Homelessness isn’t policy failure—it’s policy. From 19th-century British 'clearings' to today’s police sweeps and Blackstone driven evictions, the playbook stays the same: displace the poor, privatize the land.
“What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all. And this housing shortage gets talked of so much only because it does not limit itself to the working class but has affected the petty bourgeoisie also.” – Friedrich Engels, 1872
In 2024, the U.S.’ unhoused population increased by 18%, which translates into approximately 770,000 individuals living on the streets. This is a consistent annual increase over the previous years. (This information was recently removed from HUD’s website.) It is not that the U.S. does not have enough land or buildings to house its people, but that capitalist greed ensures significant segments of the population remain unhoused on purpose. Compounding the current homelessness crisis, also surging in other industrialized countries, is that the ruling class engages in global land grabs, what Marx/Engels dubbed “the clearings.” More land is now being accumulated for privatization by once again violently dispossessing the people living on it.
Recently, the Republican U.S. President made public statements revealing plans for the land grab in Palestine, stating that “the civilization [has] been wiped out in Gaza.” To be clear, his Democratic predecessor laid the foundation for him to assert this by ensuring the destruction of nearly every building in the Gaza Strip during a 15-month live-streamed genocide and bombing campaign funded by U.S. taxpayers, which was home to an estimated 2.3 million Palestinian people in 2023. As the world’s attention remains on Palestine, it is important to note that the seeds for the current housing problems sprouted in Europe with the original land grabs prior to the onset of colonialism and capitalism that were committed with as much brutality and disregard for human life as we are still witnessing in Palestine in real time.
Volume I of Das Kapital discusses the Duchess of Sutherland, who desired to run a wool farm in Britain, and in a 6-year period, “15,000 inhabitants, about 3,000 families, were systematically hunted and rooted out. All their villages were destroyed and burnt, all their fields turned into pasturage. British soldiers enforced this eviction and came to blows with the inhabitants.” This instance resulted in the acquisition of 794,000 acres of land. The remaining clan was then relegated to a subpar portion of that land and began paying rent to the Duchess for its usage. Prior to this, people lived on land. They foraged for food, planted crops, built buildings, and forged communities. But, they did not pay another to live on land the same way one would not pay to breathe the air nature provides for us all.
The British (along with other European powers) then exported this same practice around the globe when settling other places where people already lived. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides an example of the Cherokee people from what would become the U.S., which demonstrates the same method of land clearing where over the course of a year “five-thousand Cherokee were made homeless refugees” after the British laid siege to town after town setting hundreds of homes aflame, and displacing thousands of people for the purpose of occupying the land. As in Europe, those who would not flee were burned alive in their homes. Just like the plans expressed for Gaza, many U.S. towns and cities are built atop the ashes of what was deliberately destroyed.
Clearings encompass not just intentional acts, but the fomenting of disasters (natural, or not) that allow for continued displacements of people without regard for how they should, or will, continue to live. The Lahaina fires in Maui, Hawaii, as well as the wildfires in Los Angeles, were quick to see land speculators who view suddenly-displaced people as an opportunity to acquire wealth, and profit from the land. While the embers were still burning in L.A., Governor Newsom spoke of enacting a Marshall Plan and discussed the Olympics, seeming to forget that human beings just had their lives destroyed and lost a place to live.
When disasters don’t provide opportunities for capitalists to acquire land, purchases are made by wealthy individuals or corporations beyond the capacity of what working families can afford, so-called market rates—a.k.a., gentrification. Tech magnate Bill Gates is the largest single owner of farmland in the U.S. Meanwhile, investment firms, such as Blackstone, have been increasingly purchasing single-family homes that used to be available for working people to buy. The elites set market prices to the exclusion of what typical workers can afford. No matter one’s earned income, they become captive to paying rent to a landlord at whatever “market rate” companies decide they can extract from the populace. If people can’t afford to pay, there is no consideration for where they will be housed as an alternative. Under capitalism, there’s always the streets or incarceration. Being unhoused has become so demonized that the only acceptable political/economic discourse on the subject is constant clearings.
Wherever unhoused people live in groups, cities routinely conduct sweeps to clear homeless encampments, particularly when there are planned events that generate capital for wealthy individuals and companies. The Super Bowl is one such event where, in 2025, the Governor of Louisiana ordered the clearing of downtown New Orleans lest visitors paying $6,645 on average for venue tickets be bothered to see or interact with desperately poor people on their vacation. Rather than house human beings, the decision was made to spend $11.4 million to render unhoused people invisible, miles away from downtown, for a single occasion. Just like British soldiers of the past, and the original European settlers, modern law enforcement follows orders and reveals itself to be a mechanism of capitalism by carrying out the inhumane dictates of the landed gentry they serve.
Throughout the U.S., disproportionate numbers of unhoused people are of African and Native descent, depending on which part of the country the analysis centers. When figures who directly serve the ruling class, like Donald Trump, publicly commit to “buying and owning Gaza” to make it into a site for future development, connections must be made to fully understand what that means. Trump says he wants to clean out 1.5 million Gazans remaining (inadvertently admitting to understanding that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered throughout the duration of the genocide, while corporate media holds steady at an estimated 50,000 deaths). In the U.S., while cities and towns are not being literally burned as in the past, they are being figuratively torched via policies designed to ensure the same outcomes of people with no place to live and a government that serves the wealthy, operating with callous disregard for its citizenry. When Western organizations such as the World Economic Forum initiate so-called economic recovery plans for The Great Reset, we must recognize that the actions of a psychopathic ruling class, intent on the centuries-old practice of clearing, just like in Palestine, in a myriad of forms, continue unabashedly.
Netfa Freeman just returned from Cuba, where he was one of the coordinators of the National Network on Cuba's delegation to the U.S. May Day Brigade.
C. Liegh McInnis is a poet, short story writer, and former instructor at Jackson State University.
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