Abstract
People experiencing homelessness struggle to find a place in the city. With public spaces mostly devoted to infrastructure (for cars), civic identity, and recreation, few spaces remain for the unhoused. Cities regulate behavior in more visible public spaces to prevent loitering, sleeping, and sometimes sitting and eating. Given the scarcity of welcoming public spaces for people experiencing homelessness, it is unclear where they live and whether these spaces are providing what they need. To uncover how people experiencing homelessness use landscapes, I mapped the location of people along urban transects in three California cities: Sacramento, Oakland, and Santa Cruz. I interviewed people who are unhoused in these cities regarding their daily movements. The mapping and interviews resulted in a typology of public spaces of homelessness. This research found that although many people experiencing homelessness inhabit urban parks and sidewalks around social service centers, they also frequent places formed by and adjacent to transportation infrastructure. People experiencing homelessness creatively appropriate public transportation infrastructure as living areas to socialize, rest, and manage their visibility. I argue that the redesign of infrastructure should consider the preservation of edge conditions and informal spaces to provide public space for people experiencing homelessness.
INTRODUCTION
People experiencing homelessness do not have private space. Without shelter, a home base, or a private refuge, they live out their lives in public. In many cities of Western Europe and the United States, more public space is devoted to car travel and parking than to any other use (Nello-Deakin, 2019). Cities designate remaining public space for other specific purposes, that is, utilities, recreation, or civic identity; rarely do these spaces provide for the daily needs of people experiencing homelessness.
In the few public places people experiencing homelessness might inhabit, they may be unwelcome because of their appearance, behavior, or assumed identity (Takahashi, 1997; Harter et al., 2005). This lack of hospitality has been codified in policies that attempt to prevent people from resting too long in public space. Identified as “antihomeless laws, they prohibit loitering, sitting on sidewalks, eating in public, or camping of any kind (Bauman, 2019). Mitchell (1997) argues that antihomeless laws perpetuated by city elites help transform urban public space into a threatening landscape for the poorest members of society. The laws intend to promote an aesthetic of cleanliness, growth, and stability in the city, but they result in criminalizing behavior associated with socioeconomic destitution.
The challenge for people experiencing homelessness in this context is to find space for daily rest and other private behaviors. Where should they spend the day? Where can they assemble with others? How do they inhabit these spaces? Descriptions of homeless life, such as “living on the streets” and “concrete camping,” suggest they occupy pavement—the roads, streets, driveways, and sidewalks that form so much of public infrastructure. The geography of homelessness has largely been studied through smallscale analysis of specific buildings or public spaces, such as libraries (Hodgetts et al., 2008), shelters (Brinegar, 2003), abandoned buildings (Kaplan et al., 2019), and tent cities (Herring & Lutz, 2015). On a larger scale, Jennifer Wolch and others studied the movements of unhoused people in Los Angeles (Dear & Wolch, 1992; Wolch et al., 1993; Wolch & Rowe, 1992). Since Wolch’s work, there have been few locational studies of people experiencing homelessness at the site and neighborhood scale. People experiencing homelessness often center their lives around social service centers and procuring basic food, water, and shelter, which tends to concentrate the population (Wolch & Rowe, 1992; Murphy, 2009; Harrell, 2019), while they experience the pressure of policing and “move-alongs” that disperse the population (Amster, 2003; Walby & Lippert, 2012). But how homelessness works itself out in the urban landscape remains obscure. Understanding the geography of homelessness would lead to a better understanding of the relationship between the daily lives of people experiencing homelessness and the physical and social construction of the urban landscape, as well as potential ways to enhance a city’s livability for those without permanent shelter.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: LANDSCAPES OF HOMELESSNESS
Unhoused people are defined by what they lack—a home. The common description of someone as “homeless” (as if their circumstance is who they are) closely links person and place in the public mind. The label places them, whether that place is an absence or presence, that is, Skid Row, the Bowery, or “the streets.” Soja (2011) describes the intertwining of people and place as a “socio-spatial dialectic”— the social produces the structure of space and the spatial informs social relationships and structures. Ranciére describes this relationship as the “distribution of the sensible” (2015). The social structure and people in power control the “distribution,” in this case a dispersal of the shared vision and its elements as well as a partitioning of the city into categories— this belongs here while this other thing does not. It is not just that the social informs space, deciding what goes where through a process of planning, design, and use, but that experience of space, “ the sensible,” informs the social, shaping who lives in a place and who belongs (Schein, 2009).
Cities divide people into those who belong and those who do not belong by dividing spaces into categories according to zoning, land use, wealth, or even what is “natural” and “cultural.” Cresswell (1996), after Bourdieu (1984), points to ideological values, determining whether someone is in place or out of place, for example, a homeless person in Grand Central Station. In the experience of homelessness, as in all human experience, the mutual production of social relations and spatial structure shapes lived experience, as well as public perception. Landscapes of homelessness are not only distributed by the normative and exclusionary social structure, they are also constructed through the interplay of identities of the people who inhabit them, including those experiencing homelessness.
Urban residents share a spatial imaginary of how a city should look and how it should function. “Spatial imaginaries are stories and ways of talking about places and spaces that transcend language as embodied performances by people in the material world” (Watkins, 2015: 509). The imaginary relates to our experience of a place in a shifting conglomeration of power, knowledge and mapping (Gregory, 1995). A homeless person resting, camping, or sitting on urban streets does not reflect the normative vision of what the city should be, as they are practicing private behavior in public space. “ Private” and “public” are social and spatial terms, used in the distribution of the sensible to define, delimit, and critique unhoused people’s use of space. Immersed in the distribution of the sensible, the person experiencing homelessness appears in-sensible. The sensible urban landscape is ordered through its distribution— divided, controlled, and parceled out according to economic and social ideals of economic vitality and growth. In contrast to the housed urban dweller, a person who is homeless may be seen as disorder, threatening feelings of safety and economic growth bound up in ideas of what a place should look like. Erratic behavior (to others)—moving when they should be still, sitting when they should be moving— and a bedraggled appearance inspire feelings of dissonance in urban spaces (Dear & Gleeson, 1991; Klodawsky, 2009). People experiencing homelessness are perceived as disorderly.
The perceived threat and feelings of dissonance may explain the exclusionary practices exhibited in many public spaces. Formal measures of policy, land use, and policing attempt to limit or displace the perceived threat of homelessness (Herbert & Beckett, 2010; Walby & Lippert, 2012). However, people experiencing homelessness and the landscapes they inhabit do not exist outside the city as separate entities; they are produced by and integral to the systems of property, economy, and open space of urban life (Blomley, 2009).
People experiencing homelessness learn to adapt, a practice of personal “street” survival that varies depending on the setting and whether they are alone or with others (Snow & Mulcahy, 2001). Bergamaschi et al. (2014) describe the occupation of the Italian inner city by people experiencing homelessness as an inhabitance based on the twin motivations of survival and belonging and based on a recognition of their own aesthetics. Unhoused people manage their appearance by hiding amid the arcades, alleys, and urban indentations to escape the notice of store owners and police patrols, while remaining visible to those who can help them. To manage visibility, and thus their perceived identity, they implement creative tactics, reforming public space and its occupation for their own ends, establishing territories, social meeting places, and places of exchange (Bergamaschi et al., 2014; see also Certeau, 2002; Sparks, 2017a).
People experiencing homelessness respond to the spatial imaginary in cities in two other ways. First, much of the behavior of unhoused people focuses on procuring basic needs, like food, water, and bathrooms, rather than on being intentionally transgressive. Unhoused people need access to safe spaces, food and water, privacy, and a social life, so they might find opportunities for long-term shelter (Hardin & Wille, 2017). Many orient their lives around networks of social services as they seek help and shelter. Wolch and colleagues (Wolch & Rowe, 1992; Wolch et al., 1993) mapped the movements of people experiencing homelessness in the Los Angeles area in the 1990s. They found that social service centers acted as pivots around which unhoused people revolve (see also Rollinson, 1998; Buccieri, 2014). Second, some people experiencing homelessness deliberately transgress norms to explicitly resist exclusionary practices in the city. For example, they may camp on the lawn of City Hall, march to the capital, or resist evictions in a tent city (Wright, 1997; Mitchell, 2003; Amster, 2004). In these more explicit protests against exclusion, public space becomes contested space.
Previous research suggests that unhoused people center their movements around social services as they seek resources, including shelter (Wolch et al., 1993); at the same time, people without housing often locate in spaces out of the public eye, where their presence is not out of place. For instance, tent cities, the congregation of informal encampments in a concentrated place, increasingly occupy spaces of vacant lots, urban fringes, and postindustrial brownfields (Herring, 2014; Sparks, 2017b; Parker, 2020). The opportunistic nature of shelter building and movement suggests that research on homelessness should take into account the agency of the person who is without shelter to procure resources, socialize with others, and protest exclusionary practices in the city.
To understand how people experiencing homelessness adapt to landscapes that are often designed and managed with the intention of excluding them, this study focuses on small landscape settings inhabited by unhoused people in three California cities. It considers in particular how these landscapes are formed by land use and planning practices and how unhoused people make use of them to meet their needs, maintain temporary shelter, and socialize with others. In addition, it considers how the physical spaces provide varying degrees of visibility and invisibility so that people experiencing homelessness can control their own visibility to a certain extent. Through behavior observation and interviews, I develop an understanding of the relationships between land use types and their daily practices. As they look for resources, people experiencing homelessness inhabit parks and open spaces, industrial areas, and transportation buffers. Through a typology, I analyze their inhabitance of these spaces to explicate the influence of aesthetics, services, and privacy to better understand why they inhabit these urban landscapes.
