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California sits at the epicenter of the US housing catastrophe. Across the state, unhoused people have banded together to build shantytowns and encampments, providing autonomy and communal care they can rarely find elsewhere. Yet the rise of encampments has been met with a new and brutal response, in which cities no longer simply arrest unhoused individuals but demolish entire neighborhoods of tents and makeshift houses.
Jessie Speer takes readers inside the encampments, interweaving an ethnographic account of the lives of unhoused people in Fresno, California, with an investigation of why cities across the United States have turned to what she calls the “bulldozer approach” to homelessness. She tells the powerful stories of people on the margins, painting a complex and detailed portrait of everyday life in the camps. Speer shows how a combination of profit, punishment, and prejudice drives the bulldozer approach in ways that mirror the demolition of informal settlements across the globe. At the same time, resistance movements have risen up to challenge displacement and dispossession, proclaiming that all people share a right to the city. Combining national data with more than a decade of on-the-ground research, Bulldozed exposes the violence of US housing politics and offers a vision of a more equal city.
— Don Mitchell, author of Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits to Capital
<i>Bulldozed</i> is so much more than a timely and thorough analysis of the criminalization of homelessness in California. Through poignant testimonies, Speer reveals how the homeless encampment is a place of resistance and radical inhabitation. Written with vulnerability and care, this book makes a vital contribution to the difficult endeavor of subaltern histories and historiography.
— Ananya Roy, author of Beyond Sanctuary: The Humanism of a World in Motion
Through her dispatches on the ground in Fresno, California, Speer examines the bulldozer as both a metaphorical and physical reality of precarious living. Although <i>Bulldozed</i> is a sobering account of life at the margins, Speer brilliantly weaves in poignant examples of hope, resistance, and redemption.
— Lois M. Takahashi, author of Homelessness, AIDS, and Stigmatization: The NIMBY Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century
Rather than housing poor people, governments devote vast amounts of resources to destroying their homes. In this timely book, Jessie Speer unpacks the logics of profit, prejudice, and punishment that power the bulldozers of domicide.
— Nicholas Blomley, author of Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow
Through research in an encampment of homeless people, this book thoughtfully demonstrates the range of experiences of people who may become unhoused and of those who so often advocate for the demolition of such communities. The work connects us to people living outside as actual full human beings. Speer’s book offers an important intervention into the possibilities of dignity and autonomy in the lives of unhoused people.
— Vincent Lyon-Callo, author of Inequality, Poverty, and Neoliberal Governance: Activist Ethnography in the Homeless Sheltering Industry
Introduction
1. Profit
2. Punishment
3. Prejudice
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index