SLC’s Other Side Village and the Industrialization of Homelessness

Salt Lake City’s escalating crisis of homelessness is already a central battleground in this year’s mayoral election, and this political attention is likely to intensify. To this point, focus has been directed to the brutality of Mendenhall’s abatements, but it is reasonable to expect the tiny home village project announced last year to reenter the spotlight in public discourse sooner than later. The contours of its electoral debate are similarly predictable. While Mendenhall will surely tout the plan as evidence for practical commitment to “progressive solutions” and ability to translate stated aims into concrete policy, potential criticism will likely frame the tiny home village as an unhelpful misallocation of public resources.

It is important that critical engagement isn’t limited to these terms, because they presume failure means a very expensive non-contribution towards resolving Salt Lake City’s homelessness crisis. However, it is reasonable to anticipate a much more severe outcome. In the following, I argue that the planned institution is founded upon disastrously expansive dynamics akin those underlying the military and prison industrial complexes, meaning the tiny home village threatens severe and potentially uncontrollable exacerbation of the very crisis it purportedly aims to resolve.

 

A strange institution

Approved by the city council in October of last year, the plan in question entails the development of a novel social institution, purportedly dedicated to providing people with a viable path out of homelessness. Known as “The Other Side Village”, the privately operated development will initially occupy eight acres (though ultimately expandable to 40), and “will include a total of 85 homes. Each will be about 280 to 400 square feet with a bed, bathroom, small kitchen and living area. Of those, 54 will be set aside to serve chronically homeless Utahns, six will be available for staffers, and 25 will be used as revenue-generating nightly rentals for visitors, volunteers and the general public.”¹ However, The Other Side Village corporation insists that it is more than a landlord. Rather, what the corporation deems important “is not the physical structures, but the social system.”² In addition to the tiny homes themselves, “job opportunities will be available at businesses within the village, and revenues from those businesses will help pay the operating costs for the project.”³

The “community” will carry guidelines residents must agree to, and though this is pitched as evidencing a strong democratic spirit, the reality of their enforcement comes under threat of eviction – “residents may stay in a unit indefinitely as long as they meet tenant obligations.”⁴ The Other Side Village corporation details these obligations as “three covenants”, the third being a directive to “follow the rules of the community itself.”⁵

Broadly speaking, the project entails founding a novel form of coercive social institution built upon the crisis of homelessness. Its convoluted institutional nature allows proponents of the project to justify substantial (and substantially expandable) investments in things including but not limited to: developing rental housing (under the guise of “shelter” – but including both “deeply affordable” units, and market rate nightly rentals), multiple businesses, and overlapping systems of social and other bureacratic services. All of this will be administrated by a private corporation aiming for eventual economic self-sufficiency.

Of course, this project is not cheap. “The village’s first phase alone comes with a hefty price tag estimated at nearly $13.8 million as of April 2022. That’s a cost of about $162,000 per unit, not including land costs.”⁶ The parcel of land itself is to be provided by the City, rezoned and under a 40-year lease agreement, which stipulates an annual payment of $1 by the corporate tennant.⁷ At least $4 million of these startup costs has been contributed from public funds.⁸ In light of all this, skepticism about the actual need or efficacy of such a convoluted institution is well-warranted. In this sense the anticipated criticism of resource misallocation is quite understandable, and only further justified given current conditions for Salt Lake City’s homeless residents – not to mention their own actual requests of the City.

Under Mendenhall’s regime, the City has unleashed a murderous and unrelenting assault on its homeless citizens, articulated through an intense campaign of frequent camp abatements – a euphemism for forced relocation and destruction of personal property necessary to survival. Countless people have died in the ensuing instability.⁹ Like any group of socially conscious individuals, local homeless residents have diverse opinions about their own conditions, and how to improve them. Despite this diversity of often contradictory opinions, I have found one point to be expressed both broadly and with remarkable consistency in countless conversations regarding Mendenhall’s campaign of terror — which span years of organizing efforts in collaboration with homeless communities in Salt Lake City. Paraphrased in general terms, it runs along these lines: “homeless existence is not an attempt to antagonize anyone, but we must occupy physical space somewhere; instead of expending enormous resources on repeatedly destroying belongings and forcing relocation without providing a viable destination, why can’t the city simply identify certain places where camping can be permitted?” This request is a remarkably simple and eminently reasonable one, predicated on the plainly observable fact that present circumstances dictate that there will be local residents forced to seek shelter outdoors at any given time. Yet current policy demands compliance with the impossible; for no one can simply dematerialize their body and exist precisely nowhere.

