Paupers, Paper Tigers, Triage, and Turf Wars: Homelessness in Washington, DC, during the Reagan Era

Moving towards a history of African American homelessness in postwar Washington, D.C. involves an interplay of race, space, and the politics of place. Historically, in the urban struggle for access to the post-World War II and post-industrial inner cities, far too many African Americans have become progressively trapped in cycles of poverty, in the vertical ghettos of public housing, and fallen prey to joblessness, gentrification, incarceration, eviction, and finally, urban homelessness. Those sleeping on the street, in tents, abandoned buildings or shelters, have often been marginalized, stigmatized, and even criminalized in the interest of public order and private profit. Postwar segregation in innercity areas of persistent concentrations of poverty has rendered African American particularly susceptible to extreme poverty. Yet this distinctive marginality has been relegated to the appendices of academic scholarship — a footnote in the larger “underclass” debate. African American adult males — yesterday’s street corner boy and the “undeserving poor” of the late 20^th century —have suffered a relentless submarginalization in the literature on homelessness. Whether muted under the polite liberal consensus quest for housing justice or mistakenly ascribed to an ahistorical post-skid row genesis, the quietly corrosive effects of this ideological and empirical absence, this lie of omission must be rectified.

The purpose of my research is to historicize African American homelessness from the late 20^th century to its end, in the contested spaces of Washington, (D.C.) (West of the Anacostia River), and to document the movement —particularly of African American homeless males — from the open penitentiaries of the emergency shelter, through the unique configuration of the city, its bureaucratic service provisioning in crisis, and back again. My thesis addresses several important questions such as what insight can the examination of housing history, pathologized topes of race and homelessness and federal and local policy give us into the understanding of African American homelessness? If homelessness is an historical variable, what does the correlation between postwar inner-city housing, community action policy, and urban homelessness have to tell us?

The sparsity of data pertaining to African American homelessness may perhaps be explained by the more conventional and misguided notions of black homelessness. I wish to use my academic poster to create a more accurate portrait and to illustrate the dynamic features of what I call “New Tramping”. This cold case of African American homeless displacement through the historical transformations of the District of Columbia must be tracked by the punitive trail which federal and local poverty governance — in stark contrast to faith-based community homeless assistance — paved through increasingly punitive inner-city homeless policies at the end of the 20^th century. Concurrent with its progressive institutionalization, homelessness in the 1990s came with the compassion fatigue of waning public support, a surge in homeless shelter costs, the bureaucratization of social service provisioning, and the slow demise of results-based homeless advocacy. However, my analysis will begin in 1988, twenty years after the infamous uprising when Washington, D.C. was facing new more insidious challenges: crack cocaine and the ensuing turf wars.