(Com)passionate Revanchism and the Role of Private-Sector Coalitions in the Spatial Management of Houselessness

The study examines compassionate revanchism as a contemporary feature of houseless management in the context of an emergent phenomenon: the formation of private-sector coalitions as coordinating leaders in houseless management. We deconstruct compassionate revanchist discourse through a comparative analysis between the Oregon Harbor of Hope in Portland, OR, and the Hello for Good Coalition in Spokane, WA. As such, the study responds to recent calls for more research on under-studied cities such as Spokane, where rates of houselessness have spiked in recent years. In the process, it critically examines recent proclamations of an emergent "post-revanchist" city and concludes by arguing that we are currently at a crossroads whereby the impulse to "take back the city" for propertied interests is either compassionately tempered and/or passionately reinvoked, and that the practices taken by such private-sector coalitions, and how genuinely compassionate they are, manifest in variegated ways across socio-spatial contexts.