Researcher ORCID Identifier
0009-0002-0317-1289
Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Open Access Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Politics and International Relations
Reader 1
Nancy Neiman
Reader 2
Aimee Bahng
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
2025 River Rafferty
Abstract
This thesis dissects how gentrification, homelessness, and criminalization intersect and influence one another, using Missoula, Montana's recent urban camping ban as a case study.
It argues that racial capitalism, as a hermeneutic, structures the logics of Missoula's Ordinance 3747 and that gentrification, as a manifestation of racial capitalism, creates a structural imperative for the criminalization of homelessness. In addition, it asserts that local community organizations such as the Missoula Tenants Union and the Missoula Unhoused Neighbors Union offer viable alternatives to the current carceral organization of public policy, orienting space in the city toward what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms abolition geographies.
Relying on critical theory and personal interviews, this thesis addresses the ways in which developers and local governments enshrine capital accumulation at the expense of marginalized populations, and how the structure of racial capitalism necessitates criminalization and displacement of those it deems surplus. Concurrently, it demonstrates how the ordinance has provided openings for community-based political interventions, illuminating the efforts and experiences of local organizers who have continuously fought against the criminalization of their unhoused neighbors and who strive to enact a collectivist future that centers the needs of residents rather than capital.
Recommended Citation
Rafferty, River, ""The Only Place I'm Allowed in the City is Court": Racial Capitalism, Gentrification, and the Criminalization of Homelessness in Missoula, Montana" (2025). Scripps Senior Theses. 2550.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2550
