Street Spirit July 2004

Homelessness: The Global Dimension

By Robert L. Terrell

In much of the United States, the unfortunate, overwhelming focus regarding homeless people is local. Thus, in communities across the nation, concerned citizens and government officials are conducting surveys, establishing programs and developing strategies of dubious effectiveness for helping local homeless citizens.

For example, in many communities around the nation much time and attention is being devoted to the provision of emergency housing. Some such programs shelter homeless people for short periods of time, and others seek to provide permanent residency, subsidized in most cases by government or philanthropic groups and organizations.

Housing subsidies are partial remedies for homeless people, as are municipal regulations that require private contractors to set aside affordable units for low-income individuals and families that can afford to pay market rates.

Nonetheless, in the medium to long run, such programs will almost certainly prove to be terribly shortsighted and manifestly inadequate because they do not account for the broad, inexorable, globalized economic forces that are radically transforming the ways in which human beings live and work in virtually every nation on earth.

One of the most important dimensions of that transformation is the monetization of virtually every aspect of life. This process has been under way, in one way or another, for several centuries. For example, it has constituted the under girding, driving impetus for events as broad and destructive as European colonialism, World War I and II, the global arms race and the Cold War.

The counterintuitive refutations of the Bush Administration officials to the contrary, monetization of resources is also at the root of the current imperial assault taking place in Iraq. The millions of protesters who have taken to city streets around the world to protest the assault on Iraq acknowledged this fact with their billowing banners and indignant posters condemning the Bush Administrations’ “War for Oil.”

One might also note that there is an important relationship between the global imperial “footprint” of the U.S. military and corporate order and the escalating number of homeless people haunting the nation’s streets.

In any event, China’s current situation regarding monetization and homelessness provides important insights regarding the impact of globalized economic order.

Prior to implementing the economic reforms that introduced China into the integrated global economy in the early 1980s, the Middle Kingdom’s major cities had comparatively few homeless people.

During that era, China’s economic social and political policies were being administered by the government via the directions of the Communist Party of China. Chinese citizens were not permitted to live where they wanted, and anyone who sought to move to a new city had to receive a host of approvals and permissions from government authorities, including employers.

Authorization to move to an urban area was strictly controlled, such that the number of persons seeking housing and employment in a given city was monitored in ways that kept available living places in rough balance with the number of persons seeking housing.

That system has essentially crumbled. In keeping with China’s entrance into the globalized economic system, social policy is increasingly being driven by market forces. As a result, Chinese citizens are largely free to move about in search of better jobs, finer housing and more attractive opportunities to become gloriously wealthy.

This has contributed over the past two decades to the emergence of a huge group of homeless migrants that has been estimated to comprise upwards of 60 million persons.

A large percentage of that potentially volatile group has settled in cities, the vast majority of which were incredibly crowded long before restrictions on internal migrants were eased in the early 1980s.

These days, China’s major cities are struggling to control the myriad social, political and economic problems associated with the presence of huge numbers of unemployed people with no place to call home beyond the public spaces that they squat.

Major cities throughout much of the rest of the world are experiencing similar difficulties, and this is particularly the case in the Third World.

Africa’s crowded metropolitan cities can be cited in order to elaborate other dimensions of the world’s mounting homeless crisis.

Very few of Africa’s major cities were designed to accommodate blacks. Mostly, they were established to provide residential, social and business amenities for whites engaged in the management of colonial regimes headquartered in Europe and the United States.

As a result, the housing that was initially established for blacks was insufficient, inadequate and generally squalid.

During the colonial era, Euro American administrators of cities such Abijan, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Lagos, Monrovia and Mogadishu almost always assumed that blacks should reside in the country-side on family or tribal homesteads, which double as farms used to produce food and other necessities.

Nonetheless, rural-dwelling Africans, like their counterparts in the United States, China, India and South America, have been drifting into cities for several decades. But the process has escalated dramatically in recent years as impacts of the globalized economic system have penetrated deeper and deeper into the countryside.

Unfortunately, very few of Africa’s displace rural residents manage to procure adequate housing when they arrive in towns. The vast majority of them end up fashioning haphazard shanties constructed of discarded paper, sheet metal, tones, dirt and tree branches.

Shantytowns composed of such dwellings ring many of Africa’s major cities. Few of them have running water, electricity, paved roads or other amenities commonly associated with urban living in Europe and North America.

Crime, ill health, disease and violence haunt the lives of those who inhabit the shantytowns. And there is little indication that the situation will improve before it gets worse.

Although the truth of the matter is generally ignored, the profit-oriented, globalized economic imperatives responsible for the collapse of traditional, rural economic systems in China, Africa and much of the rest of the world are exacting similar impacts here in the United States.

Family farms, and the small, rural communities that depend on them, are disappearing in this country for the same reason they are being abandoned in rural China and Africa.

Most important, many of the people who have heretofore resided in the world’s rural communities are drifting into cities seeking better opportunities. Moreover, there are numerous good reasons to assume that the flood of indigents will continue for some time to come, and that it will escalate in the years immediately ahead.

Communities that fail to take this into account are bound to be inundated by waves of homeless people and the social political combustion that their escalating desperation will breed.

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