SETTING AND METHODS
A locational study, an observation of people experiencing homelessness in the landscapes they inhabit, can help people describe where they spend their days and the relationship between physical space and their daily lives. This study focused on landscapes and homelessness in three California cities: Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and Oakland. Conversations with social service providers and transect walks identified key locations in each city for further study. Transects, a methodology borrowed from ecology, allow researchers to assess a larger neighborhood without observing every space (Han, 2021). Field studies, behavior observations, and interviews provided a more detailed understanding of the relationship between the landscapes that people experiencing homelessness inhabit and why. I describe my findings through a typology of landscapes of homelessness. A landscape typology is a transparent way to describe and analyze different spaces so others can understand their significance. “A typology…provides a basis for understanding meaning by providing tangible and/or visual examples of abstract concepts” (Jennings, 2007: 49). Typologies provide coherence to analysis of urban form and suggest potential shared meanings (Kelbaugh, 1996), even if only to emphasize the differences between domiciled and homeless uses.
Homelessness is particularly prevalent in California cities. Nationwide, the homeless population increased 3% between 2018 and 2019, according to the Housing and Urban Development’s point in time count numbers (an approximation of the population on one January night that likely underestimates the number of people experiencing homelessness) (Abt Associates, 2020; see also Jocoy, 2013, on count limitations). Yet most states showed a slight decline in homelessness. Almost all of the increase came from the West Coast states, particularly California, where numbers of unhoused people increased 16% between 2018 and 2019 (Abt Associates, 2020). Unhoused people in gentrifying areas of California have increased by as much as 47% (Applied Survey Research, 2017).
Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and Oakland have concentrations of homelessness high enough to facilitate field interactions and different opinions on the landscape. According to the Housing and Urban Development’s point in time count, in Sacramento County, 5,570 people experienced homelessness on one January night in 2019, and of those, 2,685 people had no shelter in the city (Sacramento Steps Forward, 2019). In Santa Cruz County, the homeless point in time count listed 2,167 unhoused people, of whom 1,700 (78%) have no shelter in the city (Applied Survey Research, 2019b). In Oakland, 4,071 people were counted as experiencing homelessness in 2019, and 3,210 (79%) people had no shelter (Applied Survey Research, 2019a).
These three cities vary in size, social services, and public space types, which adds to the breadth of this research. Santa Cruz provides relatively minimal services through shelters, whereas Oakland proves a more intense work-shelter program. The cities have a variety of public spaces available to people without housing: parks, wildlands associated with rivers (in Sacramento and Santa Cruz), utility corridors, and transportation networks (in Oakland). In Sacramento, this study focused on the River District, an industrial neighborhood north of downtown that has the greatest concentration of homeless services and unhoused people. A smaller town, Santa Cruz hosts unhoused people in the downtown area, along San Lorenzo River, and north of the Mission Highway in an industrial neighborhood. There is no one area of Oakland that caters to unhoused people; they can be found in parks downtown, east along International Boulevard, under the freeways of West Oakland, and up into the streets of Emeryville and Berkeley. In all three cities, Black and Native American people represent a disproportionate number of the homeless population, particularly in Oakland, where 70% of the homeless population are African American but only 40% of the overall population.
Homelessness service providers in each city helped me identify neighborhoods with high concentrations of people experiencing homelessness. In these neighborhoods, I selected transects based on preliminary fieldwork that identified routes and rest stops that people who appeared to be homeless frequented each day. I walked (and biked) urban transects to identify and observe where unhoused people spend their day. Each transect began in an adjacent neighborhood, crossed the key neighborhood and ended in a third area (see Table 1). I visited each transect twice at different times of the weekday in August and September during fair weather. The study mapped the location of each observed person outside, distinguishing between the domiciled and people who I thought to be experiencing homelessness, based on their appearance, their reception of homeless services, what they were carrying, and whether they were in or emerging from a campsite. The person’s apparent age, gender, race, and behavior were recorded, but these might not be the categories within which they self-identify.
Transects in Sacramento, Oakland, and Santa Cruz
To answer the question of how unhoused people inhabit these spaces, I conducted further observations in the field and interviewed people experiencing homelessness in the field (n = 41: 14 men, 7 women in Sacramento, 3 men and 3 women in Oakland, and 9 men and 5 women in Santa Cruz). Field observations were opportunistic, given the transient nature of encampments and the extreme variation in individual routines. I might notice a group of people sitting in the highway right-of-way sharing a meal one day, only to return the next week and see no one. During field observations, I introduced myself to anyone in proximity who made eye contact, leaving it up to them to participate. (The participant population skewed male because men make up a larger percentage of the homeless population but also potentially because more men made eye contact.) Interviewees participated in 10-to 15-minute interviews regarding their space, their habits, and where they might go from here. Longer interviews of 20 minutes to an hour took place at more formalized homeless gathering spaces, in particular Friendship
Park in Sacramento and San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz. Both types of interviews followed a protocol reviewed by an independent research board that highlighted the researcher’s purpose and positionality while giving options for participants to withdraw. While there are many different conditions of homelessness, this study focused on people who had been without shelter for a period of at least a week and up to a decade or longer. Study participants spent much of their day outdoors, even if they returned to a homeless shelter at night. The study did not include people who were living in cars.
Text from the interviews provided a data set from which I selected comments and stories regarding place. Using place-texts and the transect mapping, I identified spaces of rest and gathering. I divided these spaces into categories based on land use, that is, transportation or industry. This study did not consider places where people walked, biked, or rode a bus. Three categories or types predominated: parks and open spaces, industrial zones, and public infrastructure, such as utilities and transportation. Two questions were asked of each landscape type: why this location, and how does what people are doing relate to where they are? This typology helped me analyze commonalities between different settings, as well as important differences in the selection of a place to rest in terms of time of day, proximity to services, and relation to others.
A TYPOLOGY OF LANDSCAPES OF HOMELESSNESS
The resulting typology of landscapes of homelessness categorizes places in these three cities in terms of exclusion, land use, visibility and invisibility, and how people who are homeless use the space. Cities exclude people experiencing homelessness from certain areas and include (or at least ignore) the habitation of unhoused people in other areas.
Landscapes of Exclusion
Identifying places unhoused people avoid and places from which they are asked to “move along” provides clues into the places they end up inhabiting (for longer durations). The exclusion of people experiencing homelessness from these spaces are explicitly enacted—in the form of police harassment, implementation of anti-homeless policies, or fencing of property—and implicitly communicated—in the sense of feelings of discomfort in certain areas.
Fencing excludes people experiencing homelessness from public and private property. Of the five vacant properties in the River District in Sacramento, I observed four lots used by unhoused people during the day in 2016. By 2018, owners had installed fences around all four properties (Figure 1). Unhoused people countered this exclusion by cutting holes in the fence or climbing over it. In addition to fences, police patrols exclude people experiencing homelessness from certain places. In Sacramento, a homeless woman traveling with a group warned the others to stay away from K Street Mall, a pedestrian shopping street: “If you’re walking with a cart, the cops will give you a citation in minutes!” I observed unhoused people sitting down on a sidewalk in Santa Cruz’s Pacific Avenue, a shopping street, being asked to move along.
Photograph of new fencing of vacant lot formerly accessible to people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento.
In Sacramento and Santa Cruz, people sitting in the open space along the river or in the industrial area north of downtown were less likely to be approached by police or park rangers. A formerly homeless man in Sacramento said, “I could go anywhere” when I asked if there was any place in the city he had to avoid. However, he later described a series of run-ins with the West Sacramento police, resulting in a warrant for his arrest so that when he walked to his supplier in that town, he had to cross the river at the rail bridge and skirt along the bottom of a levee until he reached the right neighborhood.
He explains, “There’s been some times when it’s best to just stay out of sight.”
Indirect exclusions may include rumors of police crackdowns, signs that prohibit certain types of activities (e.g. cycling in parks), and the limits of accessible, affordable transportation. The expense of transportation constrains homeless movement, excluding people from farther reaches of the city. One middle-aged man originally from a suburb north of Sacramento walks a short distance each day between a social service center and downtown to sell newspapers, unable to return to the family home in the suburbs because of the expense.
The shifting structure of a city’s housing and public space also excludes. The civic leadership of Santa Cruz, deemed progressive since the late 1960s, has wrestled with supporting the demands of businesses alongside residents’ rights to occupy public space (Gendron & Domhoff, 2009). After the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the city decided to rebuild Pacific Avenue. To discourage panhandling and homeless occupation of this prime space, they designed it without concentrated open spaces and with benches oriented away from pedestrians. Today, Pacific Avenue hosts people experiencing homelessness almost exclusively until 10 a.m., when the shops open, at which point a combination of shoppers and police activity overwhelm the homeless population, pushing them out to the river or up north to the light industrial area.
Landscapes of Homelessness
If excluded from “prime” territories such as busy retail corridors, private spaces, and plazas, what types of landscapes do unhoused people inhabit? Just as the population experiencing homelessness at any given time is heterogeneous and difficult to classify, homeless landscapes vary. The time of day matters. Interviewees described their daily movements as confined to one neighborhood, but field observations of homeless movement suggest that they may move in and out of different landscape types according to the schedule of social services, police and park ranger patrols, and when it gets dark. Three landscape types generally serve the homeless population in these three cities during the day: parks and open space, industrial areas (with social services), and transportation infrastructure (Figure 2). Other spaces of rest and socializing certainly exist, but these three landscapes offer some combination of proximity to resources and socialization they need.
A map of the River District in Sacramento, frequented by unhoused people, showing locations of people experiencing homelessness in three landscape types.
Where people experiencing homelessness rest during the day often coincides with night encampments, because many cannot leave their encampments without leaving their belongings exposed. In addition, some may be experiencing impaired mobility. An older woman described her morning commute as a walk from a nearby women’s shelter, one block to a day use park. It takes her 10 minutes because of her history of strokes, which makes physical activity difficult. For those who can travel longer distances, camps at night tend to be more hidden and further away from areas where they rest during the day.
Parks and Open Space
People experiencing homelessness congregate in urban parks and open space not frequented by the police (in sweeps). These include urban plazas where they can rest and socialize, large parks where they can rest in anonymity, and urban wild spaces where they often camp and spend the day (Figure 3).
Park and open space typology.
People experiencing homelessness use smaller public spaces—the stoop of the public library, an urban pocket park, or a corner of a plaza—as temporary places of rest. In urban parks and plazas, the unhoused person’s visibility informs how and for how long they inhabit the landscape. Cesar Chavez Park in Sacramento and Mission Plaza in Santa Cruz, although used by people experiencing homelessness as places of rest, are highly visible and visited by police and park rangers, who can ask people to move along. One counterexample is Lafayette Park in West Oakland, which encourages unhoused people to use the space. The landscape architect, Walter Hood, engaged the homeless community in the design process (Lubell, 2019). The park’s center hosts a few tents by the restrooms, while other activities—walking, Tai Chi, and children playing— occur around the periphery of the park.
Large parks have room for both active and passive areas, as well as out-of-the-way pockets, where people experiencing homelessness can be left alone. These parks are maintained and patrolled but cannot be surveyed from just one point. In the daytime, individual homeless men inhabit Discovery Park in Sacramento, a large grassy expanse that maintains a quiet peacefulness away from the boat ramp. An older man carrying a backpack indicated that he spends time in this particular park because it is “not too busy”; he just likes “to hang out.” On the weekends, when families congregate in the park, he goes elsewhere. A formerly homeless person describes his nightly encampment in Sacramento:
Yeah, I lived most of the time in Discovery Park, most of the time in the west end of Discovery Park. I knew where the sprinklers ran…I wouldn’t go off in the brush. There are bugs, mosquitos, it’s dirty. It’s dusty. I had a spot at the far, far end, where the American [River] and the Sac meet, if you go in, if you go north from that spot about 100 yards, there was actually a dip, that dropped down. They’ve since fixed that, but there was a dip and the sprinklers missed.
And I was right there, and if you laid down, even if the ranger came in, he couldn’t see you…in the winter, I’d live under the Green Bridge. I was under the I-5 bridge with everyone else … [In Discovery Park] I would throw out my tarp and lay down my blanket and sleeping bag, lay my bike down and lock it up, hook onto it, I had bungee cords. ’Cause people could just come in and take your stuff. I’d use my shoes and my coat as a pillow.
Urban wilds are public open spaces but are not maintained as regularly as the large parks. These include the Pogonip Open Space in Santa Cruz and the American River Parkway (ARP) in Sacramento. A man in Mission Park, Santa Cruz, described his camp in the woods complete with solar array, batteries, and lighting. He spends each morning in camp. In one of the few negative interactions I experienced, an older man pushing a bike off the path and into the blackberries of the ARP questioned my presence along the river. When I asked him if he was all right, he yelled, “Yeah, as long as somebody don’t keep f—with my campsite!!” The urban wilds host those unhoused people seeking complete solitude or invisibility.
Industrial and Postindustrial Streets
Residential neighborhoods often block homelessness service agencies from locating in their neighborhood, due to concerns of people experiencing homelessness congregating on sidewalks around the shelter or agency (Takahashi, 1997). The homelessness agencies then find space in industrial and postindustrial neighborhoods without residential activists. The landscape types they inhabit fall into three categories in these industrial areas: sidewalks, vacant lots, and alleys (Figure 4).
Sidewalks and street typology in industrial areas.
The greatest number of people experiencing homelessness observed in the study occupied sidewalks, from formal concrete walkways to dirt paths along the side of the road. Often these sidewalk occupations occur near homelessness service centers. In Santa Cruz, I observed clusters of unhoused people sitting and talking on Coral Street adjacent to the Homeless Service Center and a concrete plant. Coral Street bisects an abandoned railroad track where unhoused people assemble in small groups and walk north to forested encampments.
In Sacramento, people experiencing homelessness gather at Friendship Park, a small plaza operated by the social service organization Loaves & Fishes. When the park closes, unhoused people “fan out,” along Ahern Street into the neighboring streets of the Triangle or congregate in the street next to the VA shelter. Offices and light industrial buildings dot the Triangle. A homeless couple described their sleeping arrangements on the sidewalk along Ahern as “concrete camping.” The street hosts tents, tarps, and blankets strung from the chain-link fence over the sidewalk. The couple previously camped in a vacant lot in a residential area for many years but were eventually kicked out due to complaints by residents. They chose Ahern Street because they know people there. As another homeless man put it: “when you camp on concrete, you tend to camp in big groups. There’s just no place to get out and get away.”
I include the vacant lot landscape type because this landscape has an outsized role in the urban spatial imaginary as an indicator of economic depreciation and even “blight” (Garvin et al., 2012). However, in the three California cities, I observed only a few unhoused people occupying vacant lots. Perhaps this is because most vacant lots are private property and they would be trespassing.
Finally, the alleyways between industrial buildings host a few homeless residents, either sitting for the day or camping. The practice appeared to increase with the greater complexity of the vertical and ground planes—that is, dumpsters, unused loading docks, and building projections—that allow for unhoused people to be out of sight. For an older homeless man in Sacramento, the alleys in the Triangle allow him some control over his environment and who is around him. He has been threatened at a bus stop and mugged on the street, so he sticks to the familiarity of the alleys in the Triangle or spends time in the McDonald’s near where he sleeps. The sheltered walls of the alleys create a safe place to meet friends without being in sight of everyone else or amid automobile traffic.
Public Infrastructure, Particularly Highways, Railyards, and Levees
People experiencing homelessness also inhabit places intended as transportation infrastructure: the shoulders along bike paths, the “clear zones” of highway rights-of-way, arterial streets, and the left-over spaces of bridge abutments (Figure 5). These spaces lack sidewalks and other ideal spaces to rest. They are arterials, levees, railroad tracks, and linear structures created for rapid movement.
Transportation infrastructure typology.
In Santa Cruz, I observed older, homeless men sitting on the shoulder of the bike path. Some were socializing, and others were just staring straight ahead. Also in Santa Cruz, I saw a young woman with a pack jaywalking across a busy street, weaving between cars in a parking lot, and then slumping down to rest behind a truck. Elevated freeways in Oakland offer shelter from the rain. However, the Department of Public Works and the City of Oakland police wage a low-level battle with unhoused people over the tents, shacks, and lean-tos erected under the freeway (Figure 6).
Location of evictions of homeless campers in Oakland, California. Note the relationship between the site of camping and the larger freeways and arterials. (Data from Oakland Department of Public Works 2015; base map from Open Street Map.)
The spatial and microclimatic conditions of transportation rights-of-way can be manipulated by people experiencing homelessness without retribution. Transportation rights-of-way are not usually subject to “eyes on the street” (Jacobs, 1992); therefore, they can be adapted by unhoused people for gathering, eating, and camping. In Sacramento, a railroad bridge over 12th Street provides a space for people who are homeless to sit and rest (see the crossing type in Figure 5). Here, unhoused people can talk about their day, exchange cigarettes, and gossip while people in trains or cars go by too fast to notice. The space does not merit aesthetic attention from civic authorities, existing as “uninhabited” infrastructure space. Its inhospitality (due to fumes and noise) makes it an ideal space for people who are excluded from other spaces.
DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS OF LANDSCAPE TYPES
Prior research suggests that people experiencing homelessness tend to locate in left-over spaces (i.e., vacant lots) and hidden spaces of the city (Stuart, 2014). They also frequent areas around social service centers (Wolch et al., 1993) and inhabit public spaces that are not regularly patrolled by police (Gibson, 2011). In this typology of landscapes of homelessness developed from my observations in three California cities, people experiencing homelessness do frequent areas around social services and inhabit hidden spaces—for example, the riparian brush in the urban wild, alleyways amid light industry, and highway shoulders and rights-of-way. However, in these cities, the most frequented landscape type that I observed— transportation infrastructure—complicates these assumptions.
