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Politics Notes Issues in Political Theory Notes

Justice Homelessness Housing Notes

Updated Justice Homelessness Housing Notes

Issues in Political Theory Notes

Issues in Political Theory

Approximately 10 pages

Robert Nozick; John Rawls; self-ownership; private property; end-state theory; historical entitlement theory; just distribution of holdings; Wilt Chamberlain example; Locke's Proviso The right to parent one's biological baby; fiduciary model of parental rights; baby redistribution; comprehensive enrollment; the right to raise one's child in a religion; future autonomy Property rights; negative/positive liberty; non-domination; Jeremy Waldron; Christopher Essert; shared housing; freedom of intimat...

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Justice, Homelessness & Housing

QUESTIONS

  • How should we understand the wrong of homelessness?

  • Does the wrong of homelessness consist in always being under the power of others?

  • Are the homeless unfree? If they are, what makes them unfree?

  • What does justice require when it comes to the provision of housing?

INTRODUCTION

According to housing charity Shelter, 320,000 people were recorded as homeless in the UK in 2018. This is an increase of 13,000 or 4% on last year’s figures, and equivalent to 36 new individuals becoming homeless every day.

For van Leeuwen, the fact that homeless still occurs in the world’s richest welfare states highlights a puzzling contradiction; namely, that ‘liberal-democratic states contain citizens without the defining characteristic of liberalism itself – a private sphere’.

TYPES OF PROPERTY

Public property

  • A place is common property if the point of placing it under collective control is partially to allow anyone in society to use it without having to secure the permission of anyone else [Waldron]

  • Prohibitions specific to public places provide the basis for their commonality; ensuring fair access for all in such a way that prevents people from precluding their use by others (user equality).

  • Benefits include: the provision of space for activism, socializing & religious worship; a resource for those without private property.

Private property

  • Rules of property are organized such that particular contested resources are assigned to the decisional authority or normative control’ [Essert] of particular individuals.

  • If I privately own a piece of land, I possess certain exclusionary rights over it: [Wells]

  1. The right to possess, and ‘have exclusive physical control over one’s space’

  2. The right to use at one’s discretion

  3. The (limited) right to manage – ‘to allow or deny others admission, to decide what visitors can and cannot do once in the space’

  1. The right to security – ‘one cannot be ejected from the property, except on certain grounds, within the period of tenancy’

  2. The right to capital – ‘the power to alienate the item, and the liberty to consume or destroy it’

  • Private property rights & negative liberty

Consequently, ‘others have a duty not to use it (without my consent) and there is a battery of legal remedies at my disposal which I can use to enforce this duty. The right correlative to this duty is an essential incident of ownership, and any enforcement of the duty necessarily amounts to a deliberate interference with someone else’s action’ [Waldon, 1991]

Benefits include:

  • Stability & security – protection against the elements/danger, a place to store one’s valuable possessions, etc.

  • Addresses are required to register to vote, give appropriate information on medical forms, and receive benefits.

  • Non-domination (see: ‘ESSERT’)

‘Constitutes a unique domain/’bastion’ of personal autonomy [Schrader]

  • Privacy

  • Identity formation

Frank claims that privacy facilitates the kind of reflection required for developing an intact sense of self away from the demands/pressures of public life – ‘The way I understand myself is related to the place where I live, the place that I have invested my time and resources in, a place that offers a sense of intimacy and privacy, a place to receive visitors’ [van Leeuwen]

  • Self-respect & dignity

For Rawls, the capacity for private housing is normally essential for self-respect which, in turn, is inextricably tied to the capacity for a conception of the good* for ‘when we feel our plans are of little value, we cannot pursue them with pleasure or take delight in their execution’.

WHAT IS THE WRONG OF HOMELESSNESS?

Waldron
  • As embodied beings, we always have a location. However, our choice of location is constrained by rules of property which allow us to determine ‘who is allowed to be in that place and who is not’ [Waldron]

(see: ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS & NEGATIVE LIBERTY’)

  • Insofar as ‘no one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere he is free to perform it’ [Waldron], freedom necessarily has a spatial component within which there are ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces.

  • Who is homeless?

Waldron defines the homeless as those for whom ‘there is no place governed by private property rules where he is allowed to be, and from which he may not at any time be excluded as a result of someone’s say-so’. Since homeless people ‘must live their whole lives on common land’, they are exceedingly subject to the whims of others.

  • Increasingly, public spaces are becoming inhospitable to human life-forms/patterns that are deemed ‘inappropriate’ or ‘disturbing’.

  • Local municipalities have begun criminalizing public sleeping, urinating and panhandling; evicting shelters from gentrifying neighbourhoods, sweeping homeless encampments, and installing ‘defensive’ architecture, e.g. slanted/segmented benches, spiked walls and boulders. This is coupled with the proliferation of privately-owned public spaces or ‘POPS’.

  • Because they have some place to sleep which is not the subway, they infer that the subway is not a place for sleeping’ [Waldron]

  • This state of affairs renders homeless people profoundly unfree as they have no place to perform elementary human activities (urinating, washing, sleeping, cooking, etc.) privately, and with dignity – ‘If Action X is prohibited in public spaces and if Person A has no access to private spaces wherein to perform it, then X is effectively prohibited to A, and so A is comprehensively unfree to perform X [Waldron]. They must either beg for permission several times a day, or trespass and risk arrest.

  • For Waldron, homelessness exposes the property system for what it is: ‘rules that provide freedom and prosperity for some by imposing restrictions on others. If everyone encounters both its benefits and restrictions, this correlativity is bearable. It ceases to be so when there is a class of persons who bear all of the restrictions...

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