Why We Hide Homelessness When the Circus Comes to Town (or the World Cup)

If you are anything like me, you probably got swept up in the excitement of the World Cup over the last six weeks. You may or may not know that I grew up in the West African country of Cameroon, where football—or, as Americans call it, “soccer”—is basically a religion.

I’ll never forget the collective citywide groans and cheers I witnessed as a kid whenever the Cameroon national team scored a goal (or almost scored a goal), or when a referee made a questionable call on the pitch—or “field.” So when Spain and Argentina made it to the 2026 World Cup final in New Jersey last week, I knew there was only one place in the world that I needed to be: at home, in bed, watching on television (If you thought that sentence was going to end more dramatically, keep in mind that the average resale ticket price to get into the stadium was reportedly around $11,000).

But I don’t actually want to talk about the game. I want to talk about a strange phenomenon that happens in our cities whenever a massive sporting event like the World Cup or the Olympics comes to town.

Suddenly, there is tremendous urgency to “clean up” the streets.

People experiencing homelessness are moved along. Encampments disappear. Police presence increases. Belongings are discarded. The goal, whether anyone says it out loud or not, is often to make sure tourists, visitors, and paying customers don’t have to see the visible evidence of poverty.

Now, for the record, I get it. I’m not oblivious to the discomfort aggressive panhandling can cause. Navigating a large tent encampment on a public sidewalk can be scary. And you will never hear me argue that the compassionate response is simply allowing encampments to grow indefinitely with no intervention until tents become structures, generators appear, and sidewalks become virtually impassable.

There has to be a middle ground between sending in police and sanitation crews to sweep people out of sight and accepting that leaving someone to sleep on a sidewalk indefinitely is the best we can do.

But here is the part I struggle with: Why does the urgency seem to arrive when outsiders are coming?

It reminds me a little bit of when my mom would suddenly insist that I clean my room because guests were coming over. The mess had been there all week. Apparently, it only became an emergency when someone else might see it.

And that is what bothers me about the way we sometimes respond to homelessness.

A person can sleep outside a train station for months and somehow we convince ourselves there is nothing that can be done. An encampment can grow for years while the people living there cycle through illness, trauma, violence, addiction, and increasingly dangerous conditions.

But announce that millions of visitors are coming to town and suddenly we discover tremendous institutional capacity to “help.”

There are police officers available. Sanitation crews available. Outreach teams deployed. Government agencies coordinating. Resources mobilized. Apparently, we were capable of responding all along, we simply chose not to.

The question is: Who was the response for?

Because clearing a sidewalk may improve the experience of the person walking past it, but unless the person who was sleeping there has somewhere safe to go, we haven’t actually solved homelessness. We have relocated it.

Now, sometimes that may be necessary. Public spaces do need to remain public. Sidewalks need to be accessible. Communities have legitimate concerns about safety and sanitation. But if our response ends with making poverty less visible, then we have confused cleanliness with compassion.

Imagine if we brought the same urgency we feel before a World Cup final to homelessness every day. What if the presence of a person sleeping outside created the same sense of urgency as the arrival of a tourist?

What if we mobilized housing navigators, mental health professionals, outreach workers, shelter beds, legal assistance, addiction treatment, and permanent housing with the same determination that we mobilize police and sanitation crews before the cameras arrive?

Maybe the real measure of a great city isn’t how beautiful it looks when the world comes to visit. Maybe it is how it treats the people who are still there after everyone else goes home.

With Gratitude,

Josiah Haken

City Relief, CEO