“They Stole All My Shit”: A Qualitative Exploration of By-Law Practices and People Experiencing Homelessness

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with 65 people experiencing homelessness (PEH) in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada), this article examines the role and impact of municipal by-laws’ daily governance of PEH and their possessions. We argue PEH’s possessions are a site of governance that by-law officers use to exert both punitive control and responsibilization onto PEH’s lives. We show how the daily governance of possessions enhances and reinforces existing strategies of displacement and motion and illuminate how forms of governance tied to the movement of PEH can be simultaneously experienced as both routinized and random when subjectively enforced.

When we met Jim, a 55-year-old White man, he had been unhoused for approximately 10 years. For the past year, he slept each night in the doorway of a local small business with permission from business owners who he has maintained a positive relationship with. Jim has a lifetime ban from a key homelessness resource center and generally does not access any other services. During the interview, when we asked Jim why he sleeps outside—without any shelter, including a tent—he said, “I can’t stand tents . . . because I don’t like to have to put them up and take them down.” He does this, as he says, “because of by-law enforcement.”

Jim’s decision to sleep without a tent in a city where the temperatures in winter hover around 3° Celsius—just above freezing—is strongly influenced by the municipal by-laws that dictate that people experiencing homelessness (PEH) must pack up and move their belongings daily. Jim went on to explain his objection to tents in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada):

Yeah, you know. You can’t set them up anywhere [without having to take them down daily] . . . , there’s no place to set them up inside city limits. So that means you know to walk anywhere [to find a tent location that may be undetected] you gotta leave early so there’s still daylight. And then you got to walk forever. And then you gotta find a good spot, and it’s like—nah, that’s a pain in the ass! So, that’s why I don’t do tents; it’s just [taken down] as soon as it’s set up.

For Jim, having to put up and take down the tent daily to comply with the city’s by-law was seen as deeply cumbersome and unreasonably demanding. In Victoria, the by-law that dictates PEH must pack up and move their belongings daily is colloquially known as the “7-7 by-law” because individuals are permitted to have their belongings out after 7:00 p.m. and packed up and moving by 7:00 a.m. Municipal by-law officers (see the following) police PEH’s compliance with the 7-7 by-law and are authorized to impound their tents and belongings in violation. The by-law specifically addresses PEH’s belongings, not people. It does not compel PEH to disperse from designated spaces during the day per se, but their belongings must be moved. For compliance, PEH must, in reality, move their belongings and themselves. In this way, PEH are governed vis-à-vis their belongings.

Extensive literature documents a range of governance strategies—punitive, benevolent, and beyond this binary—that are enacted on PEH’s bodies, conduct, thoughts, and sense of being (Grainger 2021; Jackson 2012, 2015; Kaufman 2022; Maier et al. 2024; Seim and DiMario 2023; Seim 2017; Soss et al. 2011; Tillman 2023). However, scholars have paid less attention to how other critical aspects of PEH’s lives and existence—their possessions—can be targeted governance sites (cf. Blomley, Flynn, and Sylvestre 2020). Moreover, although existing research has illuminated the role that public police and private security officers play in regulating PEH, this near-hegemonic focus largely overlooks other key players in PEH’s lives—municipal by-law officers (cf. Martino, Sanders, and Dej 2024). In Canada, municipalities manage and regulate private/public spaces and “noncriminal” activities (e.g., sidewalk snow removal, park camping) through locally specific by-laws and employ specialized by-law officers to enforce these laws (City of Victoria n.d.). Although public police officers and special constables may also enforce municipal by-laws, primary responsibility for their enforcement lies with by-law officers. By-law officers may use discretion in addressing contraventions by issuing warnings to gain voluntary compliance or taking more formal action, such as suspending permits, issuing fines, and seizing property. ¹ In establishing rules on use and access to public spaces, municipal by-laws indirectly regulate the lives of PEH, including where and when PEH are permitted to sleep or rest, and establish consequences and punishments for violation (e.g., fines property seizure; see also Beckett and Herbert 2008), as was the case in Victoria.

We examine PEH’s belongings as a site of governance and by-law officers as governance actors. More specifically, drawing on in-depth interviews with 65 PEH in Victoria, we analyze their perceptions of and experiences with by-law officers to explore how these actors shape PEH’s well-being via targeting, discarding, and destroying their belongings. Blending Blomley et al.’s (2020) work on governance and Pemberton’s (2016) theory of social harm, we extend empirical understandings of how and by whom PEH are controlled, demonstrating that the governance of their possessions produces material, emotional, and relational harms. These harms negatively affect PEH’s well-being and survival, further hindering their life-sustaining efforts.

