In homeless encampments just blocks from Capitol Hill, the routine pretty much never changes. Those living in tents pitched beneath two railroad underpasses north of Union Station not only battle poverty, the pandemic and the weather; they also endure the din of every kind of train running through the District — Amtrak, CSX and Metro among them.
One recent day amid the tumult, American University researcher Aaron Howe was distributing hygiene kits, thermal underwear, flashlights, hand warmers — anything to help anyone who would accept help. Howe, a PhD candidate in anthropology with an interest in anarchism and a background in archaeology, has studied the NoMa encampments for years, becoming a frequent source for journalists covering them as they increasingly drew the ire of the surrounding business district. In opinion pieces and in an often confrontational Twitter account (@Anarchopology) — featuring messages about Howe’s own financial and mental health struggles as well as criticism of American University policies — the researcher-activist advances unconventional observations about the nature of homelessness.
“One of the narratives I’m trying to change is that homeless are a homogenous, singular group that are only victims and they only need charity and help,” Howe had told me in February 2020, sitting on a plush couch in the lobby of a Marriott downtown after deciding not to order anything at an adjacent Starbucks. “I’m trying to show they actually have agency and are using rational thought.” A year later, their fundamental view has not changed.
Howe, 30, comes to housing insecurity — arguably the most serious problem plaguing gentrified cities like Washington — from an unusual starting point: 19th-century logging villages established by mostly Finnish immigrants in Michigan. While a student in Grand Rapids, the Michigan native worked on archaeological digs studying the temporary communities, which moved up and down Lake Michigan as loggers “followed the timber.” “I look at that alternative community formation and definition of what is home and bring that to my work now,” they say.
Howe started their D.C. fieldwork in 2017 not long before decades-old encampments beneath the Whitehurst Freeway in Northwest Washington near the Kennedy Center were dismantled by city officials — a policy decision that, Howe would find, simply displaced the people living there to the underpasses north of Massachusetts Avenue NE. Howe decided to study the local encampments while working with an adviser who studied “hobo archaeology” among migrant workers in the 20th century, including a “hobo jungle” site near the border of Pennsylvania and Maryland.
That adviser, American University professor Dan Sayers, says ethnographies of such communities “took hold a bit in the 1970s” among anthropologists. Like any artifact — a tool, a house or the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen — the tents of encampment residents speak volumes about how they live and why they live the way they do. Among anthropologists, this is “material culture” — from soda bottle caps to propane heaters — and studying it can help researchers understand how to help those living on the margins.
Rachael Kiddey — an Oxford University archaeologist and author of “Homeless Heritage: Collaborative Social Archaeology as Therapeutic Practice,” based on fieldwork among homeless people in Britain — says this kind of research is necessary for the world to think of homelessness not only as a problem, but as a culture. “There’s a place for archaeology — for a cultural heritage narrative — in helping people come to terms with loss and trauma,” she says. “You tell it as a story and get it out.”
Eric Sheptock, 52, is a longtime advocate for homeless people who is himself homeless; he has lived for 12 years at a D.C. shelter, one of about a dozen operated by the city. He is not sure if he would call homelessness a “culture,” but recognizes a “camaraderie.” Encampment residents police conflicts themselves to keep authorities away, while shelter residents may do something as trivial as agreeing on a TV schedule to avoid conflict in an environment that often fosters it.
Some people end up living in encampments because they think shelters are unsafe, or they avoid shelters because they don’t want structure. “There is a culture within the homeless community for people to be responsible, to help each other,” Sheptock told me. “They’re already unwanted.”
Howe has found that encampments are less chaotic than they are often perceived to be. Residents sometimes work together for mutual aid, whether that means sharing income from day jobs to buy drugs or keeping violent men out of areas reserved for women — practices Howe calls a “moral economy” like those found among Maori tribes in New Zealand, and potlatch, or gift-giving, ceremonies among North America’s Iroquois.
In January 2019, the city started increasing the frequency of cleanups — or “engagements,” as they are called by the D.C. Department of Human Services — and Howe helped people at First and K streets NE keep their belongings out of a trash truck. Howe also was thrust into a quasi-journalistic activist role, calling the department to account on social media when it allegedly did not give residents sufficient time to move. (The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
The field wasn’t necessarily an easy space to navigate emotionally. Howe wasn’t pretending to be a disinterested social scientist, but they weren’t a social worker either. As they made clear on social media, they were a relatively privileged PhD candidate — but not privileged enough to live in a pricey NoMa apartment next to the encampment they were studying. “At the end of the day, I don’t make enough money to be able to write a dissertation, do good research and survive,” Howe told me. “It’s awkward complaining sometimes because I got to go home. I got to walk away from it. I got to go under the covers. Sometimes I would feel guilty.”
Dissertations have to be written after being researched, and Howe, an asthmatic who fears covid, spent the early days of the pandemic huddled in a Brookland apartment struggling with a crashing laptop. After the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests made it clear that street activism need not trigger superspreader events, Howe emerged again to find the inequities that existed before the pandemic.
On weekly runs with a partner to provision those living beneath the underpasses at L and M streets, Howe learned that many regulars from before the pandemic had disappeared — some to new encampments that Howe says are “popping up all around the city.” Even before the end of D.C.’s eviction moratorium on March 31, the coronavirus was taking its toll on unhoused people. Some avoided shelters because of fears of the disease, while others, who had doubled up in temporary living situations, were driven out by the stresses associated with everyone, suddenly, staying home.
The pandemic has pushed those already living on the margins closer to the edge. But focusing on violence or exploitation in encampments rather than on the mutual aid practiced there denies homeless people agency, Howe says. “I don’t think people should live under underpasses,” they explain. “Something I see is how awesome their ability to survive is.”
Justin Wm. Moyer is a reporter for The Washington Post.