The ‘Hum’ of Dispossession: Belongings and Homelessness

 

Interviewer: Avery Moore Kloss

Participant[s]: Nick Blomley, Connie Long, Claire Shapton

Length of Interview: Approximately 53:13

 

[Introduction Music] 00:00

Avery Moore Kloss 00:11

Welcome to CRISP Talk. A podcast from the Center for Research on Security Practices, or CRSP. I'm Avery Moore Kloss. This episode is part of a miniseries on homelessness and a sense of belonging. Previously, we've talked about belonging, as in social inclusion. Today, a new path. Belongings, meaning possessions. When one is housed, their possessions are also housed. They can be protected, locked away, stored away from prying hands. But wherever houseless people are, their belongings are there too, and those belongings are always at risk in a space controlled by others. In this episode, we're talking about the process, the experience and the trauma tied to the loss of personal belongings when you're unhoused. To do that, we'll bring you clips of an interview with Connie Long, who has lived experience with homelessness. To lead this episode with me. I am pleased to be joined by Nick Blomley. Nick is a Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. His work focuses on legal geography, particularly in relation to property. Thanks for being here, Nick.

Nick Blomley 01:15

Thanks, Avery. It's wonderful to be here.

Avery Moore Kloss 01:17

Nick, I wonder if, just to start off, you tell us a bit more about the work you do and how it leads us into this conversation we're having today about personal belongings.

Nick Blomley 01:28

I am privileged to be working with a wonderful team of scholars, Alex Flynn at UBC law school and Marie-Eve Sylvestre at the University of Ottawa, and we have been working for the past three or four years on a research project that seeks to understand the challenges that homeless people and precariously housed people face, in securing and controlling their personal belongings. This is something that really, just to be honest, hasn't been documented or researched in a focused way. So that's probably our focus, and that's what we're talking about today.

Avery Moore Kloss 02:02

It’s a really interesting conversation, and I'm looking forward to, for the listeners, to hearing from Connie and sort of your research context around that as well. So, for today's episode, we had the privilege of having your former student, Claire Shapton, interview Connie about the importance of belongings. First, I want to let Connie introduce herself. So, here's Connie,

Connie Long 02:24

Okay. My name is Connie Long. I'm a coordinator for API, Autonomous, Accountable Peer Initiative in Chilliwack, and also solutions local user group, and a steering member for Drug War Survivors at Batsford, and I guess, an expert on lots of things.

Avery Moore Kloss 02:42

So, Nick, tell us a little bit more about Claire and Connie and why, for this episode, we chose to use this interview.

Nick Blomley 02:50

So, Connie is a remarkable woman. She's an Indigenous person who currently lives in Chilliwack, as she's mentioned. She's a person with lived experience of homelessness, poverty and precarity. She's also been a member, as she mentioned, of a group called Drug War Survivors, that's a peer based group in Abbotsford, and Abbotsford is one of the research sites for this project that we've focused on, and we've had the remarkable good fortune of spending a lot of time with Drug War Survivors, and in that sense, Connie, I would think of as a research collaborator. She's helped us understand some of these profound challenges and made sense of them, and Drug War Survivors has really opened the door to an understanding that has allowed us to make sense of this remarkable challenge of belongings and homeless people in multiple locations across Canada. Claire is also a remarkable young woman. She's just finished her master's in Geography under my direction, and she worked closely with and continues to work closely with Drug War Survivors. She has a particular project, a particular focus on so called supportive housing, and the ways in which supportive housing is actually far from supportive, including in relation to belongings. And, so, when this idea for a podcast came together, I thought it would be really timely and appropriate to see if Connie was interested in speaking to this challenge, rather than having an academic do this, I think somebody with lived experience actually can speak more powerfully to this and Connie was thankfully, very keen to do this. She speaks, and she has spoken the past about the trauma involved with dispossession as it relates to belongings. And of course, I feel very reluctant to have her re-traumatize herself through this process, but she's made it really clear to me and to others of the research team that this issue is so important to her and to her friends, her colleagues, other peers; that she's willing to talk more generally about it, both in a personable sense, and also in terms of other people in similar situations.

Avery Moore Kloss 05:05

Yeah, and we're incredibly grateful that Connie was game to do that for this podcast, because she's just a really natural storyteller, and she has a way of explaining things that makes it really tangible and understandable. And just as an example, the name of this episode is the ‘hum’, and that's really based on something that Connie said in her interview with Claire. So, I just want to dive in by playing Connie's explanation here of what she calls the hum, and just a note that sometimes you will hear Claire in here responding to Connie, and later you'll hear Claire ask her a few questions.