Governing via Possessions

Possessions, such as clothing, furniture, and jewelry, serve a multitude of material and affective purposes in people’s lives. They can be basic and necessary resources, such as providing warmth; reinforce emotional ties, such as cherishing or remembering a deceased loved one; and signal social belonging, membership, and status, such as our style via various adornments. Possessions may be especially important for those without housing and those who struggle to meet their material needs; indeed, in the absence of housing, PEH must secure and rely on possessions for everyday survival. They need blankets, sleeping bags, and tents to create warmth and shelter; carts and bags to carry their belongings (e.g., medications, identification, clothing, food); and often bicycles to move around from place to place or to access shelters, soup kitchens, and other critical services. ² PEH’s lack of safe, private places to store belongings means that they either always carry all/most of their possessions with them or keep/leave their items on public property. This necessity creates conflict with a range of “quality of life” laws, which criminalize storing property in public spaces, such as Victoria’s 7-7 by-law.

Rather than recognizing PEH’s belongings as survival necessities, many governance actors view such items as a manifestation of PEH’s proclivity to “hoarding,” positing it as “unhygienic and unhealthy” (Ranasinghe 2017:48). When such logic is combined with claims that PEH’s belongings pose safety risks to themselves and others, it is often touted to “justify” taking away and/or disposing of their property (Braimoh, Dej, and Sanders 2023; Ranasinghe 2017). Municipalities, often supported by law enforcement, have thus implemented and mobilized by-laws to address these concerns, allowing authorities to forcefully remove—via seizing, impounding, or disposal—PEH’s belongings. When it comes to belongings used for life-sustaining purposes—such as tents—such by-law ordinances may be especially consequential. To illustrate, in Victoria, the relevant by-law states that “a homeless person must not place, secure, erect, use, or maintain in place, in a park, a structure, improvement or overhead shelter, including a tent” except between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. the following day (By-Law 07-059).

Homelessness scholars have increasingly recognized the frequency and impact of property loss for PEH. For example, research from Hawaii documents how police and other state agents often remove PEH’s belongings, how anti-homeless policies (e.g., sweeps, citations) provide the framework for this type of intervention, and how the removal of possessions can propel civic and social exclusion, material hardship, anxiety, and fear (see also Darrah-Okike et al. 2018). Work from San Francisco quantifies the prevalence of PEH’s property seizure during encampment sweeps, documenting that 46 percent of unhoused respondents had lost items during these abatement practices (Herring, Yarbrough, and Alatorre 2020). Critically, existing works also show that these sweeps may have negative downstream impacts on individual and community well-being, including poorer health and increased pressure on health service providers (Aykanian 2023; Chang et al. 2022; Qi et al. 2022; Talbot et al. 2024). Some work has also explored the seizure of PEH’s pets (Labrecque and Walsh 2011).

Although the literature on the governance of urban poverty is extensive, as Blomley et al. (2020:166) note, understanding of how “poor people’s belongings are governed and, in turn, how people are also governed through their things” remains limited. The aforementioned studies consider property-loss frequency and impact on PEH’s lives; however, they do not fully engage with PEH’s belongings as sites of criminalizing and responsibilizing governance. Here, we seek to extend these areas of inquiry with an empirical examination of PEH’s belongings, governance strategies and actors, and the harms produced. This is an important addition because the destruction and/or seizure of PEH’s possessions enhances their precarity (Blomley et al. 2020:168), such as by forcing them into the perilous and imminent risk of sleeping without shelter. Accordingly, for PEH, “governing through things can become deeply oppressive and punitive, when differential property relations and access to space are foregrounded . . . these regulatory logics can create a pervasive and intrusive regulatory matrix” (Blomley et al. 2022:225). Belongings, then, are a central aspect of understanding the regulatory matrix PEH must navigate.

Social Harm

A social harm perspective provides a unique lens for understanding how the governance of PEH’s belongings is structured via capitalism and the harms that ensue in this process. Pemberton (2016) positions capitalism as the “root of societal harms” and defines social harms as those which degrade people’s “physical and mental wellbeing” and compromise “human flourishing.” He conceptualizes three types of harm: (1) physical/mental harm, (2) autonomy harm (low opportunities of self-actualization), and (3) relational harm (social exclusion and stigma). According to Pemberton, when humans’ need for self-actualization (including physical and mental health, capacity for autonomous action, and ability to sustain social relations) is unfulfilled, this constitutes identifiable social harm (see also Mason 2020).^3,4 A social harms lens centers the state’s role in the perpetration and production of harm (Hillyard and Tombs 2004) and provides an apt lens for interrogations of housing, including homelessness (Gurney 2023). Additionally, social harms push our analyses past individualistic framings centered on ideas of intent, individual choice, victim/offender binaries, and interpersonal interactions and instead develop structurally situated accounts for how harm is produced (Canning and Tombs 2021).

Blomley et al. (2022:235) argue that “when precariously housed and unhoused people have their personal belongings seized and destroyed by government actors it increases their experiences of marginalization through physical harm.” Property loss, then, is more than material loss and can also drive deprivation of dignity, therefore urging us to study the range of social harms produced by forms of governance structuring “involuntary property loss” (Atuahene 2016:796) and the omnipresent threat of such. The social harms framework helps us to engage with the experiences and outcomes of state interventions more critically (see also Mason 2020).

Using a social harm framework and by focusing on an understudied governance area—the governance of PEH’s possessions—this article contributes to scholarship on governance and policing by (a) illuminating how and by whom PEH’s possessions are governed and (b) identifying the social harms associated with this type of governance. We show how PEH’ possessions are used as a site of governance that by-law officers use to punitively control and responsibilize PEH. Governing PEH’s possessions extends to regulating their movement, conduct, and access to space, including PEH’s pathways out of homelessness. The governance of PEH’s possessions not only increases their risks of criminalization but also, as we demonstrate, is punitive and harmful in and of itself. Although Victoria’s by-laws create a rigidly defined schedule for PEH to have their possessions (including shelter) in public space—between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m.—we discuss how individual by-law officers enforce these rules irregularly and sometimes arbitrarily, exacerbating PEH’s precarity. As such, we contextualize how forms of governance tied to PEH’s belongings can be simultaneously experienced as routinized and random when subjectively enforced. The varying ways PEH are thrust into incessant motion— vis-à-vis their belongings, bodies, or both—reveal the multitude of techniques state actors mobilize to govern, regulate, and punish PEH.

Methods

Context

Victoria (Canada) is a small city located on the scenic but unceded territories of the Esquimalt, Songhees, Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke, Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, and Tseycum peoples. Like other North American cities, Victoria has recently been challenged by social/health issues related to homelessness, a toxic drug supply, and increasing public concerns about social disorder attributed to encampments (Baldin 2023; Kelly 2020). Victoria’s most recent point-in-time (PiT) homelessness count identified 1,665 PEH. Of this population, 15 percent reported sleeping outside, 17 percent stayed in emergency shelters, and the remainder reported various other living arrangements, such as couch surfing ( Homeless Hub 2024 ). This PiT count found that Victoria’s homeless population was 35 percent women, 62.5 percent White, 32.9 percent Indigenous, 1.3 percent Black, and 4.4 percent people of color of different racial backgrounds (Homeless Hub 2024). Like other jurisdictions, Indigenous persons are starkly overrepresented in Victoria’s unhoused community compared to the city’s overall Indigenous population of 5 percent (Anderson and Collins 2014; Davis et al. 2023).

By comparison, participants in this study were 32.7 percent women and 52.3 percent White, and 92.3 percent reported being unsheltered (see Table 1). Specifically, unsheltered participants were sleeping in parks, on sidewalks, or in emergency shelters, and housed participants were primarily staying in transitional housing facilities but spent much of the day on the street and socializing with other street-involved people. Notably, participants with shelter experiences explained using the shelter system only occasionally and that they tend to move between sleeping on the streets and in shelters depending on factors such as shelter capacity, temporary bans, and personal drug use, all of which influence people’s abilities to access shelters.

Table 1.

Sample Demographics.

