After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Grants Pass v. Johnson that governments could ban camping on public property, municipalities became more aggressive in evicting unhoused people from parks and other public spaces.
Much of my career has been spent as a journalist covering poverty in the United States. That’s a job that requires you to choose your words carefully, because language too often springs from and reinforces prejudices. In the coverage of various government actions against encampments of unhoused people, there has been plenty of bias. The news is of course supposed to be objective – and I truly believe that most journalists strive to uphold that standard. But prejudice, like some other diseases, is something you can carry around without even knowing you have it.
The most common verb used to represent government action against encampments is “clear.” I have also seen “clean up” misused for this purpose. Can you imagine a reporter writing that Hurricane Helene “cleared” homes from Florida through the Appalachians? Wildfires are “cleaning up” homes in California? No, natural disasters “destroy” homes, “level” them, “raze” them. That’s how we talk about irreparably damaging the structure in which someone was living.
A tent is no less valuable to a person living in it than my house is to me. Tents not only shelter people from the weather, however imperfectly, they also hold important papers, medications and other things not easily replaced. Typically, officials throw the tent and all its contents in a garbage truck. If someone took items from my home and then threw them away, any news story about the incident would describe that as “theft.”
You “clear” or “clean up” something that’s dirty. The city hall and police officials who serve as sources about these actions typically portray groups of unhoused people as unsanitary, a risk to the public health. The cruel irony is that unhoused people and their allies ask endlessly for access to toileting and washing facilities.
When I was reporting on Los Angeles’ Skid Row several years ago, the smell of human waste was overwhelming. I could actually taste it as I breathed the air. Advocates had mapped toilets and sinks in the neighborhood and consistently demanded that the city provide more. Go to any organizing meeting of unhoused people in any city in America and you will hear about the urgent need for toilets, showers and laundry facilities. You cannot have good hygiene without running water. Knocking down tents solves nothing. Creating more public bathrooms would.
Moving beyond language to plain old facts, shame on anyone who accepts a public official’s statement that an encampment is a health risk without asking pointed follow- up questions. Forcibly moving people from encampments significantly increases their risk of illness and death, according to a study published in 2023 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Anyone covering the housing crisis should be well acquainted with that study. Displacement poses a mortal danger to unhoused people.
Full disclosure, I support “Stop the Sweeps” actions here in Connecticut. We need to come up with a better name. Again, what gets swept? Dirt. “Stop the Evictions, Forced Removals, Expulsions.” Those are things that happen to people.
I do not quibble with the use of “encampment,” a neutral term. But there are other terms that might be also used for these places, like “community” or “neighborhood.” Encampments can stand for months or even years. People become neighbors. They check in on those who are sick. They keep an eye on each other’s belongings. They share food with a generosity that I can only call holy.
Communities and neighborhoods are not created by the presence of two-story Tudors. They are constructed of human caring and so are often present in places where people live under tarps. Failing to acknowledge that encampments are also communities springs from something even worse: a failure to acknowledge that the residents of these places are human beings. They may be dirty, but they are not dirt. They want the same things anybody wants: safety, permanence and respect. Press coverage of their situation should illuminate that truth, not hide it behind loaded language.
None of this, of course, is to promote encampments as the sole or best way to address homelessness. It goes without saying that we need to scale up the availability of deeply affordable housing. But there will be no groundswell of support for such an undertaking so long as we deny the humanity of the people who need it.
Colleen Shaddox is co-author with Joanne Samuel Goldblum of Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty. She is also a member of the Rosette Neighborhood Village Collective, supporting a New Haven community of formerly unhoused people