“One way of describing the plight of a homeless individual might be to say that there is no place governed by a private property rule where he is allowed to be” (Waldron, 1991:299).
What is emerging – and it is not just a matter of fantasy – is a state of affairs in which a million or more citizens have no place to perform elementary human activities like urinating, washing, sleeping, cooking, eating, and standing around. Legislators voted for by
people who own private places in which they can do these things are increasingly deciding to make public places available only for activities other than these primal human tasks. The streets and the subways, they say, are for commuting from home to office. They are not for sleeping; sleeping is what one does at home. The parks are for recreations like
walking and informal ball-games, things for which one’s own yard is a little too confined. Parks are not for cooking or urinating; again, these are things one does at home. Since the public and private are complementary, the activities performed in public are the complement
of those performed in private. This complementarity works fine for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places. However, it is disastrous for those who must live their whole lives on common land. If I am right about this, it is one of the most callous and tyrannical exercises of power in modern times by a (comparatively) rich and complacent
majority against a minority of their less fortunate fellow human beings (Waldron, 1991:301–2).
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