Last week, I sent an appeal for funds to support me while I write a book. Calling it A Poverty of Perspective. I explained that it would detail my experiences with poverty and homelessness, as well some various elements of ‘poverty reduction’ and ‘anti-poverty activism.’
I’ve essentially been working on this book for four years. It started with research I undertook as part of a collective that sought to craft a proposal for a sanctioned tent city. (Temporary Autonomous Shelter Collective)
My main goal for the tent city research was to discover what the main objections were to the concept, research those obections, and formulate responses that we could use to help us further communicate the need for this project.
Using online news searches for articles about tent cities, I read the comments left on these articles to get an idea of what the public was saying about the concept.
It’s no surprise there is a great deal of ignorance and hate in many of these comments. I did, however, use a method to read these comments that allowed me to not be completely triggered and frustrated.
First of all, I never imagine that the ratio of for/against (or rational/ridiculous) reflects the larger society in the least. I studied the content of the comments, and not the quantity or ratios.
I found that as far as tent cities were concerned, no matter how people expressed themselves, there were only five or so objections, once you distilled what the person was trying to argue. Underneath the hate, lies and rhetoric, what was being argued was that tent cites were dirty and ugly, bred crime and addiction, and enabled homelessness.
I easily found the answers to these objections within some of these same articles. You see, the kind of tent city we were proposing was not the typical tent city that you see on the news (unless it is news about this particular, rare kind of encampment.)
TASC researched the sanctioned tent cities in Seattle, Tacoma and Washington, which were user-run, but were generally hosted on church property and had a non-profit group assisting them and providing financial oversight. Contrast this to the typical tent city that most people know of, which is either an illegal and informal encampment existing in the shadows of society, or an illegal and political encampment happening in a publicly visible space.
In it’s clandestine form, tent cities do indeed include people who abuse (or are abused by) drugs and alcohol, and they can often be messy, violent and otherwise not a friendly place to be. In the protest form, it depends on the group whether they allow drugs and alcohol in the camps. Sometimes the activists/residents of the tent city will decide that would rather have people use in a community where they have better access to help and safety, then to be left out on the street without access to food and care. Other times, the idea that the community is open to anyone and without a method for enforcement means that the demographics of the camp are beyond their control, and the rules are useless.
It would be hard to make an argument based on these kinds of encampments that the government and general public should sanction them. While there has often been very well-run, safe encampments, even in this city, there is no guarentee that this is always going to be the case.
The tent cities in Washington state, however, have strict guidelines for who can enter the camp and what kind of behaviour will be tolerated. These camps are run similar to some homeless shelters, with the main difference being that they are user-run, and residents don’t have to vacate the premises during the day as in a homeless shelter. Otherwise, people’s IDs are checked at a gate, and their names searched in a sex offender registry. Violence, drugs and alcohol are not tolerated, and residents work closely with the police, who will be called (and will show up) to remove people who are causing a problem.
It’s the kind of tent city that most of the people I’ve met who have lived in tent cities would never go to. It would serve a certain segment of the population that did want and need this kind of community, and they are well used where they are implemented.
The residents of these tent cities are obligated by special municipal by-laws created for these encampments to move the entire camp every 90 days. When a location is chosen, residents will first go door to door in the host community talking to neighbours and inviting them to a public event where the camp will be discussed. The residents will answer the concerns that I laid out earlier, and dispell every one of them. Sometimes the neighbours are won over, sometimes they are not, and the residents will go search out another neighbourhood and repeat this process until they get a neighbourhood to agree. Only then will they move camp.
In terms of the crime for instance, residents of these tent cities will provide reports that were specially complied by the police that show that crime actually goes down in the host neighbourhoods, because there are so many more people doing Neighbourhood Watch, and because the self-policing of the camps often includes patrols of the surrounding neighbourhood. Residents are sensitive to the damage that crime can do to their reputation, and so they have a vested interest to keep the neighbourhood as crime-free as they can while they are there.
By the time we started doing this research, these tent cities had been around long enough that they could call on former neighbours to help them with their outreach, an effective peer-to-peer approach that was sometimes more convincing than hearing it from the residents. Overall, these camps had proven all the objections wrong.
