Imagine that you could only keep with you the belongings you could physically carry or wheel around. What would you keep? And how would you feel if everywhere you went, someone was trying to take or destroy the few things that matter most to you? What would you do – what could you do – to keep them safe? What would you forgo doing? For many, these are questions we don’t have to contemplate as we have secure housing that helps keep us and the things we treasure safe and secure. We also have systems we can access should our belongings be at risk. This is not the case for people who are precariously homed.
As a team, we examined the challenges that precariously homed people experience in keeping their possessions safe. Because the spaces they call home are controlled and regulated by others, their belongings are constantly at risk, which perpetuates poverty and vulnerability. So prevalent is the experience of having one’s belongings confiscated, destroyed, or impounded by regulators (e.g. bylaw enforcement officers), that one of our collaborators told us that it was as if the dispossession and devaluation of their property has a sound – it’s a persistent and ever-present ‘hum’. To hear the ‘hum’, to fully understand how the regulation of precariously homed people’s belongings unfolds and how they are affected by it, their experiences and voices must be centred, in both research and policymaking.
This research addresses a gap in the scholarship of homelessness governance, shining a light on the people, practices, and experiences of regulation as it relates to precariously homed people’s belongings. We focus our research on Abbotsford, BC (Canada), a mid-sized city located 65 km east of Vancouver (Canada), one that underwent a policy pivot to approach issues relating to homelessness in slightly less punitive ways.
What is the ‘hum’?
One of our collaborators, Connie Long, described the ‘hum’ as the same story of dispossession told “over and over again by different people” whose housing is insecure. It’s also the sound of dispossession forces themselves. It’s when a bylaw officer comes across a shopping cart full of ‘garbage’ that they read as ‘out of place’. Or when a bailiff enforces an eviction notice and someone is given one bag to ‘grab what you can’ before being escorted away. For regulators, these may seem like discrete, one-off encounters. But for precariously homed people, the act of dispossession isn’t a one-off, singular encounter, but rather is one of many they experience within an extensive and overlapping web of control that they negotiate on an everyday basis. Precariously homed people don’t control the spaces they depend on, and depending on the space in which they find themselves, they can encounter a myriad of regulators, including: municipal and provincial governments, regional authorities, crown corporations, groups that represent business interests, refuse collectors and recyclers, landlords, storage facility operators, private security forces, temporary, transition, and supportive housing owners and operators, individual business owners, and housed residents.
The dispossession that precariously homed people encounter within this matrix of control affects them in significant ways. This became clear when people started telling us of their experiences with property loss.
How does the ‘hum’ affect those who encounter it?
Below are 5 broad ways that the ‘hum’ affects those who encounter it:
- Losing belongings over and over again becomes an expectation. As Connie recalled, “You can hear it coming. You know…when it’s going to happen, you know when you’re going to lose your stuff, you know.”
- It creates “impossible possibilities”, as Connie remarked, “Where do I put this stuff? Where is it safe? Where? Where am I able to come back to it? And there’s just no answer to that question…For most of us, that’s not an option. So, you just let it go.”
- It perpetuates vulnerability and poverty. Navigating the ‘hum’ means engaging in complex decision-making, sometimes around untenable options, such as giving up a pet to access housing, or leaving belongings unprotected to seek out employment or services, including medical care. An interviewee observed that when people lose their possessions, they are more likely to steal the necessities they need to live outside, which puts them at risk of encountering the criminal justice system.
- The ‘hum’ causes people emotional and psychological distress:
- The physical act of having one’s belongings confiscated can be a devastating, even crippling, experience. As Connie recalled, “Your stuff is who you are. When that’s taken from you, your identity is taken from you. Your self-worth is taken from you…You feel separated from yourself.”
- Being subjected repeatedly to the judgement, scrutiny, and biases of regulators can also cause harm as outsider perspectives may not consider sentimental, emotional, survival, or individual reasons for holding onto certain possessions when assessing their worth. This can leave precariously homed people feeling defeated, as one interviewee remarked, “it makes me feel like people think I’m less than, you know, like I’m less than them, like I’m underserving of my own belongings.”
- Few remedies exist for people to recover their belongings once seized. One interviewee pointed out the systemic inequity they experience, “I don’t understand…why they’re allowed to come and take our stuff? But if we went to their place and took their stuff, we’d be charged? But they can come and take everything we own?”
The ‘hum’, therefore, is the sound of devaluation. It works to strip precariously homed people of their personhood, marking them as unworthy of the standing that property ownership is intended to denote – citizenship, respect, and relative worth.
Conclusion
Most of us take for granted that there is an infrastructure that anchors and secures the stuff we own. This infrastructure is the everyday web of property rules and legal privileges that allow for locked doors, secure entitlements, and home-making, held up and enforced by multiple actors and agents. Precariously homed people also have belongings, yet they are denied such an infrastructure. As a result, their belongings must be located in spaces owned and regulated by others, who treat those belongings according to their own rationales and priorities. Precariously homed people tell us that the ‘hum’ is pervasive, violent, dehumanizing, and unproductive. They also direct us to alternatives, including where housing also provides for the security of belongings.
We call on researchers to be more attuned to the impossible predicament that precariously homed people face in securing and controlling their belongings. Policymakers need to better understand the ‘hum’, both in seeking to mitigate against it and finding ways to secure possessions, while also recognizing its confounding effects on other interventions.
Read the full article here: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/ijoh/article/view/16988