Why tent cities are part of the solution to homelessness

"It ain't pretty, it's tent city!"

So read one sign at the recently cleared tent city in Victoria, British Columbia.

In Vancouver, the city is seeking an injunction to shut down an encampment, and deputy city manager Paul Mochrie told the CBC "the amount of garbage, rodents, human waste, sharps — it's a really hazardous site." 

To DJ Larkin, a lawyer with Vancouver's Pivot Legal Society, the way some residents and politicians think about tent cities misses the point of their existence.

In an interview with The 180's Jim Brown, Larkin says some people make a strange leap in logic when thinking about tent cities. poverty is a bad thing, therefore tent cities should be removed.

"I think as Canadians we believe that we do a good job of taking care of one another. We want to see all residents of our country being safe and healthy. So when we see these very visible manifestations of poverty it is distressing. It is hard to see and it can be comforting for people on the outside to say 'maybe if we just make it go away, we can pretend that the problem also went away.'"

To Larkin, tent cities are more than just a reminder of poverty, they're part of the solution.

"People's lives and health are at risk tonight. It has been decades since our federal government invested sufficiently in social housing. We are not going to solve this crisis overnight, but we can save people's lives."

And if they're unsanitary? Larkin says the solution is to treat residents of tent cities the same as other residents; provide civic services.

"Providing for tent cities that are sanctioned, that have garbage pickup, that have sanitation services, that allow outreach workers to go in and connect with people and connect them with health care, with social services, and with housing, is the way to reconnect people with the system."

Larkin believes there's one more illogical way people think about tent cities. Since they're often political in nature, with protest signs and slogans painted on tarps, the encampments can be seen as a form of protest, instead of a collection of houses. 

​"That is such a key issue. Thousands of people don't have safe housing and are living outside because they don't have a choice. Some of those people also say that they are protesting. It is a truly false distinction... it sort of plays on this prejudice where we don't mind helping out someone who's 'fallen on hard times' as long as they're a charity case."