Housing the Unhoused

Encampments in parks are not the way to end suffering

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Unless you have a heart of stone, you likely feel some kind of pain when you walk past a person who is living in what looks to be uncomfortable conditions on the street. It may be the pain of despair, as you imagine the suffering of being out in the cold, the indignity of begging, the discomfort of being without shoes or proper clothing. It may be the pain of guilt, knowing that you are comfortable, have money and a place to live, yet you aren’t helping all the people who don’t have the same privilege of you. It may even be the pain of anger, wishing that people could just move themselves and their stuff - some of which is unattractive or smelly - somewhere you don’t have to see it. I don’t judge your emotional reaction - I’ve had all three myself and more to boot.

Often when we feel pain, we feel the need for action to remove the pain. Since we think we feel the pain because of the person we see in front of us, we want to eliminate the situation. But the desire to cure inner pain through outer solutions can wind up creating bad urban policy, and one of the biggest policy disasters I see is the tacit encouragement (or even intentional placement, as proposed for New York City’s Central Park) of encampments in our parks.

I have touched on this before, but to be clear, it’s important that we call out park encampments for what they are - the privatization of public space. The degradation of natural habitat. The creation of biowaste and garbage in our parks. The loss of safe spaces (or at least safe feeling ones) for children to play.

However, I’m not blaming the people who live in encampments, who are just living their lives the best way they’re able to. And I don’t think we end encampments by sending in tactical squads of officers on a mass eviction missions that inevitably turn ugly. Nor am I necessarily opposed to tent living - it’s much less wasteful than more conventional ways of living - and the anarcho-queen in me appreciates people creating their own rules and communities. The problem is with the location of encampments. Green space in our cities is just as important to the health of our population as housing is - our natural systems ensure clean air and water, give us a host of other physical, mental and emotional benefits, and provide a place to live for the animal and plant species we share the planet with. And closely packed populations without public hygiene puts us right back into the ages where disease ran rampant. So if city government is interested in encampments as a housing solution, there needs to be thought put into hygiene, and they need to be in places that don’t destroy already scarce access to our parks.

The fact that Toronto’s government is not doing anything about park encampments stems, I believe, from the false dichotomy created between compassion for people who are unhoused and protection of public spaces. Where people who are in encampments should go is of course a valid question. But it can be answered on a case by case basis - and only the people themselves can answer the question of where else they can live. I believe the government’s role is to demarcate the places between public and private space clearly, and the sooner we do this, the less of a problem we will have in respecting those boundaries in the future.

All of us who feel anguish or pain at the plight of others can look at what we can do individually about both our personal anguish, and the situation of the person we are worrying about. The fact is, there is nothing stopping any one of us from offering someone that’s suffering direct support ourselves. We can have people over for dinner. We can offer them a place to sleep. We can ask them what they need. If we want to change things, we need to step up ourselves. Yelling at others to do something about it is empty protest, and suggesting people can take over parks is merely offloading the problem elsewhere. Neither get us to solutions.

Perhapas there is a disconnect that people feel over anguish for those less fortunate and the unwillingness or inability to personally help. To reconcile that conflict between compassion and inaction, we look to make our anxiety and guilt into someone else’s problem - we blame the government for not doing more, or we blame the person on the street for their plight. But our suffering is our problem. We don’t need to make others find solutions for our suffering - that’s up to us. I think poorly considered solutions like encampments in parks on the one hand, or criminalization of poverty on the other, are a case of us offloading our suffering over the problem onto others - assuming that the person on the street needs to change, or the government does.

Homelessness is not the problem, suffering is. We all want to end suffering - for ourselves, and for others. There’s no simple solution for that. But we can act thoughtfully, with compassion, by directly speaking to those who are suffering to find out how we can help. We do that one person at a time. And we do it together.