Realizing citizenship in property: Houseless encampments and the limits of liberalism's promise

This paper argues that geographers ought to pay closer attention to the role of property relations within political liberalism. Developing on the idea that propertied-citizenship excludes houseless or other property-insecure people from space, the paper argues that property-insecure people are instead incorporated within the relations of property. Examining how houseless people are incorporated within rather than outside of property, illustrates how key values of property long-held in liberalism are maintained and used to devalue a sense of social and political autonomy for the property-insecure. After tracing the dialectical relations of property with citizenship through the historical emergence of American liberalism, the paper examines how the values connecting property with citizenship continue to diminish the livelihoods of houseless people. Based on ethnographic research with self-governed houseless encampments in Portland, Oregon, I analyze how opposition to these unique types of houseless shelter affect encampment residents. What we are able to see from Portland's encampments, I argue, are the broader limitations of citizenship within liberalism which continue to be demarcated through a proper social order defined by property.