Even granted the most optimistic of hopes, it is an incontrovertible fact that the provision of several dozen tiny homes will not alter the fundamental reality that there are more homeless people in Salt Lake City than available shelter can accommodate.¹⁰ Furthermore, no one (excepting, of course, the select few bourgeois beneficiaries of the generous arrangement) actually asked for such a convoluted “solution” — not general “tax-paying citizens”, and certainly not anyone presumably expected to live there. In light of these factors, it is admittedly rather baffling that anyone sees the tiny home village as a good plan, let alone one worth prioritizing.

 

Clarifying “the problem” of this crisis

Bringing clarity in the face of baffling proposals like the tiny home village often demands critical interrogation into how its proponents understand the nature of the problem being addressed. Such critical analysis can often demystify crucial contradictions, and place them on comprehendable terrain. For instance, when the tiny home institution’s proponents appeal to its alleged “practicability”, it is tempting to argue over how practicability should really be defined. This is an error. Instead, following the example of István Mészáros, our critical analysis must turn to questioning, “practicable, in relation to what?”¹¹ This line of interrogation reveals that the disconnect is not a disagreement over the definition of practicability, but contradictory understandings of why homelessness is a problem. Once this is recognized, previous confusion is brought into sharp relief.

This kind of critical interrogation can be illustrated by observing a more familiar example of a broadly bewildering institution in our society: the Military Industrial Complex. By any substantive measure corresponding to material social needs, defense spending in the United States is utterly irrational. This irrationality is only heightened given recognition for the lack of sufficient public funding for numerous important social needs, such as health care and education. We are all familiar with arguments demonstrating that such needs could be fully funded with a miniscule fraction of the defense budget. Furthermore, as many arguments have demonstrated, U.S. military expenditure would still outstrip that of any other country, even given the reallocation of public resources called for in such demands. In other words, the choice is not even one between expanding military dominance and public welfare; it is entirely possible to have both. What is missed in these lines of reasoning, however, is that the primary function of the defense budget is not to meet material security needs (even delusionally imagined ones). Rather, military expenditure addresses the economic needs of capitalist accumulation; its “problems” being those of commodity circulation.¹² Given this clarification, the system’s otherwise bewildering irrationality can be rendered quite clear (which is not to say it is right, nor justified).

Some insight from the Military Industrial Complex

Expansion is an inherent feature of capitalism. By its very definition, capital exists only as the unrelenting accumulation of its own abstract form value at ever increasing scales. Capital’s process of self-accumulation occurs through commodity circulation, which encompasses both production, and consumption. Thus, the functioning of capitalist society necessitates ever-increasing levels of both commodity production and their consumption. However, this requirement is constrained by internal contradictions, whose management long ago surpassed the capacities of even the most idealistic imaginations of the “free market”. Among them is the fact that real human individuals can and will only consume so much, regardless of what they can actually afford. As a result, capitalism’s historical development has entailed systemic adaptations that allow commodity circulation to step beyond the immediate contradictions of the market; the Military Industrial Complex is the preeminent example.

Critiques of the Military Industrial Complex often point to its production of immense waste, proliferated through functions like signing massive contracts for weaponry destined to be obsolete garbage from the moment of its delivery. In most cases, these critiques posit such wastefulness as a flaw; but the reality is that this perceived “flaw” is in fact the essential “solution” provided by the institution. The primary contribution of the Military Industrial Complex is not security, but the provision of a massive apparatus for consuming huge numbers of commodities – therefore also justifying the corresponding creation of extensive “productive” applications for enormous amounts of capital that would otherwise have no viable investment opportunity. In this, capitalism is given space for expanded accumulation well beyond the constraints of actual use or need. This hardly benefits humanity — to the contrary, it threatens our collective annihilation in more ways than one — but it is an eminently practicable contribution with regard to the economic needs of capitalism.

This brief analysis of the Military Industrial Complex illustrates how interrogation into the actual nature of “problems” being addressed can bring otherwise baffling circumstances into clarity, but the comparison is also useful in the present context for another reason. Namely, the basis for the tiny home village’s alleged “practicability” is essentially the same; it does not correspond to the needs of real people, but those of capitalist accumulation. According to the interests of capitalism, homelessness is not a crisis because people are suffering, but because those people are not active participants in the process of commodity circulation. Given the inherent imperative to expand in the face of all constraints, this circumstance is intolerable in the logic of capital.

 

What the tiny home village truly offers, and why it is a threat

The real contribution of this new institution — which is what renders it practicable, measured against the needs of capitalism — is not an innovation in resolving human suffering, but its transformation into an investment opportunity. The tiny home village should be viewed as a systemic adaptation which turns an economic crisis into a productive industry. More specifically, it is a mechanism enabling participation in commodity circulation on behalf of people who are otherwise not doing so in a substantial way. That is, the tiny home village is itself essentially an economic actor capable of participating in the market; perhaps most importantly as a consumer of commodities.

