After homeless encampment sweeps are conducted, many media outlets and politicians will rave about how clean the streets are, painting an inaccurate portrait that claims – either literally or subliminally – that homelessness has been solved in that area.
Data shows that ruthlessly dismantling encampments does not result in permanent housing solutions over 99% of the time, with one study showing that only 0.1% of sweep victims maintain any semblance of permanent housing status in the years to follow. So, claiming that swept streets curb homelessness is highly misleading, an action that carries heavy consequences. This false narrative plays into legislative decisions, ultimately exacerbating homelessness and making our communities less safe.
Optical Illusions: How Politicians Make the Harmful Practice of Destroying Homeless Encampments Look Advantageous
The 2024 Olympic Games convey Paris, France, as a glistening, carefree metropolis where the Eiffel Tower looms over grand arenas.
Historic landmarks take center stage alongside scores of internationally acclaimed athletes. But, beneath the photovoltaic panels of the 5,000 sqm Aquatics Centre and behind the sands of the temporary Champ de Mars Arena, there lies a darker truth we must contend.
In the months leading up to the games, Paris city officials gathered thousands of unsheltered homeless locals and forcibly bussed them out of the region. It’s a move The Real News Network referred to as “social cleansing,” although game makers more technically reference it as activating “dispersal zones.”
Regardless of the chosen name, the end result is an optical illusion that makes homelessness look as if it has disappeared when, in reality, it has been temporarily relocated.
If previous examples serve as projections, we can expect to see a mass resurgence of homelessness in this host city, as we have witnessed in every other host city since the 1980s. Meanwhile, many viewers will be fooled into thinking Paris has somehow solved its homeless crisis because of what they see on their screens.
The Olympics is a large-scale example of this lie, but it’s not an anomaly. Politicians are playing these same games in cities worldwide – by managing the image of homelessness rather than countering the root causes of the crisis.
Similar practices have taken place elsewhere with comparable results. For example, the streets of Philadelphia gleamed for that one day when the pope came to visit. They have since returned to the lackluster reality that homeless people are forced to endure daily.
In 2023, there was the infamous McPherson Square Encampment clearing, which presented the public with the same skewed imagery of squeaky-clean streets. What the media fails to mention is that two-thirds of the swept encampment residents were living unsheltered in the same vicinity the very next day.
According to DCist, six weeks after the incident, only three encampment residents obtained permanent housing. The vast majority of McPherson Square encampment residents lost access to vital resources because of the forced relocation, as social workers scrambled to find them in the rubble. This means they are unlikely to obtain permanent housing anytime soon, which equates to more homelessness, not less.
YouTube personalities and popular podcasters shower the public with footage of swept streets a few hours after encampment “cleanups” have been conducted, never returning to the same space even a few days later. However, Invisible People’s camera crew has exposed this political scam. Click here to see what those same streets look like days after these multi-million-dollar sweeps take place. Spoiler alert—they look the same. In some instances, they even look worse.
In really deceptive reportage, some mainstream media outlets will preemptively suggest that criminalization or forced institutionalization might “solve homelessness” once and for all.
One recent article was titled “Can a $6.4 Billion Mental Health Ballot Measure Solve California Homelessness?” The ballot measure the article references does not put homeless people into housing. It forces them into mental institutions, which is yet another form of relocation.
To quote the LA Times, “the vast majority of people with severe mental illness aren’t homeless,” and many unsheltered residents forced into institutions will wind up right back on the streets in a matter of days, weeks, or months.
Presenting this idea as a possible fix for homelessness deceptively suggests that mental illness plays a deeper role than housing in the homeless crisis. Meanwhile, scholarly research continues to identify the leading cause of homelessness as a lack of affordable housing.
Putting a Band-Aid on the Tidal Wave of Homelessness to Justify a Tsunami of Evictions
This is the political equivalent of asking a toddler to clean their room and watching as they shove everything they own into an overflowing closet that will inevitably burst open, littering the floor again with toys.
This is like holding up a fishing net while posing in front of a tsunami receding to the sea and snapping a selfie seconds before the surge as if to suggest the brief absence of water means that fishing nets can stop tsunamis in their tracks.
Imagine if the general public was led to believe that holding fishing nets in the air was the best or only way to stop a tidal wave. And so, instead of investing in tsunami mitigation strategies like hazard zone mapping and flood-proof construction, the overwhelming majority of allocated storm funding went toward buying millions of fishing nets. Sure, the fishing net sales industry would be booming, but the destructive waters would ram right through the gaping holes, crushing whole communities of people who are both unprepared and ill-informed.
This is what is happening with homelessness. The false narrative impacts where the homelessness reduction funding goes, and the wave of homelessness recedes high above us, crashing unexpectedly. Then, homelessness pours through the holes in each net, and the money needed to end the crisis is washed up.
Legislative Decision-Making is Heavily Influenced by Public Opinion – and Vice Versa
If the public is misled well enough by the false narrative, they will inevitably vote in favor of policing homeless people rather than resolving homelessness. In an exclusive discussion with Invisible People, Senior Policy Director Eric Tars of the National Homelessness Law Center elaborated.
“It’s all part of the dangerous approach of criminalization and sweeps that focuses on short-term visible actions rather than solving the underlying causes of why people are becoming homeless in the first place and needing to live in encampments,” Tars said.
“Unfortunately, in today’s political arena, the primary interest of elected officials is really just getting elected again. And so this incentivizes them to respond to the loudest constituents, who are the ones complaining about people sleeping on the streets or sidewalks in places that impact their homes or businesses. The politicians use sweeps to remove homeless people in the fastest manner possible rather than doing it in a manner that would actually solve the problem for everybody.”
“If a homeless population has just moved from one street corner to another, you can point to those initial folks who were complaining and see that they are satisfied with the actions that elected officials have taken,” Tars continued. This means the politicians get votes for having allegedly solved the problem, even though they’ve just moved it to a different street corner. Then, the cycle repeats. And all of these resources that have gone into sweeping encampments could have been going into actually housing people.”
Once the Lie Has Been Bought and Sold, Elected Leaders Can Successfully Promote Ineffective and Expensive Approaches to the Homeless Crisis
The practice of dismantling encampments is profoundly expensive. It was so expensive that voters would never support these actions if they knew the truth- that sweeps don’t work. Eric Tars explained that this is why data is deliberately hidden from voters and gave specific examples of recent events.
“In Los Angeles, for example,” Tars reflected, “back in 2015, an audit showed that the city had spent about a hundred million dollars on homelessness. $87 million of that was for law enforcement, and only $13 million was for housing and services for people.”
“If you flipped that figure and prioritized housing and services, you’d start seeing a dramatic decrease in homelessness,” Tars continued. “Instead, we continue investing more and more into these policing approaches that are only making things worse by giving people arrest records, fines, and fees that they can’t pay or that they have to pay before they save up for their first month’s rent and security deposit.”
“So, criminalization is actually prolonging people’s staying on the streets,” Tars concluded. “Things are getting worse, and as the cycle perpetuates, the public view is intentionally obscured. Put simply, the criminalization approach is harmful both to the individuals who are directly impacted by it and to the community as a whole because it continues misdirecting resources away from actual solutions and putting funding into approaches that are ultimately making the problem worse.”
Tell Your Legislators You Vote for Actions, Not Illusions
Criminalization tactics don’t solve homelessness, but favorable legislative policies could. Tell your local legislators that your vote is contingent upon making housing a human right.
