Dateline: Greater Vancouver – BC’s Lower Mainland, Canada

I begin by offering a story — a story I heard in 2019 while standing with a group of precariously housed folks in a dimly lit empty parking lot late one winter night. 

We were gazing up at the sky. Someone had mentioned something about the stars — or maybe about a satellite or the space station. We’d all tilted our heads to look. A chill wind lapped at our faces, and we shuffled our boots against the asphalt to trick our feet into warmth. Unmittened fingertips held beer cans and lit cigarettes. And then a voice from among us asked if I knew about the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio.

“We used to come here at night to watch the owls,” he said. “They would perch at the edge of the roof over there, hunting rats. Beautiful birds. They’d watch the parking lot, waiting for the rats to come out. Then they’d swoop down and grab one. Plenty of rats. Good hunting for owls. But not everybody likes rats… When they renovated that building on the other side of the lot, things changed.” He pointed to a low-rise building, kitty-corner from the roof where the owls used to roost. “They put in a yoga studio, and people would drive here for classes. I suppose they didn’t like that sometimes a rat scurried by when they walked from their car to the studio. Someone must’ve complained to the building manager. Next thing you know, they’ve put down poison. Killed the rats. … No rats, no owls. They never came back.”

Several people nodded at the end of the story, and one man gestured to his dog, “Had to be careful this one didn’t get hold of any poison.” A couple murmured softly about the loss of something rare. “They wouldn’t have known about the owls,” the storyteller explained. “No way to know the poison would affect more than the rats.”

“No way to know …” The generosity of that statement has stayed with me. It forgives a lack of imagination that seems embedded in other urban solutions, such as those offered as a cure for homelessness. The same lack of imagination that killed the rats and ignored the owls is also present in one-size-fits-all municipal decisions about what “home” means to people who appear not to have one. — It is present also in decisions regarding what makes housing “adequate” for folks who have survived sleeping rough. Such decisions often ignore greater ecologies and tend to oversimplify the targeted problem. 

To examine what makes a “good” solution, and who benefits, I invite you to take a closer look at the tale of the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio. What existed before a problem was identified? An urban ecosystem of sorts: a healthy colony of rats living underground — some of the houseless folks estimated the subterranean community spanned four blocks or more — and owls attracted by an abundance of prey. What played out in that space, from the perspective of the humans who gathered to watch the nocturnal hunting grounds come alive, might have been considered the stuff of nature documentaries. So, what, then, caused the problem? The arrival of a business that attracted folks who were not so local, clients who might not associate rats with owls — nor, for that matter, associate owls with parking lots in a neighbourhood of strip malls, police presence, and various social services. The assumption of the storyteller that someone connected to the yoga studio had complained about the rats, although not proven, seems plausible. The cause-and-effect timeline observed by the nature-watchers is clear: visible natural ecology playing out nightly, followed by arrival of yoga studio and its clients, followed by extermination of rats, and disappearance of owls. But through the limited gaze of the building manager and the yoga studio clients, the timeline is clipped: first there were rodents, which was deemed inappropriate, so action was requested and taken; now the rodents have disappeared. From this latter vantage point, the solution has been “good”; but from the vantage point of the locals who understood the ecology of the space, the solution has caused multiple harms. That there was no way to know the harms caused by poisoning the rats is true, but in a very limited sense: no one sought to ask, “Was there more they should know before taking action”.

And as with rats, in this case, so with humans. 

A few weeks ago, a former classmate messaged me enthusiastically about renewed plans to “end homelessness” in the city. My instant emotional response was, “Whatever.” It’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of ending homelessness, I just haven’t seen it work in a way that permanently increases quality of life for the folks who become the target of these initiatives. In many cases, what I have seen and heard makes me wonder who “solving homelessness” is for: so often, it seems to merely invisibilise those without normative houses by tucking them out of sight into over-surveiled spaces that don’t ever feel like “home” — places people don’t necessarily want to be. 

In the past six years, I’ve spent time in places where stories of people’s journeys into and out of homelessness — and back into homelessness — are the norm. The single common element of all the narratives I hear is that these experiences are individual; they vary depending on personality, ability and mobility, social connection, and the amount of trauma an individual has experienced. Just like housed folks, those who are houseless are not one definable demographic. But solving homelessness would be so much easier if that were not the case: if only unhoused people were a single entity with uniform needs. The stories I’ve heard bear the scars of easy solutions: housing conditions that are far from what the already-housed population would accept, and that few homeless folks would describe as “home.” 