TASC never got to the point where we finished a proposal and started lobbying for the required special bylaws. The current mayor of Victoria, who ran in 2008 on the promise to end homelessness, (and who only made brief mention in the issue in his 2011 campaign), is firmly opposed to the idea of a tent city. We wrote preliminary reports and discussed the concept with him in other informal ways, but he insisted that to accept the idea would be to sanction substandard accomodation, and that his goal was real housing. We tried to communicate that not all people were currently facing the choice between tents and real housing, but that many people were facing the choice between tents and nothing, in which case, the current situation is substandard, and a tent city would raise standards of living.
The mayor will have none of it however, and we realized it was not a matter of logic, or having a compelling argument, but of politics and public perception.
I am theorizing, and this gets back to the subject of the book I am writing, that public perception of poverty and homelessness (and addiction and mental illess, etc) is in need of a major shift into reality. Morality, fear, denial and a host of other barriers are preventing us from being able to make the changes we need to make. Shifting these perceptions involves somewhat more than just having a better argument. I’ve pointed out a few times lately that I’ve read (I’ll find the article again soon) that the economic crisis and the ‘shrinking middle class’ have started to shift people’s perceptions of poverty, and that less people think now that poverty is a disease of the weak and lazy. As such poverty is getting more media coverage than it has in a while, and just last week, on Martin Luther King’s birthday, there were hundreds of acticles across the US that centred around the last few months of King’s life, when he was planning his Poor People’s Campaign. So it truly appeared to me, (and I plan to scan the news archives of previous years) that the aspect of King’s Civil Rights campaign that focused less on race and more on poverty of all races, was starting to get more attention then it had in previous years.
We’re told here in Canada that our economy is in much better shape than our neighbours to the south. And so this would lead us to believe that if experiencing poverty is what it takes for people to accept what needs to be done about it, then we have a few years yet before public perception shifts the way it needs to.
Whether this is true or not, the need to have that information available, the need to keep telling our stories, doing our research, defining our arguments and refining our plans and strategies is as vital as it has ever been. Perhaps the majority of Canadians are not listening to what anti-poverty activists are trying to communicate, (or perhaps they are), but regardless, we need to still be talking when they do decide to listen, and unfortunately, we still seem to need some time to come up with a workable strategy for dealing with/fighting poverty.
When the City of Victoria approved plans to ‘beautify’ the 900 Pandora block, (which was at that time a central area for people on the street), effectively pushing them off the block, I was particularily disappointed (to say the least) as I had spend the previous six months campaigning against the project. A public meeting was held where over a hundred people stood up against the project and spoke very eloquently. Yet it fell on deaf ears.
I expressed my disappointment to a friend, and she, having been an activist for 30 or so years, told me that sometimes it’s not even worth trying to change people’s minds on something, and that our writing skills (she is a writer too) may be better used mobilizing the people who already understand.
So this is where I’m coming from mostly in my writing about poverty and homelessness. I’m a high school drop-out, unemployed, homeless off and on for 15 years, and so I don’t have the same kind of persusive power where some people are concerned. That role might fall better to someone the average well-to-do, educated and professional person can more relate to. I myself have a higher persuasive power among people who have experienced the kinds of things I have been through, who know where I’m coming from and trust my perspective. I don’t need to convince those people that we need to take immediate and serious action on poverty and homelessness. I just need to have to hold space for the conversation we need to be having about it.
The goal for me then with this book is to explain what has been happening, what kinds of things are being done to address poverty, and perhaps provide some perspective into their efficacy and appropriateness. I also have some ideas of my own, some opinions on what needs to happen. I have questions, and a desire to strategize and brainstorm with others on this issue.
As I mentioned, I have been homeless, and I’ve worked in a homeless shelter, and have been actively engaged in anti-poverty activism in this community since I came here 4 years ago. I’ve researched the various approaches and have been part of planning some of them. I can’t say that my own perceptions don’t need to change. If I understood the situation completely I’d be out there doing what I felt needed to happen. As it stands, I’m as confused an anyone what needs to be happening. Poverty is a seriously complex issue, and we don’t seem to be given the proper tools to figure it out. Much time is wasted counting and measuring and debating the definition of poverty, and this is just one small piece of the puzzle.
So expect the book to be finished sometime within the next year. Also expect me to be engaging you in a converstion about your perceptions of poverty, and what you feel needs to happen.
