Afterword

In this short essay, Mike Davis provides a concise account of the historical antecedents and contemporary situation of the down-and-outs of Los Angeles. Whereas in the late nineteenth– early twentieth centuries, harvest tramps, hobos and poor immigrant workers were allowed to camp openly on the banks of Los Angeles River, today homeless people are forced to live like shadows, darting from one hiding place to another and denied access to an evergrowing section of public spaces. Building on Jeremy Waldron’s argument on the contradictions between the Lockean doctrines of negative liberty and an all-encompassing system of property rules, the article argues that Los Angeles approaches a libertarian catastrophe regarding its homeless population who – as a consequence of anti-homeless legislation, the elimination of public lavatories, “bum-proof” bus-benches, aggressive deployment of outdoor sprinklers and alike – have lost entitlement to any existential ground whatsoever. By deliberate design, public policy is translating the city’s socio-economic polarization into the dichotomization of space. These policies, the strategy of hardening the streets for the poor while simultaneously softening them for the well-to-do raise fundamental questions about the fate of citizenship.