In defense against anticipated criticisms of poor resource management, the public has been reassured that the tiny home village will be a fully self-sufficient enterprise. However, this is most certainly not comforting. To the contrary, this aim should be seen as profoundly alarming, as it reveals quite clearly the fundamental character of the institution as a novel economic industry. In quite literal terms, the tiny home village is a privatization of the responsibility for providing social welfare to the very most vulnerable members of our society. Furthermore, we must not be deceived into thinking a non-profit designation amounts to market ambivalence, nor non-alignment with interests of value production. The tiny home village represents an infant industry that is much broader than a single corporation created as its direct manager (and the multiple businesses it will operate as part of the institution).

Reproducing this “community” as an economic actor with distinct economic “needs” is the real management role for its corporate guardian. Entailed in this are the tasks of managing contracts with providers of supplies and services, and maintaining the tiny home village’s internal conditions – which amounts to a curation of the very basis for its consumptive agency. The tiny home village is thus in truth a commodity circulatory entity, whose real promise for capitalism lies in providing an outlet for products which would otherwise have no purchaser. It creates economic opportunity out of human suffering. And whether its supporters consciously pursue this task is ultimately irrelevant with regard to anything beyond questions of moral judgment; ideologically mystified motives do not alter the material reality of why the tiny home village is a viable plan in the social logic of capital.

Considered from the dominant ideological perspective of capitalist society, the above is difficult to see as a negative. In fact, for many the foregoing might be interpreted as compelling support; for even if the tiny home village winds up contributing little to the actual mitigation of homelessness, at least it contributes a positive aspect to the unfortunate social reality. What is obscured in such views, however, is that the worst case outcome of this institution is not passive non-contribution to solving homelessness. Instead, it is likely to produce an exceptional exacerbation of the crisis. By building an industry on the basis of homelessness, the tiny home village actually renders the perpetuation of that social reality a necessity for its own economic survival; but more importantly, also that of its founded industry more broadly. In this we can see a real perversion in the designation of practicability for the tiny home village; its corollary is that actually substantive efforts become inescapably impracticable, because reducing homelessness fundamentally contradicts the expansionary capacity of the tiny home institution itself – and growth is the very basis of its own designation as a practicable approach. It is only by embodying the expansionary logic of capital that the tiny home village meets the criteria against which it is judged.¹³ The consequence of this is that the tendency of this institution will be towards the exacerbation of the social crisis it purportedly aims to resolve.

Even so, surely the present alarm reflects a rather hyperbolic overreaction? What possible impact could a single, ultimately quite economically insignificant experiment in a mid sized city really have? The answer is that the severity of potential consequences is based on extrapolating from predicted outcomes, according to the internal dynamics I have outlined. Envisioning future developments does not need to be a wholly theoretical task of imagination, however. There is an illuminating comparison that can be drawn to another contemporary social institution – one which also purportedly exists for the treatment of social ills – which has a much more robust, concrete historical development to observe. I’m talking about the Prison Industrial Complex.

 

Mass incarceration’s warning

Mass incarceration does not reflect a historical escalation of crime in our society, but is itself a driver of ever greater criminalization. This point is incontrovertible; disputed only by overt ideologues in a manner akin to the current state of climate change denialism. However, for many bourgeois social theorists, the reality of this expansive phenomenon is detached from its basis in the fundamental logic of capital, rendering the force behind its growth an impossibly convoluted mystery of human nature (that metaphysical rug under which all manner of inconvenient causes are swept). This kind of obfuscation is illustrated in articulations of mass incarceration which posit it as a more-or-less direct consequence of the profit motive of private prisons. Though they are truly heinous institutions, private prisons are a consequence rather than cause of mass incarceration. The explosive growth of our carceral system is in truth an expression of the same dynamics I have pointed to in embryonic form in Mendenhall’s tiny home village; with fuller historical development exhibited in the Military Industrial Complex. In other words, the Prison Industrial Complex is not a consequence of malintented private greed, but a feeding ground for it. The prison system demonstrates another adaptive institution for the (short term) management of commodity production’s constraining contradictions.

In reality, the revenue generated by private prisons is a relatively insignificant portion of the Prison Industrial Complex’s total value production. This point is evident, granted consideration for the rather staggering scope of the prison industry, which includes not only prisons but their servicing. Whole micro industries exist within the economic universe of the carceral system, featuring countless value-producing enterprises whose entire business models are predicated on mass incarceration: phone systems for inmate communication; software for those (and other) systems; meal services; data management tools sold to state governments for tracking their many citizens under carceral supervision, both in and out of prisons. The list could go on – far beyond any reader’s point of exhaustion – but what it represents is a remarkable engine of capitalist value production, which functions on an enormous scale. It is crucial to emphasize that all of this is fully dependent on the existence of mass incarceration. The prison system alone manufactures the “need” for any of these products, and without it there would be no consumer for quite literally any of a staggering number of commodities. As in the case of the Military Industrial Complex, the unrestrainable expansion of mass incarceration is only bewildering if we ignore this actual function it provides for capitalism. Its contribution does not address any real social need; only capitalism’s relentless need for expansion through increased commodity production and consumption.

