Navigating Risk, Violence, and Safety: Exploring Unhoused Community Members' Experiences with Encampments

• In Event: Experiences of Violence and Victimization Among Unhoused Persons

Abstract

Over the past few years, the increasing presence and visibility of homeless encampments - or 'tent cities' - across North America have elicited notable political and media attention. Driven by concerns that encampments are ‘cesspools' for crime, social disorder, drug use, and health risks, cities' standard responses have been to forcibly dismantle them. While the subject of much public concern, we know relatively little about how unhoused community members themselves think about and experience encampments. Drawing upon interviews with 550 people experiencing homelessness and people who use drugs across nine cities, we examine participants' reasons for erecting, joining, and living in encampments. We find that unhoused community members' decisions to live in encampments are shaped by several factors, including the risks associated with intensifying drug crises, the lack of clean and safe housing options, and the increased potential for street-based victimization. Unhoused community members' decisions to erect, join, and/or live in an encampment are, therefore, inseparable from the social conditions underlying their lived realities. Based on these findings, we illuminate how different sources of risk and victimization shape unhoused people's experiences in encampments and daily survival.

Authors

• Adi Keynan, University of Winnipeg

• Katharina Maier, University of Winnipeg

• Carolyn Greene, Athabasca University

• Marta-Marika Urbanik, University of Alberta