Homelessness, by definition, involves a lack of access to private spaces.

This places people experiencing homelessness “necessarily” in the public realm, explained Dr. Jeff Rose, a professor at the University of Utah whose research explores homelessness and parks. “And then if you're in the public realm—where do you be? Where do you exist?”

The best option, for many, is a park.

This has become even more apparent as COVID-19 has placed added pressures on the shelter system. But even prior, many shelters were not accessible to all, due to factors such as restrictions on pets, partners, and/or substance use, a lack of adequate storage for belongings, and/or inadequate supports for trans communities and people with disabilities.

Anna Cooper, a lawyer and homeless rights advocate at Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver, noted that, in this context, parks can be places of relative safety.

Being surrounded by community lends a sense of security, and can play a life-saving role amidst a national overdose crisis where encampments can serve as de facto overdose prevention sites, Cooper said. It also makes it easier for outreach workers to stay in contact with people they’ve connected with when they know where to find them.

Despite these realities, many of our standard approaches focus on displacement.

Defensive urban design—defined by researcher and founder of DefensiveTO Cara Chellew as “an intentional design strategy used to guide or restrict people’s behaviour in urban space as a form of crime prevention or order maintenance”—is one such tactic.

A classic example is the park bench with a third rail to prevent lying down. Defensive design in parks can also look like “ghost amenities”—the absence of amenities thought to attract “undesirable” users, like sheltered gathering areas or public washrooms, said Chellew.

But Chellew noted that not only does this approach fail to address root problems, it also makes parks inhospitable for all—especially other vulnerable groups like seniors, people with disabilities, and people with chronic health conditions.

As COVID-19 has made clear, amenities like washrooms “are basic things that all humans need, that should be in public spaces,” Chellew said. “When we're trying to exclude a certain group of people, we're really making the park hostile for everyone.”

Encampment clearances are another common response. But these measures are expensive, ineffective, and inhumane when people have nowhere else to go, said Anna Cooper. “We shouldn’t be using resources to constantly displace people from public spaces to nowhere. It's a bad policy, which is doomed to fail, because people have to occupy space,” she said.

Dr. Rose agreed, adding that these measures “often have the perverse outcome of supporting what they’re trying to work against.” His research has found that being forced to relocate or stripped of belongings can create setbacks in people’s efforts to improve their situation.

Displacement from parks can also push people to take shelter in more isolated spaces where they face increased health and safety risks, new research shows.

On top of the ethical and economic issues, park clearances often rest upon the shaky foundation of bylaws that are “constitutionally suspect,” Cooper said.

Some cities have had their bylaws prohibiting sheltering in parks struck down, on the grounds that they violate individual rights to safety and security of the person, set out in Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

While some cities have worked to bring their bylaws into alignment with these rulings, many have not. A key reason these bylaws continue to exist, said Cooper, is due to a lack of resources to challenge them.

“As a homeless person, you can't go to your local Legal Aid office and ask for funding for a lawyer to help you challenge a bylaw,” she said. “There is a huge access-to-justice issue where there's just no funding.”

In light of these realities, it’s easy to wonder what the alternatives are to our current approaches. Fortunately, we can look to Canadian cities that are showcasing other possibilities.

To learn about how cities are working to put non-displacement into practice, see Part 2. And to learn about how creative park programming is connecting communities across housing status, read Part 3.