Connie Long 05:38

The hum is, it's a feeling. It's like a cloak that I feel like each city wears, or each city throws over top of its homeless community, where everybody, yes, stuff, is taken from you, and it's like pushed out, you know, away from you, away from everything, and has its meaning. It creates this hum. Where everybody is aware of it. You can hear it coming. You know when it's gonna happen, you know when you're gonna lose your stuff, you know, yeah, you want to hang on to your stuff so badly. And I think that that energy, and then that with signed forces, try to take all that stuff just creates is, yes, this awareness, and it's traumatic. You're inside of the hum, and, you know, you can lose your stuff at any time. So, it makes it that much, like, way more important for you to hang on to that stuff as tight as you can, and to, you know, somebody from the outside might look at it and go, “why do you have all that stuff?” or “why are you hanging out so tightly to that one thing or two of those things?” It's because that's all you have. It becomes that important, and losing it is just it's like losing a part of yourself, or like society telling you that you don't need that stuff, is another hard thing to swallow, or people around you tell me, “no, you don't need that”, or “I want that, so I'm just going to take that”. Or “that's not important to me. So why is it important to you?” “I'm just taking it. You need to move along”.

Avery Moore Kloss 07:13

So, Nick, I think what Connie's saying here is very powerful. It's such an almost visual, or maybe like an audible description of what this kind of loss feels like.  Why is this characterization of the hum so important? Do you think?

Nick Blomley 07:30

Just hearing that audio again, and I've heard Connie talk about the hum in the past, it's so powerful, so obviously, so traumatizing, it's hard to imagine, but I think it is so important to hear Connie speak of the harm. And just to textualize this very slightly, this came, I think, in some ways, out of some initial, very initial conversations that I had, and other members of the research group had with Drug War Survivors in Abbotsford, and I remember naively coming into a focus group with peers and asking them to give me a story, you know, “tell me a story of dispossession, of how you had your stuff taken”. And of course, there was never one story. There were just endless stories. And this was made clear to me by Connie after this process, she helped facilitate that focus group where she said, “look, there isn't one story. It's just a constant noise of loss, of dispossession”. And that's, I think, where the hum comes from. It's this constant sound that's being, in a sense, verbalized by homeless people as to having their stuff taken from them. But also, where Connie describes it, it's this it's this noise of the machine of dispossession, this ongoing, endless process of dispossession. And to me, this was so powerful to understand that, and to understand that it's not this singular moment of loss for homeless people. It's constant, endemic, expected and just utterly pervasive in a way that I would hope most of us who have secure housing, you know, “sometimes I lose my car keys”. That's frustrating, but to have your stuff constantly being taken from you, and to have that as an expectation, I think, is just it profoundly, profoundly important, and it speaks to the crucial fact that if you're homeless by definition, you have no control over the spaces in which you're in. And what that means is, not only are you insecure, but perhaps in particular, your belongings are insecure, and belongings are really as one homeless person told me in Surrey, BC, “that's all we have” when you're homeless, you don't have property in the sense of having a lease or having ownership of land, all you have is your stuff, and that stuff is of anything more important to you when you're homeless. It's your tent and many other things as well. It's emotional markers of your past and your history. So, wherever you are, that stuff is at risk, and that's something I think Connie will unpack for us going forward.

Avery Moore Kloss 10:01

Connie really has so much to say here that reveals that traumatic nature of losing your stuff when you're unhoused. So, I just want to go to Connie here, and this clip is Connie talking about her very first experience losing her belongings.

Connie Long 10:17

The first time I was homeless was a long time ago, and it was my first experience with a landlord who basically rents out their property to pay a mortgage. And I lived in this house for 10 years and had children, and 10 years is a lot of life. There's a lot of stuff, you know, like, and I'm not talking about like, hoarding stuff, but there was a lot of memories that were attached to that place. And he did not tell us that he was selling the house. He did not tell us that he had sold the house. I just had a baby, and two weeks later, there was some people in my house throwing all my stuff into boxes and loading those boxes onto a truck, and I still remember that feeling, standing there with a brand new baby and all my little kids standing with me, like wondering what the heck was going on, being told that we were told we had to move, that we were given eviction notices, which we never were. Then watching all everything like, some of my kids were born in that house and watching all of their possessions being loaded out onto the front lawn. And that was, you know, and looking at the expression on my kids faces and the way I felt as well. That was my first experience with the hum. I didn't realize it at that point, that it was a common thing, or, you know, like a trend that was beginning to happen.

