How to Make Money From Tent Cities
In the shadows beneath the Marquette interchange, in a warm, ambient glow, a fog of lighting, toned yuppies exercise their mutts and play pickleball. Pop-up commercial events draw crowds of hip youngsters, shedding what disposable income they have to purchase fashionably degraded baubles. From the river’s edge, across from the Milwaukee Public Market, kayaks can be seen following a barge, on which plays a blues band, a pied piper leading the crowd downstream.
In this twinkling light, and with these toe-tapping tunes, it becomes hard to recall that, a few short years ago, these comfortable alcoves were the spots where Milwaukee’s homeless camped. Remember that? The tent cities in the shadows of the freeway, the fragile vinyl monuments to the idea that human beings can be ‘surplus’?
The Riverwalk Commons, as this stretch of land is known, as well as the nearby dog park, are on Milwaukee County land, but operated by Business Improvement Districts (BID) numbers 2 and 21, respectively. BIDs represent an advancement in the political technology of corporate governance, turning over swathes of valuable land to committees of business and property owners to do with as they see fit, and allowing them to take over roles which are traditionally in the public sphere, like security. They fall into the category of what are called QUANGOs, that is, Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations. It’s a first libertarian step towards private government. That’s why you see so many private security vehicles patrolling the area around the Milwaukee Public Market: A little regional faction of our local business class is running the place like a fiefdom. But it wasn’t always that way.
In the build-up to Milwaukee hosting the Democratic National Convention in 2020, there was an effort made by local officialdom to pretend that we had no homeless people; inequality that stark would be a poor advertisement for our city, it was thought. What this involved was rounding up all the homeless people, putting some up in hotels for a while, and destroying their tent cities. The task fell to the State Department of Transportation, and in November of 2019, the tents were taken down, and victory was declared over homelessness, or over the homeless, depending on your perspective. At the time, Alderman Bob Bauman stated that "The fact that many of these folks can easily find alternative housing but choose to live [in the encampment] raises a whole new sort of question that local government is still trying to answer.” A housing case manager I knew laughed bitterly when the city declared that it had zero (0) chronically homeless people.
More recently, Wisconsin’s official count for 2025 had us at 5,225 people experiencing homelessness, though the Department of Public Instruction counted 20,195 students who did. It’s recognized as a growing problem.
Some homeless people are on drugs, it’s true. But there’s no chicken-or-egg debate: While addiction can contribute to people becoming homeless, often, it’s the stress of life without a place to go which leads people to use drugs.
About half of them work full-time.
Despite the fact that many homeless people work, the image of them in the popular imagination is threatening to a worldview built around the necessity, and even the moral virtue of work for its own sake.
Work is necessary for a community to take shape. We feel the need to contribute to the common good, to pull our weight, so that the community can thrive. In part, it’s an ancient and ingrained feature of the human mental apparatus, compelling us to productive action so that we, members of a social species who need each other, can stay around that neolithic campfire and share in the roasting wooly mammoth flesh. But in modern conditions, when so much work is automated, and so much more is unnecessary and even harmful, do we still think this applies? Do we feel that our homeless neighbors, in order to win the right to sleep indoors, owe the community in general 40 hours of their week working at a retail clothing store? Would their packaging computer cords at piece-work rates evolve them, in our eyes, into the deserving poor? And why does this labor need to be for someone else’s business enterprise?
It’s somewhat akin to the idea of debt. In principle, when we incur a debt, we ought to repay it, not to clear our accounts, but to maintain our equality with one another. That’s what a community is, really: A network of constantly changing and continuing mutual obligations. But this same moral principle does not apply to, say, a hospital owned by private equity, which strictly itemizes and tallies every Q-tip, every square of toilet paper, and hires a law firm to secure default judgment against you at compound interest. The institutional imbalance of power, and the un-neighborly behavior of these firms preclude the kind of mutuality and general equality on which our moral sense of debts rests, and so many don’t feel obligated to pay them, unless compelled. Our labor, and even our sense of mutual obligation is alienated from us and filtered through institutions which do not recognize our equality and over which we have no control.
Again, many homeless people do work. But homeownership in Milwaukee is out of reach for most working class people. We’ll see homeownership rates of 60% or more and get the misimpression that most people own their own homes; this number refers to the percentage of households, not individuals. Milwaukee is a majority renter city.
Homelessness is the natural consequence of, and the logically necessary corollary to having our housing stock be privately-owned. It is a fact that, with every rent increase, there is a calculable rise in homelessness. I used to think that landlordism was a vestige of feudalism which made no sense in a developed capitalist economy. But eventually it clicked: In order to compel a class consisting of the majority of the population to work for someone else’s private gain, there needed to be a thing we call the “cost of living,” consisting mainly of rent. And so, there is a symbiotic relationship between the capitalist and the landlord, though their interests will clash from time to time, as the landlord wants to raise rents and the capitalist does not want to raise wages. It is at those times that we see increases in homelessness.
One way to look at it is that we live inside a machine that makes homeless people. Instead of replacing the machine, we’ve painted a mural on it.
Now, I’m sympathetic with a perspective which holds that the only way to make art is if we all do. In principle, I rejoice at the ability of communities to reclaim blighted areas, to transform dark and lonely space into brightly-painted playgrounds. But if we accomplish this at the expense of our most vulnerable neighbors, by pushing them further into the margins, we haven’t made a better city, and we haven’t made art together; we, or rather, those with the capital and so the decision-making authority, have made a city which can only be sustained by a cycle of these miniature atrocities, the continual clearance of slums and tents, the repeated denial of a city of all of us. There’s no worse art than playgrounds for the rich.