Transportation Infrastructure as the Primary Landscape of Homelessness
People experiencing homelessness frequent rights-of-way, sidewalks, bike paths, and alleys more than any other spaces in the three cities. The phrase “living on the streets” implies a down-on-one’s-luck status in city life (Mehta, 2009), non-normative movement (Patton, 2004), and danger (Lee & Schreck, 2005). It also means an increased chance of personal injury or death. Spaces dedicated to transportation infrastructure are not an ideal human habitat. The noise and pollution emanating from the adjacent traffic wears on the human body. Schoolchildren living adjacent to roadways have greater rates of airway inflammation (Dales et al., 2008). It is not unreasonable to assume that people living in the road right-of-way experience more exposure to pollutants. Safety, the original purpose of the clear zone along a highway, is compromised. Why choose to live on, beside, or around the highway or railroad tracks? The choice to occupy transportation spaces comes from the ubiquity of these landscapes in the urban environment, as well as their concealed nature in the spatial imaginary.
In most transportation infrastructure projects, cities transform public space into landscapes with a single purpose, using instrumentality to justify socio-spatial decisions (i.e., “how many cars can we move from point A to B?”) (Jain, 2004). Infrastructure organizes public space—roads, power lines, pipes, wastewater, antennas, and open space—shaped by the goals of efficiency and speed. The quest for higher speeds overwhelms other aspects of the landscape, since higher speeds require larger spaces. Streets have transitioned from a multipurpose landscape of movement and commerce in the early 20th century to a single-purpose through-way for automobiles (McShane, 1994; Norton, 2007). For example, a cursory spatial measurement of public space using GIS data from Sacramento reveals that the River District neighborhood devotes 86% of its public space to cars in the form of on-street parking, streets, and highways (this calculation does not include private space devoted to cars, such as off-street parking, gas stations, and auto repair). As public lands become single-purpose, other purposes, such as resting in the day or camping at night, must take place in a shrinking number of multipurpose public lands or occupy a single-purpose landscape in a way contrary to that purpose.
Although people in a clear zone right-of-way may be hidden from the view of most residents, inhabitance or rest in an area intended for transportation transgresses social expectations that cities establish and enforce (Casey et al., 2008). In a culture of speed, where 80% of public space is devoted to traffic movement, rest becomes a private endeavor, unwelcome in public. Illicit resting or inhabitance of public infrastructure requires prohibitions (i.e., no loitering), limitations on time spent in public space, or constraining rest to other spaces (i.e., campgrounds).
Edge Conditions and Visibility
In a sociospatial urban landscape, the politics of identity (“the homeless”) become a politics of location (on the streets) so that “marginal” spaces are inhabited by “marginal” people (see Duncan, 1978; Ruddick, 1996). Yet the application of marginality to people and place needs to be challenged for ignoring the integral nature of these people and places in the city, as well as for neglecting the agency of people experiencing homelessness to adapt and use space to serve their needs. The landscapes that unhoused people inhabit, which may exhibit benign neglect, cannot be considered left-over or marginal. Just as poverty is not “marginal” to a functioning city (see Perlman, 1975; Caldeira, 2009), landscapes of homelessness permeate a city’s form and functioning. The urban wilds, such as the American River Parkway and San Lorenzo Park, are considered urban features central to the identity of their respective cities. Cities incorporate light industry as integral to their functioning with concomitant utility and traffic. Public infrastructure, such as a highway or freeway or railroad tracks, branches throughout a city’s functioning, linking it to the larger region (Cronon, 1992; Larkin, 2013).
That being said, in neighborhood areas, people experiencing homelessness inhabit pockets of space on the edges of transportation infrastructure and industrial zones. They lay their blankets next to a wall, against a fence, along the edges of trees or brush. The landscape types of sidewalks, alleys (walls), shoulders, and crossings all exhibit edge conditions. In the larger landscape types, like urban wilds, unhoused people set up their tents or rest at the edge of the vegetation, so they might see people approach while remaining hidden, after the manner of Appleton’s (1975) prospect-refuge theory.
Edge spaces may help people experiencing homelessness stay hidden, particularly at night, when camping is likely illegal (Kaplan et al., 2019). To a certain extent, unhoused people avoid publicity regarding their encampments. Camps often occupy places away from policing and the public view. As one older homeless man described his former campsite: “You can see it’s pretty well hidden. That’s why I chose this place…[The camp’s] pretty close to Loaves and Fishes and all those and the AAs and at the same time, no view from the river. No view from the outside, so … people who camped up [beyond here] were kinda hermit crabs.” Yet only a few “hermit crabs” occupy completely hidden camps. Most encampments tried to balance a need to hide with a need to be visible, to see out and for others to see in (for safety). Unhoused people are often the victims of crime; petty theft is particularly rampant (Ellsworth, 2018). Visibility suppresses criminal behavior; edge landscapes offer that balance between visibility and hiddenness, between being public and creating a modicum of privacy.
