Update: the Region of Waterloo is pressing on with its plan to open supported tent encampments for people who are homeless. The location has yet to be determined. Read more in Global News:
Waterloo Region close to opening new outdoor shelters for homeless population
Read more below for background on this development.
So it’s an emerging ‘best practice’ for responsible authorities supporting the downtrodden: referring budding plans to those with ‘lived experience.’ From a homelessness perspective, if you want to know what the homeless would prefer, ask people who are, or have been, homeless.
Well, the region of Kitchener-Waterloo in Ontario have taken a leaf from that textbook. A survey of people who are homeless has revealed, among other things, that the locally housed AND the locally homeless actually share a particular opinion. They both, by and large, agree that people who are homeless would be happier somewhere, anywhere, else.
This, of course is a truism for the housed. It can be pretty much assumed that no city neighbourhood anywhere on earth has a majority in favour of, say, moving people who are homeless INTO their neighbourhood, unless . . .
You didn’t expect there to be an ‘unless,’ did you, dear reader? But of course there is one: unless homelessness — cheaper then homebuilding — becomes a profitable industry such as the prison system. When a new, government-funded incarceration facility wishes to move into town, it can bring jobs and prosperity.
And really, with its consultation of those possessing lived experience, that seduction is just what the region of Kitchener-Waterloo is nibbling away at. The survey carrot that was offered to people who are living in the region’s major illegal encampments: would you move out of town to a ‘managed’ tent encampment somewhere else?
Here you have the beginnings of a homeless encampment industry. A stretch? We think not. For starters, the region does not seem to be sizing up the homeless numbers and wondering how and where enough permanent housing can be built to house them.
The plan under discussion would seem to be permanently temporary shelter in tents, properly managed with a health and safety support. There’s no discussion of transitional shelter that can be dignified by the name housing. (An example of that is the pop-up, then potentially move-elsewhere transitional housing in British Columbia1).
The idea of government-managed tent camps is not new. As to the potential success of such efforts, there is plenty of evidence around concerning attempts and failures to ‘regularize’ tent encampments2.
All of which currently avoids a major issue: which town or city within the region will be the lucky winner of an ‘official’ government supervised tent city? It will, of course, only be a temporarily permanent solution to a profound regional and national lack of truly affordable housing. If you wish to imagine that such a municipal service could ever be permanent, consider a sad California story, where an official, but extremely minimalist, official encampment was established beneath a highway bridge3.
For more on the story of Kitchener-Waterloo testing the waters of official tent encampments in the never-never fantasyland of ‘somewhere else’, read more in the The Record: Nearly half of Kitchener homeless camp would move to a managed encampment in a different city: survey