Nick Blomley 11:47

Again, Isn't that profound? I mean, there's so much we can say there, 10 years is a lot of life. Of course it is and but that life is also a life that relates to belongings, and not just her belongings, her kids belongings, and having that taken in an instant with people in my house throwing all my stuff into boxes and loading them into a truck and taking them away and standing there with a brand new baby, I mean, over and above. You know the deeply traumatizing experience that I think Connie describes here; it also tells us that the hum is not just something that's happening in maybe visible public spaces. Some of us may have seen, you know, by law officers coming and removing tents from homeless people who were camped out in public spaces. But here it speaks to, I guess, the pervasiveness of the hum and the pervasiveness of precarity that makes the hum possible. Connie is living, presumably, in an apartment with a sketchy landlord. Like a lot of poor folk do, the landlord is illegally evicted her, as is quite common, he's just showed up with a truck and a bunch of guys, and they're just kicking her out without any, of course, recourse to any of the legal protections that should apply to tenants in more secure housing, and she's out on the street, and her belongings are in the back of a truck or strewn over the front yard, and other people can pick through it. So, this speaks to the fact that the hum is not just something that's happening with by law officers, it's happening in multiple spaces, it's happening in private rental spaces. We also, from our research, we've documented the way in which in shelters, people's belongings are not secure, partly because of other residents of those buildings, and the choice not to provide secure storage for people and their belongings. Supportive Housing also very strict rules on belongings and how many belongings you can take into those sorts of spaces. The use of hoarding as the weaponization of hoarding as a means by which people stuff are also taken, some summary evictions that happen in those spaces where people are basically kicked out on short order and their belongings again are at risk also in storage lockers, private storage lockers, another space right where people often have to park their stuff. Maybe they're in on remand or they're unable to find, you know that they're outside, and they have to put their work stuff somewhere, and then they can't pay the rent on that. So, then they lose their stuff again. So, it's these multiple overlapping spaces and these multiple forms of control, all of which are predicated on a, basically, a very simple legal power relation between those people who are legally empowered to control those spaces and those who are forced to occupy those spaces with their belongings and placed in spaces of vulnerability as a result.

Avery Moore Kloss 14:40

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me, one of the pieces here that really hit home was her talking about the look on her kids faces, and you know, kids do so well with routine and having, being able to expect what is coming. And they also are, kids a lot of time. Kids collect things. There are little, tiny possessions, things that you might think aren't precious are really, really precious to them. And so, I think for Connie, the trauma that is inflicted in this scenario, this story she's telling is really obvious, but I want to play this clip here where she's also talking about what that loss meant to her kids.

Connie Long 15:19

So, for myself, initially, standing there with kids like small school aged children and a brand, two-week-old baby. My main thought as I watched all of our stuff be, trucked away, was, “now what” “what do I do”? “How do I look after these kids?” I think that when children are involved, that's especially traumatic, right? It's especially sad, because they are only just starting to realize, you know, what their stuff means to them, and to have it all taken away. Because my kids still deal with that day. You don't have anything really, once it's taken forever, and if there's little bits and pieces left, you just hang on to them so bad. And then you're like, “where do I put this stuff?” “What do I do with this stuff?” “Where can I put it, where it's safe?” “Where am I going to be able to come back to it?” And there's just no answer for that question. For some people, they're lucky. They get to put their stuff somewhere, you know.

Avery Moore Kloss 16:19

So, Nick, I wonder what your reaction is to what Connie's saying here. You know, I assume that her children in this scenario are now adults, and they're still processing what's happened, what happened on that day. Can you give me a sense just of what the effect is here for children when they're experiencing this kind of loss?

Nick Blomley 16:38

Yeah, it's so painful to hear, isn't it? And what I hear is Connie also speaking as a parent, you know, “it's my job to look after, to care for my kids and make sure they're safe and secure” and that's being taken from her. That inability. She's still caring for her kids, but other people are making decisions which involve her kids and their possessions, and that has to be so traumatizing for both, for Connie and for the kids. And as Connie puts it, that has an afterlife, that affects those kids. We've actually spoken to adults, one in particular, who an unrelated person, who talked about their own experience as a child of actually being illegally evicted and having their stuffies taken from them and that feeling of security just stripped from them by other more powerful, powerful people. So clearly, it has to be traumatizing. And I think we might speak to this later. I mean, the process and the experience of loss is not generalized. It's going to be different depending on the person, depending on who that person is, how they're placed, whether they're adults or kids or Indigenous folk or women. It's going to be different depending on the type of possessions that are taken. I think that's also an important point. We need to recognize that belongings, we think about our own belongings, you know, some of them are loose, functional things like our phones and our car keys, but some of them are objects of emotional significance as well. So, we need to unpack that a little bit, but I think also what's interesting here is what Connie says at the end, where she asks this question. When after you've gone through this, you just lose any expectation that you're able to secure your stuff, and you develop a mindset in which you're constantly almost paranoid that your stuff is going to be insecure. Which is perfectly understandable, because it isn't secure. If we reflect on those of us who have secure housing and our own expectations as to our belongings and the way in which those things are going to be here when we, go to the shops and come back there. We expect them, as well as our animals too, which are also belongings. We expect those to be safe because of the way in which a colonial property system holds up the property rights of those with privilege, those who have been granted the powers that come with secure private property.

Avery Moore Kloss 19:00

Yeah, I think what you're saying is really important here, too. And Connie does talk about that, “what's the lasting effect this paranoia you end up with?” And I think before we talk about that, I just want to play this clip from Connie where she talks about how this trauma stays with people, what it feels like. I think this is this feeling that leads to what you're talking about this paranoia, this, always wondering about your stuff and being worried, and that's really based in, this idea Connie shares here.

Connie Long 19:29

When your stuff is taken from you, and there's no possible way to get it back, or if you feel like you can't get that stuff back. For a lot of people, it's simply devastating. Your stuff is part of who you are when you're outside; when that's taken from you, your identity is taken from you. Your self-worth is taken from you. I've seen lots of people just become desolate. I myself. I know I became frantic, and that's what trauma does to me. It makes me just hung way up here. It's a horrible feeling, and you feel separated from yourself, if that makes any sense. When you have all your things and you know who you are, and all your things are taken from you, it does take part of that away. You're left wondering, and you're left separated and devastated. It's trauma, and it's a really horrible type of trauma. You know the guy that you see on the bench who's filthy and sad. If you sit and talk with him about you, he even has a story about losing his stuff, and that’s what it looks like for people who are without housing. But losing my stuff was only the beginning, because by the end of all of that, that episode, I guess in my life, I had also lost my kids. Like I literally lost everything. And it puts you in a spot that's really hard to come back from.

Avery Moore Kloss 21:07

For Connie, it starts with this loss of her things, her belongings, and then it leads to the loss of her children. Nick from people that you've talked to and the work that you've done. What happens to people when they experience this much loss?

Nick Blomley 21:25

It's devastating. Those of us who do have secure housing, if we reflect on our belongings and try to imagine a situation in which our belongings were taken from us and recognize that some of those belongings are actually essential to our survival, our physical well being, and some of those are essential to our emotional well-being, and our psychological well being. We might begin to imagine what this might look like, and to recognize, again, as Connie put it, that this is a ‘hum’, not a singular moment of loss. This is an ongoing process of organized dispossession. People have spoken just eloquently of the consequences of this. And as Connie puts it, “your stuff is part of who you are". I mean, I like to think about belongings precisely for that reason, because belongings help us belong. They give us a sense of who we are. They anchor us. They connect us to our family, to our community, to a place, to people that are important to us; and to have that stripped from yourself has to be devastating, traumatizing, of course, in all sorts of ways. Tangibly, people talk to us, for example, about having photographs taken from them. If your photos are on your phone, of course, your phone gets stolen. You lose those unless you've backed them up somewhere. But then, pre-electronic photos, people have photos, maybe of relatives who've passed or, as Connie might put it, of children. Children who've been taken by social services and you don't have connections with or are not able to make connections with anymore. To have those photos destroyed personally is devastating, but as others put it, it also allows them to show other people their histories. People have complex histories, and have histories of family, and friends, and maybe more secure lives. So, the inability to be able to be able to demonstrate that and to show that is profound. Practically speaking, you lose your work boots. Now you can't go work on the work site, because you need work boots to do that, so that then places you in a space of vulnerability. So more generally, I think, in very broad terms, the effect of this is to make people who have already been made vulnerable by the workings of a capitalist and colonial system and a NEO liberal system that has stripped people of dignity and the rights to survive. The effect of this is to make vulnerable people even more vulnerable. Not only in terms of the traumatizing effects of this, but also the everyday choices that people have to make to secure their belongings. And people talked clearly about this. If I'm in a tent with my stuff, do I leave my tent to go at the OPS or go to the Sally Anne to get food, to do the sorts of things I need to do to secure myself and make myself, and to survive. Many cases, people say, no, I choose not to, because I know if I do that, when I come back, someone will have just taken my tent and thrown it in the back of a skip or thrown it into a recycling truck. Will I go to access medical services? No, I won't. I can't, anyway, because I don't have an ID, because my ID was taken in a sweep. So it has this effect of really traumatizing people in a profound way. But to speak more generally, is a problem because, of course, it's intersectional. It's having differential effects on different people and to get back to your point, I think Connie's point here about losing her kids is also crucially important. But in an earlier conversation, she spoke to me about men coming to take her belongings and then men coming to take her kids, in the same breath; and that's just brutalizing. Kids, of course, are not belongings, but the same process of arbitrary seizure and traumatizing violence, I think, is important. So, we need to reflect a little bit, and we try to in our work on as to the differential ways in which the experience of dispossession, for example, on the part of women or on the part of Indigenous folk, who, of course, have endured an ongoing and structural process of dispossession; also needs to be addressed.

