For the past several months, a homeless man named Joshua has taken up residence in a dank crawl space beneath a crumbling building, situated at the end of an old train tunnel. The ceiling is low, making it impossible to stand, and there are rats crawling everywhere. “I hate them,” Joshua complains. “I try to kill them, but it just attracts more.” He pauses for a second. “Rats eat dead rats, you know?”

We’re in Olympia, a half mile from Washington state’s capitol. The city, Joshua tells me, has been raising fences and blocking alleyways in order to redirect the “undesirables,” while police usher away those resting on sidewalks during daylight hours. If he’s out in the open, he feels like he’s somewhere he’s not supposed to be — even in places where there’s a visible homeless population. But beneath the building, alone with the rats, no one bothers him, and he bothers no one.

Much of what’s written for liberal audiences about homelessness aims, first and foremost, to inspire empathy — it encourages compassion toward a population that spends much of its time feeling cold, wet, scared, and miserable. Complementing this sort of reporting are wonky social-scientific analyses intended to identify homelessness’s root causes — in most cases, blaming housing costs or zoning ordinances or various failed public policies. Taken together, these two genres might be understood as intending, reasonably enough, to inspire action by arousing sympathy for this materially dispossessed population while also explaining how to fix the problem.