(URS3) Homelessness Governance

As homelessness continues to rise and become more visible throughout Canada, it is crucial to understand contemporary homelessness governance strategies that attempt to supervise, regulate, and integrate people experiencing homelessness into civil and market society. This session invites papers that engage in debates about contemporary homelessness governance by an array of state, nonprofit, and/or private sector actors in spaces such as, but not limited to, emergency shelters, encampments, public spaces, and the private rental market. This includes discussions about how contemporary social-welfare systems and wider political-economic logics influence homelessness governance logics as well as how these logics impact the everyday lives of people experiencing homelessness. These can be some combination of punitive strategies that aim to discipline and/or criminalize homelessness, compassionate strategies that provide support and care, or ambivalent strategies that defer to nonprofits to provide basic human needs. As a cross-listed Housing and Urban Sociology cluster session, we encourage papers to engage in some current debates about access to housing, neoliberal urbanism, urban street clearance objectives, policing of homeless encampments, the pandemic’s impact on homelessness governance, governing of various homeless subpopulations (veterans, LGBTQ2S+, Indigenous, among others), or any emerging governance strategies. Tags: Accueil Et Logement, Communautés, Rural Et Urbain

Organizers: Daniel Kudla, Memorial University, Natasha Martino, McMaster University; Chairs: Daniel Kudla, Memorial University, Natasha Martino, McMaster University

Presentations

Hannah McLean, Memorial University

Supports for 2SLGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness in Canada

Canadian youth homelessness researchers argue that there has been a collective delayed response to the over representation of 2SLGBTQ+ youth (25-45%) in homeless demographics for over two decades (Abramovich, 2022; Gaetz, 2018). Given the nuanced challenges queer youth experiencing homelessness encounter while trying to maintain stable housing and employment, there is a need for more targeted solutions including supportive housing and comprehensive services for 2SLGBTQ+ youth (Abramovich, 2017). Drawing from one-on-one interviews with young queer individuals that have experienced homelessness, the findings highlight challenges and successes in new housing programs serving 2SLGBTQ+ youth.

Jayne Malenfant, McGill University

Exploring the Role of Lived Experts in Homelessness Governance: Mapping the Canadian Context

Increasingly, across policy spaces, frontline services, advocacy groups, and research on homelessness, lived experiences of housing precarity are sought to inform decision-making, responses, and solutions. Recent housing rights legislation in Canada, the National Housing Strategy, further calls for the ongoing and participatory engagement of those directly impacted by housing rights violations in the creation of responses (Levac et al., 2022). Despite this increasing recognition of the value of lived experience, many groups struggle to foster equitable, ongoing, and meaningful relationships with people who are directly impacted by housing rights violations. People with firsthand experience can be integral to understanding how homelessness happens and what interventions are needed to effectively address it. Still, in spaces of governance and decision-making across federal, provincial, municipal and organizational contexts, lived experts remain underrepresented, and engagement is often limited to token positions or “make-work” roles that are not implicated in governance (Ilyniak, 2022). Lived experts are rarely in positions to make decisions or shape the way housing services, policy, or practice are governed. Led by a researcher with lived experience of housing precarity, this paper presents ethnographic research undertaken with over 20 lived experts who have worked as advisors, peer support staff, community researchers, and advocates across Turtle Island to better understand how we can engage services users and people with lived experience in our programming and policies. Themes drawing from the experiences of those navigating spaces policy, advocacy, service provision and research spaces will be presented, with the aim of illuminating how direct knowledge of systems, physical spaces, resources and trjaectories impacting housing and homelessness are engaged in service of the housing and homelessness sector. Relationships related to decision-making and hierarchies of knowledge in this sector—often positioning lived knowledges as simultaneously valuable and anecdotal—will be explored. In particular, mobilizing Institutional Ethnographic approaches (Smith, 1990), the paper will examine texts (e.g. government and service providers’ policies) that organize the governance of housing and homelessness spaces in so-called Canada, beginning in the work of those with lived and living experiences of homelessness, governance is structured in ways that draw from, ignore, or abstract the realities of those navigating housing precarity. Key barriers outlined by participants and policy analysis—particularly a lack of access to stable roles in organizations, feelings of ongoing consultation with little access to (or understanding of) decision-making structures, and assumptions that lived experts do not (or cannot) hold the skills or knowledge to contribute to governance—will be explored, in order to provide tangible ways lived expertise may be better mobilized to address housing rights. The work will also speak to how making visible the activist roots of by-us-for-us organizing (Nelson, 2020), intersectionality, and anti-oppression can be key part sof meaningful ways of fostering lived experience and community leadership of solutions to homelessness, both in local contexts and broadly.

