A Rhetorical Analysis of Houselessness as Pollution in Bellingham, Washington

Abstract:

Environmentalism in the United States has largely centered on protecting non-human entities and
spaces. The rise of the environmental justice movement has emphasized the importance of
including all things that impact human well-being, including uneven access to resources such as
housing. Bonds & Martin’s 2016 paper argues that environmental protections should “include the
capacity to access, and to visibly exist within, urban environments,” specifically referring to
houseless communities, the spaces they occupy, and the frequently harmful ways they are
perceived and spoken about. To better understand how this stigma and disproportionate access to
urban space occurs in Bellingham, Washington, we analyzed rhetoric employed in public City
Council comments and letters to Bellingham’s Homeless Strategies Working Group between
March 2020 and April 2022. We “coded” this rhetoric into themes and quantified the frequency
of each code. We then compared these codes to rhetoric employed in discussion about pollution,
exploring Bonds & Martin’s proposed framework that includes humans and the spaces they
occupy in both harmful and beneficial discussions about the environment. We identified four
rhetorical themes – “Othering & dehumanization”, “NIMBYism & containment”, “Shifting
responsibility”, and “Rules are rules” – in roughly 34%, 50%, 41%, and 10% of the analyzed
texts, respectively.

Keywords: Environmental Justice, Pollution, Homelessness

Authors: