“Intersecting Hazards, Intersectional Identities: A Baseline Critical EJ Analysis of US Homelessness” is out, in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space! This paper draws on ~50 interviews, most with houseless community leaders and representatives, about the kinds of environmental hazards people face on the streets and in the margins of cities. Predictably, people reported a long list of challenges, such as extreme weather (including climate change-induced weather), noise pollution, soil and air toxins, fire danger, rodents, mold, and much more. But to understand why people face these kinds of hazards, it is necessary to go beyond the hazards themselves.
Sweeps – evictions – in downtown and residential areas push people into dangerous spaces. In turn, cities overwhelmingly respond to environmental hazard concerns with more exclusion and displacement—creating a cycle of criminalization, hazardous living conditions, and serial forced removal. This incarceration-exposure-eviction cycle multiplies and magnifies other forms of violence that disproportionately impact homeless people along lines of race, gender, age, (dis)ability, and so on.
Read the full thing here.