Avery Moore Kloss 25:45

Yeah, I think that's a really important piece of what Connie is saying here. And so, I want to go to Connie and let the listeners hear what she had to say about that intersectionality, that that you're referring to.

Connie Long 25:57

For Indigenous people, there's already such a huge stigma. I mean I live in a city where I'm surrounded by nine indigenous communities, and they have very little to do with anything in the city in a professional capacity. Already, the people that live in the city seeing Indigenous people sitting somewhere, it's automatically assumed that they're sitting there, drinking in there. You know, “they're homeless”. So much has been taken from Indigenous people. Anyways, culturally, through generations, and then for them to have just that taken. That amount of stuff really seems like a really small amount of stuff compared to all the other stuff they've already lost. It's just adding to that big, huge pile you know, of loss. People can only suffer loss for so long before they either are not people anymore, or for women, losing your kids, losing things. For women there's a lot of stuff that's really important to us, toiletries and stuff like that. For women to lose toiletries for just the way our bodies function, to not to be able to take care of yourself like that is so hard. It is so hard. And I'm gonna be graphic a bit here, I guess. When you go to ask for help during menstruation and they hand you one tampon. It's very frustrating. And again, it makes you feel shame and takes away from yourself respect.

Avery Moore Kloss 27:41

Nick, there's a line in here that Connie says that I really want to repeat. She says, quote, “people can only suffer for so long before they're not people anymore”. And I wanted to mention that because I think it's so important to pause there. It's easy to say that someone's belongings are just things, but when you're constantly like Connie says, losing pieces of yourself, losing belongings is part of this wider experience of dehumanization.

Nick Blomley 28:10

Yes, you're absolutely right and we've heard this again and again. This failure to recognize the central humanity of poor people, people who are homeless, people who use drugs, people who are forced to live precariously, a failure to recognize the traumatizing effects of dispossession. Where we don't even use the word dispossessions. It's things like decampments, for example, which is a remarkable phrase that belies the organized violence that comes with systemic forms of takings of people's stuff, but also everyday forms of denial and dispossession of the traumatizing effects of this process and also the significance of belongings to people. When we talked to regulators, when we talked to the people who actually are empowered or choose to exercise the power that comes with private property, to seize, or to deny, or to control people's stuff; they'll use words like garbage, obstruction, stuff. Where, therefore, possessions are viewed as not as belongings, but actually as a problem, a problem to be dealt with, a problem that needs to be swept away and to be cleaned up in the service of some presumed higher good, the effect of which, of course, is to ultimately devalue people and their belongings. It's important to recognize the way in which certain types of belonging, certain types of property, are held up in society. Such that if somebody broke into my car and stole my stuff, I could call the RCMP, and probably not very much would happen in reality, but in theory, at least, that would be a criminal act. I could call upon the state to enforce and protect my right to my CDs and my small change in my vehicle. But, when we take away somebody's tent and place them in a space of heightened personal precarity, their protections, their rights, their dignity, their essential humanity; of course, have faced and denied.

Avery Moore Kloss 30:22

Just to clarify before we move forward, if someone hasn't been privy to seeing one of these, quote, “decampments”, who's taking these items away? In the same breath, who are the regulators? You know, is this the police? Is it the municipality? Whose job is this?

Nick Blomley 30:42

That was one of our questions that we tried to figure out, and it turns out to be complicated. It's precisely because we're talking about multiple spaces, multiple legal spaces, if you like. Some of them are public, some of them are kind of quasi-public. Some of them are private, some of them are quasi-private. All of them have their own informal and formal rules in place, and one of our jobs has been to try and uncover this regulatory landscape, formal and informal. That would include the slum lord who summarily evicted Connie and her kids and chucked all her stuff in the back of a truck, but would also include the bylaw officers and the police who are legally empowered to engage in decampments in city parks across Canada. Trying to uncover that landscape has been very much part of our work, and we've actually got a report that's online, people can access if they wish, called “belongingsmatter.ca”, where we go through a couple of spaces, streets, parks, supportive housing, and so on; and try and uncover that that landscape and formally, the rules that apply or the practices that apply in those spaces.

Avery Moore Kloss 31:58

Yeah, thank you for that clarification. I know that the answer doesn't seem clear, but I think for the listeners purpose, it's good to know where that conversation is, right. So, in this next clip, you'll hear, Nick, your former student, Claire Shapton, ask Connie about regulators and about why she thinks people in power are regulating this confiscation of belongings from people who are unhoused. So here is Claire, and then you'll hear Connie right after.

Claire Shapton 32:25

So, this question's a little abstract, because you are not one of those regulators who take people's stuff, of course, but how do you think regulators are thinking about houseless people and their belongings?