The Agency of People Experiencing Homelessness as a Cultural Force
People without housing are not passive actors in the making of their environments. They break through fences and walls. They plant themselves in the highway clear zones or dig into the toe of a levee. Daily, they navigate a linked series of spaces, each of which holds meaning and utility. The cultural landscape, unarticulated in civic literature or imagery, becomes a colorful network of these places to enable them to maintain connections with others and homeless communities of the past (Parker, 2020). These landscapes should not be romanticized; people experiencing homelessness continue to operate in them under threat of injury, theft, eviction, and pollution. Yet the daily rhythms and nightly camping recall the days of tramps and hobos, partly because they themselves recall past camp names (see Maharidge & Williamson, 1993; Parker, 2020). In the River District and along the Parkway in Sacramento, camps such as Rotten Egg and Rattlesnake sit amid industrial buildings that did not exist when the camps were first established during the Great Depression.
Certainly people who can maintain a vehicle or an encampment for a longer period of time consider themselves at home, but even those who occupy a space for one night arrange the space to their needs and personalize their territory. As I wrote in my field notes, “I walk by a woman sitting off the path on a bed roll. Roller luggage sits beside her. She does not look up, but is rearranging her things beside her, getting comfortable for a night spent by the river.” Temporarily inhabiting a space means making it your own, coming to rest in a chosen spot, settling down on a blanket or pad, removing one’s things from a bag, and spreading them around. Arranging things equates to arranging life. Even for those who own very little, personal belongings appear to be filled with meaning. The placement of things in a territory establishes a habitat, building a “homed” identity in the midst of homelessness.
CONCLUSION
The daily needs of people experiencing homelessness influence which landscapes they inhabit; they seek out places that provide social services, places where they can control their visibility, and places they can arrange to suit their needs and identity. Each landscape of homelessness type, while integral to the functioning of the city, exists on the periphery of single-purpose space. In this distribution of the sensible, unhoused people find an opportunity for the different purposes and behaviors of daily life despite active work by cities to remove or disperse them.
The homeless landscape does not exist as a unified entity of disenfranchisement but as a heterogeneous blend of public and private space, movement and rest, visibility and invisibility. These observations were based on a short-term study of three cities in California; any general statements on landscapes of homelessness require additional research in other homeless communities. However, the ubiquity of transportation infrastructure in cities and past research on edge conditions suggest that these aspects of the landscapes of homelessness may apply elsewhere. In addition, further research is necessary to address subpopulations of the homeless community— different races, family units, youth, and different modes of dwelling. A survey of people experiencing homelessness could provide a broader picture of homeless geographies by asking questions on where they spend the day and why. Spatial issues of procuring resources such as clean water, weather protection, and bathrooms remain underexamined.
This research, alongside future work revealing more about unhoused people’s inhabitation of urban landscapes, could lead to improvements in the safety, health, and social-emotional needs of people experiencing homelessness. In the case of landscapes, this article suggests that an increase in the availability and security of homeless spaces could provide more people with places of stability and potential places of transition (to housing).
Historically, the inhabitance of people experiencing homelessness in urban parks, industrial areas, and transportation buffers has inspired policies against trespassing and loitering to preserve an urban aesthetic rooted in economic growth. In this, the professional practices of design, planning, and the formal prescribing of space are culpable in the exclusion of informal uses and unhoused people. What if, instead of policies against, cities could shape landscapes for safe, transitional spaces? How can urban public space be reworked to accommodate people of all socioeconomic classes? More flexible, multipurpose urban landscapes are needed. Cities could convert high-speed conduits, particularly near city centers, to open spaces and remodel streets for different uses. Planners could include homeless residents in neighborhood planning.
Cities need to have informal landscapes, terrain vague, in which people experiencing homelessness can manage their visibility and engage with others (Gandy, 2016). Designers could leave portions of a site alone—not everything needs to be designed—so that wilder spaces on the edge can be inhabited. Water and waste infrastructure could be designed in support of people, wherever they are, rather than in support of property. Ultimately, new patterns of design and infrastructure can only happen with a change in the urban spatial imaginary from one of order and control to one of inclusiveness. Understanding the diversity of landscapes that people experiencing homelessness inhabit, as provided in this typology, begins that process.
HUMAN SUBJECT RESEARCH
The research methods in the article were reviewed by an independent review board in reference to human subjects. Although people experiencing homelessness are not always considered vulnerable, the study treated each participant with openness about the study’s purpose and with transparency about its methods.
PEER REVIEW STATEMENT
This submission was peer-reviewed by three reviewers. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged and appreciated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I acknowledge the kindness of the participants in this study, who spent time describing their daily lives and places of inhabitance.
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