Broke Not Broken: Rights, Privacy, and Homelessness in Seattle

Though much critical urban scholarship is devoted to the struggles of the homeless and their advocates to become "visible" to the state and the "public," little attention has been paid to efforts made by the homeless to escape the public gaze. This study draws on media reports, press releases, and ethnographic research conducted in a Seattle homeless encampment to highlight the ways in which members of this collective mobilized the discourse of rights, and in particular the right to privacy, in their battle against the Safe Harbors homeless management information system. In doing so, it is argued that the concept of privacy functions as an important lens through which to view both the spatial underpinnings of social and political exclusion and the strategies through which the homeless resist these exclusions.