Connie Long 32:40

What I think they're thinking. They say, it's their job. It's their job. It's the city that doesn't want any of this stuff visible. They don't want the rest of the world to see in their city “the guy with this shopping cart”, or the “people with the empty baby strollers just full of stuff”, or “the people pulling multiple carts with them with their things in”. The city does not want anybody to see that. That's the municipality that initiates it, for sure. “What do I think about the people that come and take all that stuff”? If you're lucky, you'll get some of them that do have some empathy and are kind while they're taking your stuff, but it's their job, and they get paid well to do it.

Nick Blomley 33:27

Yes, that's striking. If you're lucky, they show empathy as they take your stuff away, they still take your stuff away, and it's very hard for you to get it back, it turns out. It certainly is the city. I think I would add, it's not just the city. It's also for our purposes. It's also private landlords and the people that manage supportive housing and shelters and so on. One of the things we've been trying to understand is not just what are the rules and practices that apply in these cases, but why are people taking other people's stuff away? Many cases, they invest huge amounts of time and energy in actually this process, as compared to perhaps talking to precariously housed people and asking them for solutions, which might be, I would argue, a more constructive use of public resources or just energy more generally. They're doing it for multiple reasons, as Connie points out, yes, in many cases, the city just doesn't want to see homeless people and their stuff. I think what's interesting here is it's not just the homeless person; it's also their belongings that are the target. Legally, it's not against the law for a person to be in a city park, but it is illegal for them to put a tent up during the day, or it's not illegal to stand on a sidewalk. It is illegal to, in some cases, cause an obstruction, so called, and to have possessions that are deemed an obstruction by the authorities. So, I think this speaks to the importance of belongings, or people stuff as a focus for regulatory action, it's stuff that becomes the problem. It's the stuff that becomes perceived as an eyesore. There are multiple reasons for why regulation occurs. This sometimes has to do with simple esthetics. Many cases, it's just basic trespass. You're on private land, or you're on a land owned by CP Rail, and “we don't allow that”, and so you have to move. In other cases, it's motivated by actually, what are notionally inclusive ideas, that you need to move somewhere else. You need to move into shelter. But to do that, you actually, according to the people we spoke to, you have to let go of some of your possessions, because you're only allowed to two big tote boxes in a shelter, therefore you're going to have to let go of some of your possessions, and we can do that for you. So, there are multiple, multiple rationales that are actually at play here in making these decisions.

Avery Moore Kloss 35:58

So, obviously those decisions come down to regulators, and how they're perceiving these situations and what they're tasked with. What do you think it is that regulators are missing? What are they not seeing when they're making these decisions?

Nick Blomley 36:12

Well, that's a good question. I think Connie might have an answer to that.

Avery Moore Kloss 36:17

So, here's Claire asking Connie that question.

Claire Shapton 36:20

One question is, regulators, what don't they see when they're thinking about people's belongings?

Connie Long 36:29

What they don't see is when that person is inside of their tent, or when that person is showing somebody something that they have, they don't see that stuff. They don't see the pride that people take, or they don't see somebody going over their photos and what those memories, for those for those photos. Those photos keep a lot of people attached to families, children, and lost loved ones. They don't have a clue about any of it. It's just a big stinking stigma fraud stirred  by the hum, that's all it is.

Nick Blomley 37:09

It's a big stinking stigma pop stirred by the hum. Thanks, Connie. That's just such a powerful, powerful metaphor. It speaks, I think, to what we were talking earlier, and what Connie was speaking to earlier. Which is this dehumanizing mindset and in particular, kind of devaluation of poor people, of precariously housed people and their belongings, and their relationship to their belongings. As Connie puts it, regulators, don't see that, they see problems. They see obstruction, they see trespass. They see so called broken windows that need to be that need to be fixed. They see maybe an esthetic problem that needs to be resolved. What they don't see is the obvious importance of people's belongings to them, and the relationship that people have to those belongings that are both functional and immediate. You need a tarp, you need shelter, you need warm clothing, and also the emotional and psychological importance of belongings, the way in which they anchor people to community and to memory.

Avery Moore Kloss 38:17

We’ve talked a lot about the issue, and the problem, and the conflict, and the trauma, and so to talk about solutions. I think for Connie, the solution isn't just not taking away someone's belongings, right? It's deeper than that. So, I just want you to hear how she answered Claire's question about how she thinks this issue could be solved, about what she thinks is involved in creating that solution.

