have engulfed all household assets. According to Tim Harris (2014), founder of Real Change, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, homelessness in the city is a crippling form of institutionalized dehumanization that produces a highly stigmatizing narrative in which the homeless are portrayed as ‘filth’ and ‘contamination’, as ‘being in the way’ while the rich voice their angst about feeling ‘unsafe’. Such a narrative, carefully crafted to protect the cherished notion of American individual success, opens the door to particular sets of policies that, instead of addressing the precarious adaptive needs of homeless people, produce misdemeanor criminals, often highly racialized, who are rendered even more invisible by being removed from the streets (e.g. laws on panhandling) and incarcerated. Such criminalization of homeless citizens then shapes who is considered as ‘deserving poor’ and protected, for instance in the case of cold spells and heat waves, and who is not.

Let us consider the recent increase in homeless people in France. In only ten years (2001‐2011), the number of people without a home ( _sans domicile fixe_ ) has doubled, now amounting to 141,500, with roughly one‐fourth of them employed and more than half of foreign origin (Yaouancq et al. 2013). Being without shelter counts as lack in physical assets. Not having a bed or a roof over one’s head is without any doubt measurable in national statistics. What remains largely invisible, though, are the social and urban planning policies that discount these unwanted poor by prescribing their removal from urban landscapes of daily interactions. As summarized in a newspaper article right after Christmas 2014, anti‐ homeless efforts in some French cities include the fencing of benches to make them inaccessible, the replacement of such sought‐after sleeping spots with iron spears, mini cactus gardens, stone mounts, and other pseudo‐artistic creations, and the barely noticeable downward tilting of plastic chairs in the Paris metro so that disgracefully falling asleep on these chairs is no longer possible (Brändle 2014).

At the backdrop of a recent cold spell across the country and the death of at least six homeless people with nowhere to sleep in December 2014, public outrage against these latest manifestations of anti‐ social poverty politics highlights the urgent need to investigate this and similar cases and shed light on the increasingly heinous strategies implemented or attempted to address ‘la misère sociale.’ Many of these strategies silence and render invisible the growing number of destitute people in affluent societies in France and beyond. “On ne meurt pas de froid, on meurt de mal‐logement" (one does not die because of the cold but because of housing‐impairedness) (Nice Matin 2014). The Fondation Abbé‐ Pierre (2014), using the term ‘mal‐logement’ to connote housing for the disadvantaged, estimated a total of 3,700,000 individuals in 2014 as housing‐disadvantaged, including the ~140,000 homeless, as well as more than 5 million people harmed (‘ _fragilisés_ ’) by the housing crisis and a further 10 million directly or indirectly impacted.

Insights into examples of homelessness in affluent nations suggest that the discursive framing of the poor as ‘undeserving’ (O'Connor 2002; Mosse 2010) — constructing them as lazy and dangerous filth that does not belong, that tarnishes the shiny existence of the privileged and the public spaces they occupy — further deepens the dichotomy between privilege and marginalization. It fortifies the view that ‘they’ (the others) are poor because of personal failure, that not having a home must be their intrinsic fault, that their deprived state must be a result of not having worked hard enough like any other respective citizen. The same framing protects the privileged and the social relations that make 8