From Vagrancy Law to Contemporary Anti-Homeless Policy

Discussing the relationship between historical vagrancy laws and contemporary anti-homeless policies, Feldman argues that while the latter gain constitutional legitimacy on the basis of their discontinuity from past eff orts, they gain broader moral legitimacy from their connection to that tradition. However, anti-homeless legislation entails a significant shift away from older vagrancy law and its preoccupation with productivity and idleness, and serves to mark the boundaries of the contemporary consumptive public sphere: whereas in the previous centuries vagrancy law was discursively linked to restrictions on “conspicuous” consumption, it is precisely conspicuous consumption that is protected by the new anti-homeless laws. With the transformation of public spaces into consumptive spaces, the postindustrial city strives to be homogenous, without visible signs of production or poverty. Anti-homeless measures can be understood as part of the punitive underside of deindustrialization and the neoconservative rollback of the welfare and regulatory state, as the refocusing of punitive mechanisms on demonized others while the majority of the population is absorbed into consumer society. The assignment to public space as natural, self-evident function the free movement of goods and consumers is contrasted with an aspirational, pluralizing conception of public space that fosters encounters with difference.