Sidewalk lords
""Sidewalk lords is Haz's provocation about the homeless — deployed deliberately to scandalize both liberal compassion-talk and right contempt.
From the Heated political debate stream
Deflecting a critic: "You're linking me a tweet of Laconian saying that I'm— because I said that the homeless are sidewalk lords or something, very serious, obviously... He's just making a fucking statement about me. What do you want?"
The concept
The phrase (originating on Twitter, where Haz affirmed a comparison of the homeless to landlords in Mao's time) makes a materialist point through scandal: in contemporary America, public space itself has been privatized and its occupants constitute a de facto territorial authority the state manages rather than houses. The point is not mockery of the homeless but of a society that produces lords without land — and of a left that responds with sentimentality instead of housing policy (Housing crisis, Class).