The tragedy of homelessness is that, in essence, it has as much reality as a play in a theater. The men and women who sleep in tents or on the sidewalk are as fictional as the characters Othello, or Romeo and Juliet, or the Woman in the Balcony and Man in the Auditorium. The fiction in a theater, however, is produced by the human imagination. The fiction of homelessness is produced not by actual scarcity, but an imposed one. This is why a philanthropic organization or government department or news website (see Puget Sound Business Journal's six-month long investigative report on the crisis, the Price of Homelessness), that attempts to explain the causes of homelessness without at first concluding that it's wholly artificial, that there is no real reason for it to occur in a society that suffers from chronic oversupply and frequent crashes induced by underconsumption and capital surpluses, is saying everything but what needs to be said about American homelessness.

But the theater of homelessness has an important function for the leading American ideology: individualism. That is the production of the hatred of the poor. The more miserable the poor look, the less fictional does their poverty appear. On the streets, politically imposed scarcity does the work of makeup and wardrobe artists. But you will not find an artist in the best theaters of the world who can match the realism of politically imposed (and therefore fictional) scarcity. It's job is to make the smells or appearances or habits of the indigent as offensive as possible to middle-class types, the target audience of the theater of homelessness. The pungent odor of piss in the alley, the rough sleeping in doorways, the begging, the dirt, the rags, the sudden yelling—all of this is fixed on the indigent individual and not to the economic condition that's imposed from above on every inch of his or her life.

This is why it so easy for Jenny Durkan and her kind to be so committed to the clearing of homeless camps. The leaders of the middle classes believe the problem is actually the players of a theater that is produced by the top members of our over-developed societies. But if you reason clearly and correctly that every aspect of homelessness is a fiction, then you must conclude that Durkan and her kind's dedication to the disruptive relocation of homeless people from this and that part of the city resembles nothing like a solution. It is tantamount to a madman who believes he is King Lear. Durkan does not believe in the abundance and oversupplies of our society. These are her fictions. For her, scarcity is concrete. You are on the street because there is no money for you. This scarcity is as real to her as, say, a drought or virus that kills the crops a hardworking community depends on.