Why Hamilton's encampment consultations can — and should — be different, say advocates

As Hamilton wrestles with worsening homelessness and how to address it, city councillors are poised to finalize a plan next month to deal with a growing number of encampments.

In June, the city held three in-person public consultation sessions and had an online survey open for people to share their thoughts and offer feedback on the plan.

The plan works off the idea that without help from the province and federal government, encampments aren't going away anytime soon.

Lacking affordable housing, emergency shelter space and mental health supports, as well as an ongoing opioid crisis have created the current conditions, the city previously said.

It has put money into house, created an opioid action plan and declared states of emergency related to homelessness, opioid addiction and mental health to try and get extra funding.

While waiting for a long-term solution, the city's proposed encampment plan explores the idea of sanctioned encampment sites and rules for encampments that aren't in sanctioned areas.

A staff report with a recommended plan and summary of the feedback is due to be presented in August. 

But the plan — and its public consultation process about the plan — is facing some criticism.

Ameil Joseph, an associate professor in the school of social work at McMaster University and Gessie Stearns, a homelessness researcher, both have concerns with the plan and process.

In a conversation with CBC Hamilton, they said the current discussions treat encampments like an eyesore instead of being more focused on creating housing. They also say there should be more transparency.

Some of that conversation is here. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How would you summarize the state of homelessness and housing in Hamilton?

Joseph: The state is terrible. The state is one that will produce people dying. Sometimes there are allusions to the fact shelters are over capacity or there are thousands of people on a waitlist for housing or waiting for an application to be processed without housing possibilities. People are spending 50 per cent of their income on renting. All these things together remind us of the historical context where we've been pulling out of addressing matters of housing for some time — income support, people with disabilities, ODSP, housing provisions, all inadequate over several years. These things are cascading upon one another without a coherent strategy.

Stearns: We focus on homeless people as the problem, and not on the way in which we develop our community or the way in which we plan all kinds of other things. It erases the idea that housing is actually what we need. We have inclusion policies and ideas of what belonging looks like in Hamilton and none of these plans and processes don't actually reflect any of that. We silo many of the things going on in our community as though they're distinct items and as a result, we focus on people's inability, trauma and drug use, rather than looking at many of the core reasons why we are where we are today.

What do you think about the city's plan and consultation process?

Joseph: We see people outside as something broken that needs to be fixed rather than our policies, programs and resourcing infrastructure that is a problem that needs to be fixed. The consultations are about how do we identify and police those people outside and remove them and place them somewhere else. Every one of these consultations, people are saying, "I live outside, no one has offered me anything, I can't afford any option talked about and none of this makes sense." What about housing? We offer them no guarantee or provision or plan for how they can access anything they need at all.

Stearns: Consultation happened, housing wasn't on the table. There are rooms full of people with the will to start talking about solutions, but we're always told housing is not one of them. We were told to not talk about housing all along the way and the reason we were given is we'd have to draw from provincial and federal governments to do that and we're waiting. We're never quite pulling together all the ways we build this community in an inclusive way that people can belong. The way the current documents to draw upon are written, with five metres here or 50 metres there, leaves the responsibility of finding a space to people outside. What we have are a set of prohibitions never quite looking to how we're developing.

Is something different possible? What does that look like to you? And what do we do next?

Stearns: What are we doing here waiting for levels of government that aren't responding to this scathing Auditor General of Canada report that says we don't really know if we're doing the thing we set out to do? In this community, we need to be having conversations about how to address the needs of folks we're seeing struggling now. There's the ability to have more transparency to have these discussions. There's a lot of will but this consultation process has not laid out a path for us to have these conversations.

Joseph: When people are telling you over and over again there are a number of ways we can weigh in differently, that's where we need to think about how to get to. The pass the buck kind of conversations where we can't talk about provincial, federal and municipal issues continuously is a strange entry point. It's not just the case we need Ontario Works and ODSP to be higher amounts, it's also the case we can take municipal funding programs and make them livable for people on social assistance in terms of cost by re-sourcing how they're funded ... rather than retreating to "how do we get rid of these people we see as the worst?"