Discontent, Demands, and Dehumanization: Housed Residents’ Relationship to Homelessness in a Liberal City

Abstract

Housed residents play an important, yet overlooked, role in the social control of homelessness in U.S. cities. Their complaints can instigate police contacts with people experiencing homelessness, encampment sweeps, and shape city budgets. However, little research explores the content of resident complaints, how they understand the problem of homelessness, and the requests they make of the government. Addressing this gap in the literature, I leverage naturally-occurring data to describe the complaints, understandings, and demands housed residents make to a liberal city government—illuminating aspects of the social control pathway linking homeless individuals with the state. I qualitatively analyze 10,588 complaint reports and 151 public comments about homelessness made by Seattle housed residents over a four-year period. I find that housed residents complain most frequently about physical disorder, incivilities, obstructions, and threats to innocent others (children and the environment). Additionally, residents understand homelessness as a problem of public safety and order, structural failures, governance failures, and as a set of issues that most negatively impact people experiencing homelessness. Residents also demand a variety of responses—direct relief, structural responses, and formal social control, among others. These findings suggest that housed residents have heterogenous ideas about homelessness, and while many complain about and demand the removal of homeless people in public spaces, many others express frustration with the city’s treatment of unhoused people. To conclude, I discuss how this project relates to social-psychological processes of dehumanization, racialized understandings of property and personhood, as well as the political possibilities that arise from better understanding housed residents’ perspectives on homelessness.