Chapter 1 makes a thoroughgoing reassessment of James Greenwood’s infiltration of Lambeth Workhouse that establishes its centrality for the emergence of undercover journalism and the ‘amateur’ investigations that followed in its wake. Greenwood’s ‘A Night in a Workhouse’ was one of the most reprinted news stories of the century and defined the methods, terminology, and even descriptive monikers used by generations of practitioners. Our focus is on the historical novelty of the reading experience that underpinned the new mode of covert reporting. Greenwood’s account gripped the public where previous investigators had failed because it inaugurated an original narrative subject position. Examining a Greenwood imitator named Thomas Carlisle who was motivated by scepticism, we show that undercover journalism appealed to audiences, not on the grounds of compassion or political sympathy, but because the incognito persona of an immersed reporter presented a powerful opportunity for readers to identify with the investigator.

I recount my journey to developmental resilience science, highlighting the influence of serendipity and relationships. From a childhood in the military to Smith College, then onward to the NIH and the University of Minnesota, I describe forks and barriers as well as opportunities that shaped my path, including influences of mentors, challenges faced by women in academia, and fortuitous turning points in my life trajectory. I reflect on links between my own life and my motivation to understand resilience processes in children affected by adversities such as homelessness, natural disasters, or war, as well as the protections afforded by family relationships, friends, mentors, and collaborators. Relationships played a critical role in the evolution of my ideas and research, initially as a graduate student and then as a collaborator and mentor. Passing the baton to new generations of scholars, I have great confidence that resilience science and its applications to benefit human development are in very capable hands.

This chapter explores the principal constitutional challenges to laws that regulate unhoused persons and public property. Municipal ordinances have been challenged on the grounds that they are unconstitutionally vague or overbroad, impose cruel and unusual punishments, violate the right to travel, or infringe the right to equality. This chapter discusses the successes and shortfalls of these challenges. Its concluding parts discuss how U.S. and Canadian courts have rejected a positive right to housing.

This chapter provides an overview of homelessness in the United States and Canada. It discusses the risk factors associated with homelessness. It explains how vagrancy laws historically regulated unhoused persons. These laws were struck down following the rise of the void for vagueness doctrine. This chapter discusses how local governments enacted narrowly tailored municipal ordinances that governed unhoused persons and public property, which withstood void for vagueness challenges.

This chapter explains why the State has greater power to regulate and police unhoused persons compared to people with access to housing. It shows how and why the State has more power to regulate need-alleviating conduct that occurs on public property than on private property. It demonstrates how laws that govern public property operate like legal rules that impose affirmative duties to act on unhoused persons. Yet others control whether unhoused persons can fulfil this affirmative duty, and unhoused persons must make non-egalitarian trade-offs to fulful their positive obligations.

This chapter explores the relationship between homelessness and two prominent conceptions of liberty: positive liberty as self-actualization and negative liberty as non-interference. It sets out how scholars have approached the relationship between homelessness, property, and both forms of liberty. It demonstrates how unhoused persons tend to lack positive and negative liberty.

This chapter provides an overview of this book’s core arguments and structure.

This final chapter demonstrates how the State can fulfil its three fiduciary duties to end homelessness, maintain public property’s shared value, and legitimize laws that govern public space. This chapter unpacks each of these duties and explains their substantive content. Drawing on existing research, this chapter provides concrete proposals for how the State can respect each of its three fiduciary obligations related to homelessness and public property.

This chapter discusses the State’s three fiduciary duties related to homelessness and public property. Its opening parts describe why the State and individuals are in a fiduciary relationship and why the State has an overarching fiduciary duty to counteract domination. It then discusses other fiduciary relationships that arise in public law contexts. It then explains how the State has three fiduciary duties, all of which seek to minimize domination. More specifically, the State has fiduciary duties to: (1) end homelessness and secure access to housing, (2) maintain public property’s shared value, and (3) legitimize laws that regulate public space. It elucidates the relationship between these three duties.

This chapter introduces the republican conception of liberty as non-domination. It explains how unhoused persons experience two forms of domination because they lack private property rights. First, others exert control over unhoused persons’ opportunities to obey laws that govern public property. Second, unhoused persons must make non-egalitarian sacrifices (or trade-offs) to obey laws that regulate public space.

This chapter defends the State’s fiduciary duties discussed in the previous chapter. It demonstrates why various other ameliorative or coercive governmental measures either fail to mitigate domination or exacerbate it. These governmental measures include increased shelter spaces, zoning, concentration strategies, and dispersal tactics. The final parts of this chapter demonstrate why encampments are a partially justifiable response to homelessness. Yet the State must provide access to housing because individuals cannot justifiably establish encampments as a form of self-help .

This chapter demonstrates how the punishments associated with laws that govern public property entrench individuals in homelessness, such that they will continue to experience non-egalitarian coercion and domination. It explores how these laws result in fines, fees, and surcharges that can result in significant criminal justice debt. It shows how punishments can result in collateral consequences that limit employment prospects and access to housing.

This chapter begins the last section, a section that explores how the police power can be used to address modern social problems. We look at a number of these wicked problems, including housing, transportation, environmental degradation, and other predicaments, and connect our conception of the police power as described earlier in this book to the use of this power proactively to confront these especially difficult problems.