$31,065. That's approximately how much of each taxpayer's dollars are spent every year simply on making public spaces more uncomfortable. From benches replaced with leaning posts, to metal spikes in window ledges, we are constantly bombarded with reminders not to get too comfortable. These intentional design choices are commonly referred to as "Hostile Architecture" or "Defensive Design" and are implemented as a means of social control and exclusion. Lawmakers cannot punish homeless people for simply existing in public spaces, so instead they have focused on altering the spaces to make them virtually impossible to exist comfortably in for more than a few minutes. These architectural changes include segmented benches, street or doorway spikes, large boulders under bridges, and more. What does it say about our society that we would rather spend public money on strategically pushing out the homeless population of our cities rather than working to eradicate homelessness in the first place?

A report from The National Coalition for the homeless in 2023 explains how this design method was originally created in the 1960s to deter crime and create safer neighborhoods. Yet today, the purpose of this architecture is to make public spaces feel so uncomfortable and unwelcoming that the homeless population will be forced to move on to another community. This reasoning, used by officials and legislators, seems to assume that homelessness is a deliberate choice and that people experiencing it can simply choose to sleep elsewhere. For example, when announcing new efforts to criminalize homeless people sleeping in trains, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said, "The system is not made to be housing. It's made to be transportation, and we have to return back to that basic philosophy." He continued on, calling homelessness a "cancerous sore" in the city. Additionally, 24 states have laws that bar homeless people from sitting or resting in public spaces. People who don't comply with these laws are subject to ticketing, arrests, and fines up to $500. Instead of helping to "solve" homelessness, the collateral consequences individuals face for violating these laws make it even more difficult to escape from the cycle of homelessness.

If, while reading this, you're confused as to how hostile architecture is supposed to actually "solve" homelessness, you're not alone. These efforts function more as a way to segregate and marginalize the "out-group" so that they are not disruptive to the broader society. Making poor communities more manageable is a tool of social control and exclusion. In this way, governments use hostile architecture as a means to isolate those valued least in society. Additionally, the criminalization and efforts of "relocation" to a less public area of the community further confirm in the minds of the public that homeless people are different from the rest of us and should be viewed as "outsiders." Further, data shows that the public is largely supportive of criminalizing homelessness as a tool of social exclusion, given that 57 percent of voters in Austin, TX, backed reinstating criminal penalties for homeless encampments. Similarly, in the District of Columbia, 75 percent of respondents to a Washington Post poll showed support for shutting down homeless tent encampments, even if it meant that those displaced wouldn’t have anywhere else to go. Similar sentiments have been observed in poll data from Portland, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places.

One of the obvious problems with hostile architecture is that it ignores the structural inequalities and institutions that have contributed to homelessness in the first place. Most people today still view homelessness as a result of individual flaws and circumstances. For example, a study found that around 90 percent of surveyed housed individuals cite mental health issues and substance abuse as the primary reasons for homelessness. In comparison, only 20 to 40 percent of surveyed homeless individuals listed those reasons. Additionally, the authors of Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, University of Washington Professor Gregg Colburn and data scientist Clayton Page Alder, further explain that if mental health issues and substance abuse were, in fact, the primary drivers of homelessness, then it would only make sense that states with high rates of these issues would also see higher rates of homelessness. Yet they don't. While Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have among the highest rates of mental illness in the country, they have relatively modest homelessness levels. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the U.S. has always had populations of mentally ill, drug-addicted, poor, and unemployed individuals throughout history. Yet, the homelessness crisis observed in American cities today only sprung up in the 1980s, due to economic and political forces at the time. The conditions resulted in increased rent prices, a decline in personal incomes, loss of affordable housing, and significant cuts in welfare programs, which all created a high risk of homelessness.  

When we view homelessness as an individual problem rather than a social one, we are choosing to support a system that is making it worse for all of us, except the elites holding the top 1% of the wealth. Capitalism has laid the groundwork for our productivity-driven society, valuing hard work in order to achieve prosperity and, ultimately, the American Dream. In this way, people who are homeless represent a failure within a capitalist society because they are unable to actively work and support the system. Yet by admitting that homelessness has social causes rather than individual ones, we would also have to admit that the U.S. economy is inherently inequitable and that the system of capitalism results in winners as well as losers. We would have to reckon with the fact that not everyone will achieve the American Dream, no matter how hard they work. Instead, we attempt to suppress the fear and discomfort of reality by assuming that an individual's circumstances are the result of their personal flaws. 

Furthermore, not only is capitalism making homelessness worse, but its continuation depends on the existence of homelessness. This is due to the fact that the wealth of investors and banks are fueled by the privatization of homeownership. If housing was freely available and affordable to everyone, then the housing market would collapse. In this way, the simultaneous growth of extreme wealth and extreme poverty is the result of deliberate policies carried out to support the interests of the top 1%, including those on Wall Street, major corporations, financial institutions, billionaires, and politicians who represent their interests. 

With all of this in mind, it is crucial to recognize how the priorities of the dominant socioeconomic groups are reflected in our architecture. Public space today has become a commodity, and it is impossible to be in public for purposes other than following the social order. Furthermore, most anti-homeless laws are designed as status crimes, meaning that their legality is determined by who is performing the behavior rather than what the behavior is. We can observe this trend in the disproportionate rates of young Black men who are much more vulnerable to criminalization. This begs the question: Who do we design public space for? And what does it say about our society that we are comfortable with excluding certain groups of people in public spaces? Hostile architecture doesn't just harm homeless people, but it also negatively impacts the elderly, pregnant women, and disabled people. Rather than using expensive and hostile measures to isolate the homeless population from us, we should be dedicating more resources to sheltering and supporting them in the long term by increasing the availability of affordable housing and supporting community-based organizations that are working to that end. Our efforts toward public spaces must be centered around serving human needs rather than for profit and the circulation of commodities.