Driving from New Orleans to Las Vegas this June, I was struck by the fact that every roadside I saw, everywhere, had a fence separating the shoulder from the land.\u00a0 Not only was every parcel of land owned, travelers had to know it.\u00a0 Mine.\u00a0 Keep out.<\/p>\n
There are lots of reasons why people become and remain homeless, but one of them is “private property.”\u00a0 Private property, of course, isn’t real.\u00a0 People made it up.\u00a0 But because the vast majority of us accept the concept and enforce it, it persists as a reality that structures people’s lives.\u00a0 For example, we’re not allowed to build a house just anywhere there’s space.\u00a0 We can’t just tap any aquifer you please, no matter how much we need water.\u00a0 If we want to go camping, we need permission from a property owner or we have to pay a fee at a public or private park.\u00a0 And, because of private property, if you can’t afford to buy property or rent space from a property owner,\u00a0 you are homeless.\u00a0 Homelessness, then, is a function of our commitment to private property.<\/p>\n
I offer this as a context with which to view these photographs that accompany a story in the New York Times<\/em><\/a> about a tent city in Providence, Rhode Island.\u00a0 The residents of the tent city call it “Camp Runamuck.”\u00a0 As the pictures below show, the 80 or so members of Camp Runamuck have a pantry, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a recycling center.\u00a0 They also have rules (e.g., no fighting), a democratically elected “chief,” a “leadership council,” and a social contract that they have all signed.\u00a0 They share labor; they cook dinner for one another.\u00a0However, despite the fact that they’ve made a home for themselves, they are officially homeless.\u00a0 And state officials have now officially told them that they are not allowed to make their home there.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Driving from New Orleans to Las Vegas this June, I was struck by the fact that every roadside I saw, everywhere, had a fence separating the shoulder from the land.\u00a0 Not only was every parcel of land owned, travelers had to know it.\u00a0 Mine.\u00a0 Keep out. There are lots of reasons why people become and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,2056,403,98,8080,85],"class_list":["post-11454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-crimelaw","tag-deviance","tag-capitalism","tag-housingresidential-segregation","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11454"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71128,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11454\/revisions\/71128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}