Connie Long 38:42

I think that, initially, we really need to do some very serious, serious talking about housing. That's the obvious solution, is that everybody has housing and won't lose their things, like affordable housing, stable housing, not staged housing, or all these programs with housing in parentheses, availability. Anywhere there's a community, that community needs to be able to support those who are losing their things. Have a space, have storage, have a designated…  “I don't know. I don't know. A lot of people, “how are they going to pay for all that?” “Well, I don't know”, “but we can figure things like that out”. We can figure out how to pay for daycares. We can figure out how to pay for, rec centers. We can figure out how to pay for community events. Why can't we figure out how to pay for storage for people? I don't think it's, it's just not that hard, and like I get it, there are a lot of ins and outs with that type of solution. People who are attached to their things and their things are in storage, then they become attached to that space. That's where I feel like it's our responsibility to support people through it, emotionally, mentally, and physically. There has to be more advocacy and support for people and their things, and maybe even just knowledge on… I was gonna say knowledge on what's important or what maybe you should keep or not. But that's the kind of biased view, too. I think maybe just if people were afraid to lose their things, then they wouldn't be so attached to meaningless things. Now, what we would perceive as meaningless, right?

Avery Moore Kloss 40:30

Nick, I wonder if you might give us a sense of, having listened to Connie and doing the work that you do, where do you think a solution might be?

Nick Blomley 40:38

That's, yeah, there's a lot. There's so much we can say, and there's Connie has so many really kind of creative and important, important ideas here. I mean, I think one point that she makes is about housing, but housing that doesn't come with strings attached, with parentheses, like so called supportive housing or shelters, which are inadequate insofar as they don't allow people to have dignity and to have security in terms of their belongings. So having some control over the space in which you're in, which can take many forms. It doesn't necessarily have to conform to one standard model. I think is crucially important. I think there's also something significant here insofar as questions of knowledge and understanding and pushing back against these structures of dehumanization and devaluation, the way in which certain types of property relations are held up, while other types of property relations are denied and devalued. Or if anything I see there's a threat to the property rights of people like me with secure housing. I remember when we were speaking with Drug War Survivors on one occasion about solutions, and one of the things that people were clear on was something quite simple. They just said “respect”. They use the word respect and recognition of respect. And at one level, that just sounds kind of simplistic. But I think when we reflect on it, it's actually quite profound. I mean, if you respect people as people, as human beings, and respect the relationships that people have to their belongings, recognize that they're multiple and various and complex. Just the way that my relations to my belongings are multiple and varied and complex, that I think gives us an important place from which to begin. But at the same time, I think it also speaks, if we are respectful, then there's also a question of “whose experience counts, whose knowledge is to be counted?”. When we talk to regulators, some of them have had engagement with homeless people or houseless people and precariously-housed people more generally, but very often, their knowledge is pretty minimal. I suspect the knowledge of housed people, more generally, of this predicament is pretty minimal. So, to me, there's something about the need to perhaps begin our engagement with this question and thinking through possible remedies or solutions speaks to the need to center people like Connie in particular, whose insights have been so profoundly important to our own research, but also centering those voices in thinking through solutions, thinking through remedies.

Avery Moore Kloss 43:35

This is something also that's really important to Connie. Where does that knowledge come from? And I'd love just for us here to listen to Connie talk about this same thing. This [is] her view on centering the voices of houseless people in that discussion of solutions.

Claire Shapton 43:52

Why do you think it's important to hear from people who have lived experience with losing their possessions as houseless people?

Connie Long 44:02

Because unless you've experienced it, you just don't know. Even through my addiction and everything, I always made sure that there was a roof and four walls and things for the kids and losing all of that took a lot of that pride away. But then it also took me, to a place where where I was walking down the road in mission, and homeless and people throwing things at me, right? I can take that story and go and say something to somebody who's trying to help me, and I'm not going to get the best help, because they don't really get it. They haven't hurt, so if you're hearing from people who have lived it, and you're really listening, then that's how we can all get on the same page.

Avery Moore Kloss 44:52

Connie ends here, Nick, talking about listening, which I think is something that really, most levels of government really struggle with. Where do you think the role of listening fits in here?