Carter Tongs, Carleton University

The nature of homelessness: Characterization of homelessness as a policy problem

Policy problems arise when conditions in society are different from the desired state of affairs necessitating policy responses. Policy solutions are shaped by the way that policy problems are defined. Creating effective policy solutions requires that policymakers develop a comprehensive frame of the problem they are attempting to address. The frames through which policymakers perceive policy problems can have significant consequences for affected populations, particularly if those populations are vulnerable. Incomplete or inaccurate characterizations of policy problems may lead policymakers to develop ineffective policy solutions, disadvantaging vulnerable groups. Thus, the frame through which affected populations understand policy problems can provide invaluable information about the efficacy of policy strategies and inform the improvement of these policy solutions. Homelessness is one such policy problem that has received increasing attention in Canada, prompting the development of policy strategies at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Despite efforts to address homelessness through government policies, many cities such as Ottawa have experienced an increase in the prevalence of homelessness, indicating that current policy approaches to addressing homelessness are ineffective. Previous research examining the effect of framing on the development of policies to address homelessness has focused on how the definition and discourses about individuals experiencing homelessness impact policy responsiveness, funding allocation, and enumeration. Studies seeking the perspectives of individuals experiencing homelessness tend to focus on barriers to service access, often indicating that policies create and sustain many of these barriers. However, there has been less attention paid to how the framing of homelessness within policy and the resulting solutions align with the needs and perceptions of the problem from the perspectives of those with lived experience. This project aims to contribute to this gap in the literature by asking how the characterization of homelessness in the Ottawa 10-Year Housing and Homelessness Plan compares to the perspective of those experiencing homelessness in Ottawa. Using Erving Goffman’s concept of frames and Guy Peters’ theory of problem characterization, this study will describe and compare the frames through which homelessness is characterized in the Ottawa Plan and by people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa. I will engage in a qualitative content analysis informed by Peters’ theory to analyze The Plan and its related documents. First-hand experience of perspectives of homelessness in the city will be obtained through focus groups with people experiencing homelessness in Ottawa. This research focuses on the city of Ottawa as a case study because the responsibility for developing policy responses to homelessness rests with municipal governments in Ontario. Collaboration with a panel of lived experts through a local advocacy organization ensures that this research is community-informed and minimizes the risk of harm to participants. By highlighting differences in the framing of homelessness between policy and the Ottawa homeless population, this research seeks to enhance policymakers’, service providers’, and researchers’ understanding of homelessness. The results of this research have the potential to inform the improvement of future policies to address homelessness in Ottawa. Ultimately, this study seeks to bridge the gap between policy frames and lived experiences, fostering more inclusive and effective policy responses to homelessness in Ottawa and advancing broader sociological understandings of policy framing and homelessness.

Laura Pin, Wilfrid Laurier University

Municipal Encampment Governance Through a Human Rights Lens

Homeless encampments are any place where people experiencing homelessness live in tents or other temporary structures (Farah and Schwan, 2020). Encampments are not new, however recent increases in the number and size of encampments have created new challenges for Canadian municipalities (Flynn et al., 2022). Encampments do not replace permanent, affordable housing, but can be a necessary interim measure for individuals without other housing options when shelters are unavailable or inaccessible (Donley and Wright, 2012; Ha et al., 2015). Even when shelters are available, individuals may reside in encampments due to greater individual autonomy, community, and security of person and possessions (Herring, 2021; Kaufman, 2022; Young et al., 2017). Canadian municipalities have responded to encampments in a variety of ways, ranging from forced clearance of encampment residents, to tacit acceptance, to sanctioning (Brown et al., 2022; Cohen et al., 2019). At the same time, according to human rights law, practices such as forced removal are violations that frustrate Canada’s expressed commitment to a rights-based approach to housing and particularly harm racialized, Indigenous and gender-diverse people experiencing homelessness (Farah and Schwan, 2020). Moreover, municipal encampment responses can be matters of life and death for unhoused residents, who rely on encampments for food, shelter, and support (Boucher et al, 2022). Yet, little is known about why municipalities adopt different approaches to encampments, and how these responses intersect with other areas of muncipal regulation, like bylaws. A human rights approach to housing means recognizing that all people have the “right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity” including individuals experiencing homelessness (CESCR, 1993, see also: Porter, 2021). In recent years, despite the federal government’s adoption of a human rights approach to housing through the National Housing Strategy Act , human rights organizations have criticized Canada’s record concerning a) the right to housing (CCHR, 2022) and b) encampments specifically (OHRC, 2022, Human Rights Watch, 2022). While housing policy is intergovernmental, encampments are often treated as matters of municipal bylaw violation and enforcement. As such, there has been a proliferation of formal policy protocols at the municipal level intended to advise local actors on how to engage with encampments. These protocols include the process for providing outreach supports and/or enforcing bylaws to remove encampment residents. Drawing on a bylaw scan and protocol analysis of all municipalities over 100,000 residents in Ontario, Canada, this paper assesses assess municipal encampment responses through a human rights lens, developed through domestic and international human rights tools. It finds while all 39 municipalities had neo-vagrancy bylaws – bylaws that criminalize elements of poverty - only 14 had publicly available protocols specifically addressing encampments. While there was substantial variation in the approaches taken by municipalities, ranging from explicit recognition of human rights commitments to forced removal. However, even municipalities with encampment protocols addressing human rights commitments, neo-vagrancy bylaws were still in place, including anti-camping bylaws. Moreover, in the event of a conflict between neo-vagrancy bylaws and encampment protocols, municipal protocols generally specified the neo-vagrancy bylaws took precedence. Another limitation of protocols is the absence of positive action towards securing the right to housing, through the provision of municipal services. This research demonstrates the importance of municipalities taking comprehensive approaches to address encampments through a human rights lens, including analysis of how these protocols intersect with bylaws and service provisioning. This paper also demonstrates a need to for future research to explore the lived impact of contradictions between encampment protocols and neo-vagrancy bylaws by people living in encampments and outreach workers.