Over 100 Charlottesville residents filed into the Charlottesville City Council meeting July 20. The tension was palpable as citizens eagerly awaited their turn to voice concerns during the public comment session for a recent plan. Just three days earlier, the city had announced its plans to clear the homeless encampment that had formed along the Rivanna River near Free Bridge by Sept. 1. The air was thick with hostility between two distinct sides. A group of Charlottesville citizens praised the removal for breaking up a site where occupants “openly consume drugs, harass residents for money or create dangerous or unsanitary conditions,” as one Greenbrier resident put it. Shooting back, others emphasized the lack of options provided to them, and Free Bridge inhabitant Donez Chambers criticized the opposition for “blam[ing] the homeless people for being homeless.”
Like so many other American cities, Charlottesville is struggling to balance these competing stakeholders. And despite well-meaning efforts from the City to work with the homeless by visiting the Free Bridge encampment and providing a new shelter on Holiday Drive, many people at the site are likely to end up back on the streets and in worse, potentially life-threatening, conditions. The Free Bridge encampment removal is thus immoral and ineffective at addressing local homelessness. This controversial announcement exposes why unproductive solutions such as Charlottesville’s fail — it also exposes the erroneous way in which many of us, especially college students, perceive homelessness.
Within America, there are two incompatible perspectives on homelessness. Some citizens believe that this problem is the result of criminality, substance abuse and, above all, personal laziness. Rather than acknowledging the role of exploitative economic and housing systems, they argue that personal factors guide homelessness and push back against everyday people paying for policymaking solutions for housing. On the flip side, others treat the homeless as entirely passive victims without recognizing the need for drug treatment programs, financial training and mental illness services to help those experiencing homelessness on a personal level. In reality, both perspectives are flawed. Only by targeting larger systemic failures, as well as individual barriers to finding a job and later home, can a comprehensive solution to homelessness be produced…