Columbia University Press Bulldozed: Homeless Encampments and the Politics of Demolition

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.