“Tenting is a desirable adventure for the already-housed.”

A few years ago, as a “tent city” was about to be taken down, I watched on my television screen while a reporter asked a woman in the camp if she didn’t want housing. All the viewers would have understood the dominant message that a tent is not appropriate housing. We also all understood the framing of this problem: those staying in the camp were refusing some sort of normative shelter being offered. This seemed to baffle and frustrate officials making the offer of housing. The woman answered the journalist without hesitation, “Of course I want housing.” And she told the reporter that she wanted her (the reporter’s) housing, explaining that if she couldn’t live in conditions similar to those that already-housed folks had, she’d rather live in her tent, where she had at least some control over her environment. That response is what I had already heard from others, and what I continue to hear from folks who feel that what they are being offered is sub-standard. But this lack of willingness to accept a living space with gyprock or concrete walls instead of the fabric walls of a tent flummoxes municipalities and those who have always had normative housing. Why would anyone turn down an opportunity to come in from the outdoors, to get out of a tent? — After all, although one outdoor adventure advertisement for my province boasts “50 free campsites” and pictures a tent pitched in a beautiful clearing, camping is reserved for leisure, for those who can afford to fit nature-time into the vacations doled out by their employer. Tenting is a desirable adventure for the already-housed. Folks who pitch a tent for free in urban spaces are an eyesore and an uncomfortable reminder that the rights to the city are inequitably distributed. So, when more normative housing is offered and then rejected, this can be confusing to those extending such offers. It might even seem like ingratitude. In an effort to understand refusals of housing, some people have decided that the lack of comprehension lies with those who are houseless. I’ve heard stories of houseless folks being advised to come put their name on the list for temporary modular housing (TMH) when they “come to their senses.” There is a strong fibre of paternalism running through these stories: that if unhoused folks simply understood what was good for them, they would accept what was on offer.

“When you don’t have a lot of money, there’s a fine line between housing and prison”

Theo, who made his living through scavenging and informal recycling, slept rough and pushed his belongings in a grocery cart. He had resisted different forms of housing on offer after discovering restrictions that he just didn’t want to live with. If he was going to move indoors, he told me, he wanted to know he would be comfortable; if not, it just wasn’t worth it. In 2019, during weeks of sleet, he reconsidered and went to see what the proposed TMH development in his neighbourhood might be like. He spoke with me the day after he’d gone to put his name on the list. He was angry. Apparently, before he’d had much of a chance to ask about regulations and restrictions, the woman in charge had nodded toward his grocery cart. “She told me to come back when I’d downsized my belongings! I was sure steamed. Told her to go back to her home and downsize her own belongings. How did that feel?” Johnny, with whom I’d been on many scavenging trips, lost his housing through renoviction in 2019. Although looking for housing, he wanted a place he’d be comfortable, and didn’t want to have to sign in and out when leaving a place where he lived. “That’s not home,” he grumbled to me one day. He lived rough for a year before a place he could live in became available. 

Kyle, too, had been homeless for long stretches of time. “When you don’t have a lot of money, there’s a fine line between housing and prison,” he told me. He was especially wary of the TMH units that Theo had investigated. “They’re not all the same,” he said, admitting that some TMH projects are better than others, both in design and level of surveillance. “Run by different folks. But it’s like their name: they’re “temporary.” If you give in the first time and say, ‘Okay, I’ll sign in when I want to go home, and I’ll sign out when I want to leave my home, and I’ll accept that maybe I have to have room inspections, and that maybe I don’t have a kitchen in my home and I can’t have guests spend the night — or maybe I can but only a couple of nights a month and they have to be the right kind of people, well, okay then. — If I accept those rules for my ‘home,’ okay. But then the modulars get shut down. — They’re only temporary, right? — And they’re going to move you to new housing. But maybe this new housing comes with even more rules. What are you going to do? It’s a slippery slope. Say yes now and one day find yourself living in a prison.” He described some residents as “sleepwalkers.” “You have to be,” he told me, “to accept those conditions.” 

