The Issue with Visibility

By Katie Chang, Stanley Munoz, & Ethan Hartanto

In cities across the country, homelessness has been deemed less a social crisis and more a public inconvenience, one best dealt with through simple erasure. Thanks to “clever innovations” like hostile architecture and camping bans that remove the very spaces unhoused individuals need to exist in, the public has found ways to do just that. Out of sight, out of mind. Because ultimately, this isn’t about addressing houselessness; it’s about protecting the comfort of the housed majority while pushing the most vulnerable further into the margins. But not only does this approach reinforce the damaging narrative that frames the unhoused as a public nuisance rather than a humanitarian crisis, the deeper roots of homelessness are still yet to be confronted. And while it might be a convenient story for those in power, invisibility is no escape at all for the people living it. 

Although it may seem unnoticeable, hostile architecture is one of the most harmful strategies that cities implement to push the unhoused community out of sight. Initially, it may just seem like minor design alterations; however, those extra armrests on benches, jagged rocks under freeway overpasses, or metal studs built on flat surfaces remove places someone might rest on. The underlying message of these decisions is unmistakable: you are not welcome here. Cities have spent money on designs that penalize individuals for having nowhere else to go, rather than tackling the root causes of homelessness, which include the growing cost of housing, restricted access to healthcare, and a lack of mental health facilities. 

This is particularly hurtful since these constructions deprive people of both comfort and dignity. Imagine not being able to shut your eyes, relax your body, or sit with your possessions without worrying about being commanded to get up. For many homeless people, every unfriendly seat or spiky ledge serves as a reminder that others would prefer to ignore their very existence rather than provide assistance. These plans don't address homelessness. Rather, they exacerbate misery and perpetuate the myth that those without homes are a problem that has to be solved rather than beings in need of care.

This trend is similarly reflected in recent policy that increasingly treats homelessness as a criminal matter rather than a humanitarian one. For example, in 2021, the Los Angeles City Council passed a sweeping sidewalk camping ban, Ordinance 41.18, prohibiting people experiencing homelessness from sleeping or storing belongings in many public spaces. This means, without anywhere else to go, (as this is the very nature of their struggle), charges and fines quickly pile on, alongside jail time. And with no legal counsel or educational resources on how to remove them, these misdemeanors collect, turning vulnerable individuals into repeat offenders. Hence, many opt to flee to the margins to avoid such strict punishment. However, in these cases, upon displacement, individuals forgo many of their basic needs, severing their ties to caseworkers, medical clinics, and other vital services. In short, unhoused individuals are penalized not for outright criminal behavior, but for simply meeting the requirements of life without the privacy of a home. And regardless of a person’s response to these camping bans, staying or leaving, any possible path towards housing inevitably becomes harder. More recently, this sentiment was solidified in the federal executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which called for a nationwide push to cement this approach, rewarding cities for enforcing public camping bans, sweeps, and other measures that erase homelessness from view. This has made it clear that these measures were never about aiding the unhoused, but ensuring that the housed population doesn't have to suffer through the discomfort of witnessing their struggle.

Even more egregiously, these hostile designs in space and policy not only create physical distress as individuals flee from public view, but also prompt chronic mental deterioration. When public benches are redesigned to make lying down impossible, when lighting is weaponized to keep people from resting their eyes, when anti-homeless sonic devices that emit intolerable sounds to deter people from sleeping, when encampments are swept without warning, the city itself becomes a site of psychological harm. Because what we fail to recognize, is that privacy is a privilege, and for the unhoused, it is almost entirely absent. Every moment of rest, grief, illness, or despair is subject to the opinion of strangers. Forced to stay awake, alert, and on the move to avoid constant policing and citations, people endure an unrelenting mental toll. And with health services already out of reach, these trends of weaponization of basic needs are the farthest thing from productive. On the other side of the same coin, by investing in “out of sight, out of mind” designs, housed society the idea that homelessness is a “public nuisance” to be solved only for the comfort of the housed majority. This allows onlookers to freely turn a blind eye to unhoused suffering–or worse, to fail to notice how anti-homeless agendas have been built directly into their cities. This is invisibility by design and every one of us has been trained to accept it - in the structure of our civic spaces, policy, and thoughts, themselves.

In the end, if we truly aim to move forward, we must rethink how we see the individuals behind the crisis. This requires us, as a society, to reject the tendency to categorize unhoused individuals as public inconveniences and instead recognize their upbringings and circumstances as an outcome of systemic neglect. Only by facing our own discomfort and interrogating who we are neglecting out of personal “convenience” can we begin to replace our exclusionary structures with those that foster long-term stability, inclusive community, and collective progress.