly effective at introducing social divisions in communities previously unified through mutual mistrust of the police. “In place of an antipolice violence coalition between African Americans and white gay radicals in the 1970s,” Thompson and Murch write, “by the 1980s and 1990s, gay politics instead centered on reforms, such as the recruitment of gay and lesbian police officers and the monitoring of hate crimes and antigay violence, that could more readily coexist with enhanced policing.”
“This paved the way for more recent conflicts, like that around Chicago’s ‘Take Back Boystown’ movement, that pit comparatively affluent white gays and lesbians against African Americans and other residents of color.”
The idea of “quality of life” emerged during this same period in the 1970s, first as a generalized measure for healthcare outcomes and later as a figurehead for the progressive politics underwriting the Wars on Poverty, Drugs, and Crime. In “Origins of the Concept of Quality of Life in Health Care: A Rhetorical Solution to a Political Problem”, David Armstrong and Deborah Caldwell of Kings College describe quality of life as a response to “a void created by the perceived narrow successes of high technology medicine.”
Technological developments in healthcare had made it possible to extend a person’s lifespan, but often at great expense and accompanied by substantial suffering. Quality of life measures became a counterweight to a singular clinical fixation on neutralizing disease by attempting to acknowledge the subjective experience of the patients.
Given this history, there’s a monstrous reversal of values in using quality of life as justification for community surveillance of the homeless. Instead of looking at the ways property and wages can create pathogenic ruptures between neighbors, quality of life arguments justify the criminalization of those suffering most from the dysfunctional politics of the rich. It turns people into vectors of poverty, suggesting their immiseration must have been caused by some pre-existing moral failure.
It’s not quality of life or public safety that’s being protected by civilian surveillance of homeless people, but the unjustifiable vanity that makes such judgements possible. Murray Hill is an expensive neighborhood, the kind of place where rent averages are separated by doorman buildings and non-doorman buildings, with a studio in the latter category going for between $2200 and $2300 a month. It’s also racially homogenous. The 2000 census said it was 76% white and more recent data from 2010 suggests it remains overwhemingly white. Like the Facebook group before it, Fox’s app is less a tool to help those suffering outside the locked doors of Murray Hill apartments than a catalyst for the immoral wealthy to displace their guilt onto a catalog of other people’s frailties.
The right to defecate is fundamental to human society, it’s not a pathology of unproductive lives. In Murray Hill a shitzu on a leash has more rights to a normally functioning digestive system than a human without a lease. This is an evil state of affairs, as mundanely invisible as car exhaust. It’s never enough to have more than another human being, wealth can never feel secure until it creates a moral narrative that justifies otherwise intolerable disparities.
Poverty becomes a personal failing, an aesthetic violation of the Calvinist symmetry between hard work and prosperity. Wealth, on the other hand, can never be personal, but is instead a sign of the divine order of a system working as it should for those fortunate enough to be aligned with it. In that way, NYC Map the Homeless is an augmented reality tool that makes it possible for the better-off to blame everyone else simply for being present. ..Source.. by Michael Thomsen
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