Challenging the Narrative on Homelessness


Jessica Braimoh, York University; Erin Dej, Wilfrid Laurier University; Naomi Nichols, Trent University

With approximately 35,000 people experiencing homelessness every night in Canada, we are facing a crisis that is destroying people’s lives, enabling divisive narratives within communities, and further entrenching marginality and social disadvantage. Although homelessness is becoming increasingly visible across communities in Canada, smaller suburban cities are facing an identity crisis given the changing context of homelessness. The desire many long-term residents have in smaller suburban communities to maintain ‘the old days’ comes up against changing economic, demographic, and social diversification realities. These changes are not going away. As homelessness becomes more visible, we see an increasing public frustration demands for someone (e.g., municipalities, law enforcement, service providers, and the government) ‘to do something’. In some communities, members of the public have weaponized misperceptions around homelessness to enact vigilante efforts at change[1] [1]. Such action deepens NIMBYISM, social exclusion, and hate. In this session we draw on the concept of ‘community resilience’ to consider how smaller suburban communities might shift the narrative away from homelessness, hate, and criminalization towards active strategies aimed at inclusion and belonging. Community resilience is a multi-dimensional, dynamic, and iterative process that involves collective awareness, action, reflection, adaptation, and social inclusion. Community resilience is influenced by social, cultural, and structural resources, constraints and opportunities. Central to developing community resilience is the ability to address sustainable, affordable housing, poverty reduction, and access to a continuum of healthcare and mental health resources. This paper emerges from current and past research conducted in small suburban communities. Reflecting on this work, we consider the following questions: How do we move from NIMBY to YIMBY? How do we mobilize support for community safety and resilience that challenges hate and NIMBY-ISM? What might meaningful and targeted community engagement look in small suburban communities? Throughout the presentation we engage in a call-and-answer style of conversation. Each question is posed to all authors who, drawing on their research and community work, provide insight into the challenges that exist for small suburban cities in their current responses to homelessness. Specifically, we consider how these responses to homelessness are tied to changing community identities, ongoing system failures, policy decisions, NIMBY-ISM, and systemic forms of oppression and exclusion. Keeping our unhoused neighbours at the forefront, this paper asks how we engage multiple stakeholders including scholars, practitioners, multiple levels of government, the public and those experiencing homelessness in strategies that build stronger places for us all to live.

This paper will be presented at the following session: