Displaceability by Design: The Spatial Governance of Mass Homelessness

Urban Affairs Review
Co-authored by Ananya Roy, Carla Orendorff, and Pamela Stephens

Thinking from Los Angeles, an exemplar of liberal urbanism, our research studies the spatial governance of mass homelessness. While encampment evictions have been underway for a while, what is distinctive about the present conjuncture is that the criminalization of homelessness is yoked to the ruse of housing. We argue that such offers transform unhoused persons into state subjects governed by the homeless services bureaucracy, its chronopolitics of waiting and its spatial logics of enforced separation. Drawing on frameworks of postcolonial development, we theorize such subjection as displaceability by design. We find that a key part of displaceability is the iterative enrollment of unhoused persons in services and street outreach and their affective anticipation of always out-of-reach housing. Our research methodologies highlight trajectories of (un)housing that demonstrate such displaceability. Combining an insurgent appropriation of administrative data with ethnographic narratives, we transform homelessness research into the practice of watching the state.

Download >> Displaceability by Design: The Spatial Governance of Mass Homelessness (Published December 23, 2025)