But not everyone feels that way. TMH can become home space for some who need it, and some TMH is designed with fully-contained units that do have kitchen spaces and private bathrooms. But it is temporary. Other housing, like SROs and temporary shelter living requires a sharing that can be difficult for people coming out of abuse. Several women I’ve spoken with have likened the mere experience of being homeless to an assault. “I thought to myself, ‘This is not my life. This is not my life.’ I woke up every morning and wondered how I got here. I grew up in a nice neighbourhood,” one woman told me. When she arrived at the shelter with her small child, she found it difficult to parent in public, to find alone time. “I just needed a space to myself. But there’s no privacy in these places. — I’m not ungrateful, but you just need a space to yourself. And there isn’t one.” When she had taken a few minutes to sit quietly, another woman had made an official complaint that she was neglecting her child. “I mean, how can you be a good mother if you don’t have time to take care of your own needs?” I was surprised to hear there was little support.

Ryder, an informal recycler I worked alongside during my thesis research, told me women always have a hard time. “You can’t win if you’re a mom without a home. People always look at you as if you’re a bad parent. If you give up your children to the system, you’re a bad mom, but if you try to keep them and you don’t have good housing, you’re a worse mom.” Women told me how hard it was to find housing that is deemed appropriate, especially if they have children over the age of five: according to the Canadian National Occupancy Standard (CNOS) male and female children are not to share a room. It’s possible that many families don’t know this: those of us who have always been housed are able to configure our home spaces however we like. But I’ve heard from women who are deeply concerned that breaking CNOS guidelines may put at risk their housing funding or ability to live with their children. That means finding affordable apartments with multiple rooms, a financial impossibility in British Columbia’s lower mainland. And fathers suffer, too: one of Ryder’s friends had been separated from his children and their mother because most shelter housing is not intended for families. Gender-segregated shelter space means that children stay with mothers, and fathers live apart, meeting up when they can. For families already juggling the stressors associated with precarious living (precarious employment, food insecurity, moving children to different schools, surveillance from social services, the endless bureaucracy of paperwork required to access essential services), segregated shelters place extra burdens on relationships. 

In order to save their relationships, even childless couples will sometimes reject sheltered housing in order to remain together. “We’re the only thing we have,” one woman told me. “Each other. That’s it. If it’s the street or separation, I choose him.” She and her partner had lived rough for almost ten years by the time they found space in a shelter that allowed couples. I heard a similar story from a woman in her 60s who felt her husband needed a level of care that simply wasn’t offered in a shelter. She chose to live with him in a tent, packing up daily and looking for “safe spots” to spend the night along the urban periphery. “It’s important to be invisible,” she told me. “That’s the only way to stay safe.”

I couldn’t agree more: just ask the yoga studio rats.

And I say this as a person who has a deep respect for rats — for their sense of community, their ingenious ways of getting along with the humans who wish to eradicate them. And like owls, rats are intelligent. One of my former professors might observe that rats simply lack a good marketing team. Without re-branding, residents have a hard time seeing them as anything but undesirable. Rats are a sign of filth; they offend the human penchant for “clean.” In the same way that rats make us uncomfortable, so does visible homelessness. We might explain this feeling by saying we wish for others to be comfortable, to be taken care of. But if that’s really true, then why is the housing we offer so unlike that of already-housed folks? Is it that we feel our housing must be earned? That houseless folks are less deserving? I suspect this is an obvious truth. And it must feel quite comforting and virtuous of us when we see fewer homeless people on the streets. This means we — our City, our Region — are solving homelessness. But I challenge that for someone to move out of being “homeless” they have to actually find “home” — something we don’t provide with temporary, over-regulated, segregated, rights-limited housing.

A few nights after I heard the story of the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio, Kyle and I were chatting a few blocks from the parking lot. He was still unhoused by choice, waiting for something that wouldn’t break his bankbook or his soul. “I wonder about them,” he told me, as we gazed across at the new condo towers only a kilometer away. I wondered about them, too, thinking that some of the yoga studio clients likely lived there. “I wonder what they’re thinking — and if they wonder about us,” Kyle mused. “They’re so high up, they don’t close their curtains. They must think they’re invisible up there.” He chuckled and then pointed, “Did you see that? The light just changed in that window there. You can tell they’re channel surfing.” Finally, the light remained a faint green glow. Kyle wondered aloud what they were watching. I was feeling gloomy. “Probably a National Geographic program about owls,” I said. Our shoulders shook with dark laughter, and he nodded beside me. “Yup. Wildlife.”

…