In the case of more historically solidified institutions like the Military and Prison Industrial Complexes, the unfortunate reality is that the enormity of value they produce now renders them indispensable pillars of capitalism. These apparatuses are like duct-taped supports preventing present capitalist society from absolute collapse under the weight of its contradictions. In this sense, contrary to common allegations of reflecting “broken systems”, these institutions function precisely according to their true purpose. There is no “fixing” them; relief is possible only through their destruction in the revolutionary socialist transcendence of capital as the regulator of society.

In the present context, however, what is most important to emphasize is that the existing monstrosities observed here reflect nothing but the culmination of the same logic underlying assertions of the tiny home village’s practicability. There is no hyperbole in sounding the alarm.

 

Conclusion

The explosive escalation of homelessness in Salt Lake City is not a locally unique phenomenon, nor is Mendenhall’s tiny home village experiment the only venture into birthing this infant monstrosity. We must not allow critical engagement with this institution to become mired in disputes over its efficacy in treating a problem it doesn’t actually confront. Though somewhat counterintuitive, our aim should be nothing short of ensuring this proposed “solution” is met with spectacular failure. There is frighteningly little reason to expect this endeavor will fail of its own accord, so this means organizing efforts should be directed to making the experiment much more trouble than it is worth; both to disrupt development of existing projects in localities already pioneering such models, and to establish a dissuading political precedent by doing so.

If initial attempts such as Mendenhall’s prove promising in the eyes of capital’s political guardians, there is certainly no leap involved in predicting broad replication and expansion.¹⁴ The only “leap” is expecting otherwise. Furthermore, little imagination is needed to recognize the (historically precedented) consequences of such an outcome; our brilliant innovating entrepreneurs will not take long to recognize opportunity in catering to these new institutions. Acknowledging these consequences is not a reflection of naïve idealism. Rather, it is an unavoidable conclusion of questioning the uncritical ideological faith involved in proclaiming, like a broken record, that “this time our attempt to resolve a social crisis through the commodity market will work!”

In her war on the homeless, Erin Mendenhall has exhibited a monstrous disregard for humanity. But it is perhaps the tiny home village that could become the most truly historically catastrophic aspect of her bloody legacy. Its development represents an attempt to forge an early link in a chain that will further bind homelessness to capitalism; not only as a byproduct, but a precondition.¹⁵ We will regret our failure to destroy these presently isolated and unfinished links, should they become successfully joined.

 

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Notes

1. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/10/19/that-village-tiny-homes-its-go/
2.  Featured on the corporation’s website home page: https://theothersidevillage.com/
3. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/10/19/that-village-tiny-homes-its-go/
4. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/09/12/have-questions-about-slcs/
5. https://theothersidevillage.com/faqs/
6. https://www.deseret.com/utah/2022/10/19/23412738/tiny-home-village-salt-lake-other-side-vote-approval
7. https://www.slc.gov/council/completed-projects/tiny-homes/
8. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/09/10/we-now-know-what-utahs-55m/
9.  Literally; the City stopped counting homeless deaths this past winter https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/05/08/after-5-people-died-streets-this/
10.  Not to mention the fact that shelter will not be immediately accessible, anyways. “Before moving into a permanent tiny house, residents would have to first graduate from a more intensive care and case management program to get on their feet.” https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/09/12/have-questions-about-slcs/
11.  István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control
12.  This reflects a simplified articulation of the MIC’s function in global capitalism, which unfortunately obscures the logic of imperialism as an also vital factor. Imperialism, though ultimately also an expression of capital’s social logic, itself demands particular observation for a full understanding of the role of the MIC. The omission of imperialism here is not a suggestion of lesser significance, but an attempt to maintain an appropriate scope for the present analysis.
13.  And expansion is not a hidden aim. In addition to the projected plans to expand The Other Side Village itself – including more homes, and up to 32 more acres of land (under the current agreement, alone) – a self-stated “ultimate goal is to scale the model worldwide.” https://www.utahbusiness.com/the-other-side-village/
14.  Again, the “ultimate goal is to scale the model worldwide.” https://www.utahbusiness.com/the-other-side-village/
15.  To reiterate: this claim is not contingent on nefarious intent; whether some, none, or all of the project’s supporters pursue this task consciously has little bearing on material outcomes. As expressed previously, “ideologically mystified motives do not alter the material reality of why the tiny home village is a viable plan in the social logic of capital.”