Crisis as a pretext: reorganizing the geographies of homelessness in Reno, Nevada, through discourses of care.

Keywords: homelessness crisis, geographies of homelessness, urban post-revanchism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Homelessness is a widespread and pervasive issue in the United States, with national media and political actors referring to it as ‘the homelessness crisis’. Attempting to tackle the growing number of unhoused population, the City of Reno, the City of Sparks, and Washoe County envisioned in 2020 the creation of the Nevada Cares Campus (NCC), a facility with a capacity of 650 individuals that would concentrate the homelessness resources of the region and merge different sheltering modes. Interestingly, the so-called homelessness crisis is usually treated as a health crisis, which enables the articulation of discourses of sanitation and care in the definition of the problems and solutions for homelessness. The case of the NCC is no different, as its development was surrounded by narratives of care and sanitization of public spaces that, at the same time, justified the demolition of informal camps and the policing of the unhoused in their activity spaces –usually around downtown Reno. This increasing pressure on the unhoused –even when the NCC was at full capacity– reproduced patterns of urban post-revanchism and reorganized Reno’s urban space into spaces of care (the NCC) and spaces of exclusion (the revitalizing downtown area) for the unhoused. This paper interrogates the ways in which discourses of crisis reduction based on care were articulated to reorganize the geographies of homelessness in Reno, Nevada, in support of the urban revitalization of usual activity spaces of the local unhoused population.