Nick Blomley 45:05

I think without listening to Connie and listening to other people like Connie with lived experience in particular, of this process of organized dispossession, we're not going to understand the situation. I think most of us have a superficial notion of the problem or the issue. Yes, maybe we've seen the decampment happening in our neighborhood, or we've seen the bylaw team with this, with the truck picking up a tent from a certain location, or we've maybe seen a person pushing a shopping cart around and wonder, why do they have all their stuff in a shopping cart? That doesn't seem to make much sense. Of course, it makes a lot of sense, given what we understand, now. I think if we listen carefully to Connie, and we listen to people like Connie, we learn a lot. We learn most immediately about the traumatizing effects of this process, we learn also about the way in which it actually makes people who are vulnerable, more vulnerable. So, if we are as I hope we are, concerned about questions of vulnerability and health and addiction and harm reduction and all the other sorts of policy interventions that we should be engaged with, realizing that actually taking people's stuff away is going to make all those sorts of interventions that much harder. It's going to mean that people are not going to want to access shelter. It's means that people are not going to want to access harm reduction, etc. Because of the challenges associated with people's belongings and the vulnerability associated with those spaces, but also, most immediately, we can come back to this notion of the hum that Connie speaks to, so powerfully, right? Connie tells us that this isn't an individual, unexpected, surprising process of dispossession. It's constant, endemic and expected. Learning that, I think is, to me, was profoundly important in understanding, as a researcher, the process of dispossession. I think the policy makers learning that this is not just a singular moment, because people tend to think in silos. Maybe they're, the bylaw officer, or maybe they're a landlord. They're not seeing, if you join the dots, they're not seeing, the hum, we're not seeing this process in its entirety. And that, to me, is crucially important.

Avery Moore Kloss 47:33

Now we thought, because we're centering Connie in this episode, that we would give her the last word. So, we will go out with some kind of closing thoughts from Connie, but Nick, before we do that, we usually end episodes of Chris talk with a discussion about what research still needs to be done. What questions are still left answered? And I wonder if you, you would take a try at that, what's on your research wish list, as it were, when it comes to this topic?

Nick Blomley 48:02

Well, there's always much more to be done. We've really just scratched the surface. We've looked at this in a couple of jurisdictions. We've looked in Toronto, we've looked at it in Abbotsford and other places, in Metro Vancouver. I think it would be important to think about this process, both from the perspective of precariously housed people, but also from the perspective of those people who are regulating people's belongings, whether those are private and public actors. More fully understanding the effects is, of course, something that would, I think, be useful to do. I think, in terms of where our research most immediately goes, right now. It's actually, well, things like this podcast, it's actually trying to find ways, given the direction of people like Connie, who want this systemic crisis to be made more public. To find ways to communicate this research and the voices of people like Connie to a wider public audience. That's, I think, where we're working at now, trying to get the work out there in a wider, both policy space, and also in terms of public conversations, more generally.

Avery Moore Kloss 49:11

Nick, I really want to thank you for your guidance through this episode. You've added so much great context and it's been really eye opening for me, and I hope for the listener. We're going to end here with the very end of the interview Claire did with Connie. We'd really like to thank both of them for their work to help make this episode happen, especially to Connie for sharing so openly about her lived experience, and for offering us all of her expertise.

Nick Blomley 49:37

Yeah, and I just had my own “thanks”, as always, to Connie for her willingness to share in these really personally, very traumatic experiences in order to try and engage with a larger community, and to Claire for her hard work in making this happen as well.

Avery Moore Kloss 49:56

Yeah, absolutely, Nick. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here and helping us with this episode of Chris talk.

Nick Blomley 50:01

Thank you, Avery, and thank you to Chris for making this happen.

Avery Moore Kloss 50:05

So, with the last word, here's Claire asking Connie two final questions.

Claire Shapton 50:12

Why is this an important topic for you?

Connie Long 50:15

I don’t think it's just an important topic for me. It's the marginalized community. [It] is the top important topic for me. So that goes from all of it, housing, addiction, possessions, ministry, children, families, all of that. I’m not going to say corrupt system. It's, a broken system being applied to broken people, people who are broken in the moment. It's just silly to me that we're using the same system that we've used for what, 75 years, and it didn't work then, and it's not working now. Something has to change, like it affects people. I care about people, whether it's because I've been on my own journey. That makes all of this stuff really important to me, or makes my journey seem [to] have validity? I don't know, but it's just like I said, a community is only as strong as its weakest citizen, right? And yeah, if that citizen is happy and healthy and isn't losing their things at every turn. Even if that citizen wants to live outside and not have a lot of things, then that's okay, but when that citizen is traumatized and suffering with so many mental health issues because of it, then it's not okay. Something has to be done.

Claire Shapton 51:36

I’m wondering if you think there's anything that we should talk about that we haven't already. Anything else that it's important for people to know about property loss for houseless people?

Connie Long 51:46

I think that it's an important story because of the connection that it's creating. The more we come forward with our stories, and the more people who have never experienced the loss of property that are listening, it's building a bridge, and I think that it's a great start to having communities come together and find solutions. I truly believe that we need to look out for each other. To me, that's what's broken with our system is like saying that the MCFD is telling you this is what you need to do in order to get your kids back. But that person's ever had a child, even or being in any kind of hardship situation like that. They’re telling and it's very, very hard having been that person too, to listened to somebody tell you that, or to somebody coming alongside the road and telling you that you need to get out of your tent and pack up your things, and if that person has an idea about what the effects of their job or their duty for that day is doing to the other person, I think things would look a lot different then.