Participant Characteristics (N = 65)
Age
16–29	18.5%	(n = 12)
30–49	46.1%	(n = 30)
Over 50	27.7%	(n = 18)
Missing	7.7%	(n = 5)
Gender
Women	32.3%	(n = 21)
Men	67.7%	(n = 44)
Ethnicity
White	52.3%	(n = 34)
Indigenous	38.5%	(n = 25)
Latino	1.5%	(n = 1)
Black	1.5%	(n = 1)
Missing	6.2%	(n = 4)
Current housing status
Unsheltered	92.3%	(n = 60)
Housed	7.7%	(n = 5)
Past experiences with homelessness
Unsheltered	100%	(n = 65)
Encampment	56.9%	(n = 37)

In Canada, concerns and controversies surrounding homeless encampments—the majority of which are unsanctioned and, therefore, illegal—largely monopolize conversations about homelessness. Indeed, encampments have proliferated nationwide in recent years, pushing many municipal and nonprofit organizations scrambling for legal guidance on whether, where, and when encampments may exist. Municipalities’ battles to remove encampments have played out and been challenged in Canadian courts, with recent judicial decisions forcing some provinces and municipalities to adjust how/when they respond to unsanctioned encampments. ⁵ This was the case for Victoria—and British Columbia more broadly; in 2021, the court deemed the removal of overnight encampments unconstitutional when a jurisdiction does not have sufficient emergency shelter space. Notably, however, the court stopped short of recognizing that PEH had the right to remain in an encampment during daytime hours under similar circumstances (BCSC 2021; see Hermer 2022). Consequently, municipalities in British Columbia, including Victoria, may legally dismantle encampments remaining beyond their constitutionally protected overnight stay (Wood 2023). Although Victoria’s by-laws previously prohibited overnight camping in all city parks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, municipal by-laws were amended to allow overnight camping between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. ⁶ —known as the “7-7 law”—in designated parks to accommodate social distancing. Although initially a temporary public health measure, the policy remains in place to address homelessness and limit encampment proliferation in nondesignated parks. At the time of writing, of Victoria’s 138 city parks, 5 (as of August 1, 2024) permitted PEH to camp overnight between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. (City of Victoria 2024c, 2024d; Romphf 2024).

Victora’s municipal by-law officers are tasked with dismantling and removing encampments that violate the 7-7 law. ⁷ Any property deemed “rubbish,” “bulky,” or “hazardous material” may be immediately sent to a landfill. By-law officers may confiscate all other property, including shelter-specific items (e.g., tents), although they are slated to give property owners 14 days to pick them up before they are permanently seized or destroyed (City of Victoria, 2024a). ⁸ Notably, although a caveat written into this by-law states that this applies to those “who do not accept an offer [for housing]” (City of Victoria 2024c), none of our participants mentioned the possibility of keeping their possessions by being on a housing list.

Any analysis of governance strategies impacting PEH’s lives in Canada must acknowledge the impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples (Kaufman 2022; Thistle 2017; see also Christensen 2017). As an enduring structure, settler colonialism is ongoing project defined by a “logic of elimination” where land is central (Wolfe 2006:387). Laws authorizing state officials to take people’s belongings, and especially those of Indigenous PEH, must be considered alongside state-produced Indigenous homelessness and the ongoing state violence and cultural genocide of Indigenous persons via their “removal, displacement, dispossession” (Blomley et al. 2022:237; TRC 2015). Any instances that involve the right to and use of land in the settler colonial context—including homelessness and sheltering in parks—“cannot be separated from ongoing practices of colonialism and capitalism in Canada” (Braimoh et al. 2023:17). Furthermore, policing itself as an institution in Canada is part and parcel of the settler colonial project, created in part to manage and control the movements of Indigenous peoples (Monaghan 2013). As such, although unhoused persons are broadly conceived of (and treated) as “out of place” in capitalist societies, these exclusionary perceptions and practices are exacerbated for Indigenous persons, who are already often considered “out of place” in urban contexts (Christensen 2017:29) and are informed and inseparable from the colonial context (Braimoh et al. 2023). The intersections of homelessness and Indigeneity mark a particularly “complex” situation that requires navigating collective “disbelonging” in a settler-colonial society and individual embodiments of being unhoused (Christensen 2017:23; see also Thistle 2017; Urbanik et al. 2024). Particularly, formations of racial capitalism (Robinson 2000) that center the inextricability of race and capitalism are invaluable for contextualizing Canada’s settler colonial context (Pasternak 2020). Here, the assimilationist and segregationist policies—of which poverty governance has been central—that have been aimed at Indigenous peoples exemplify the interconnections of settler colonialism and racial capitalism (Pasternak 2020). Indeed, “settler colonial racial violence is at the root of the production of urban space in settler states” (Dorries, Hugill, and Tomiak 2019:263) In outlining the enduring structures of settler colonialism, the resultant impacts on Indigenous peoples navigating homelessness, and other forms of state violence, we can ground the experiences of PEH in Victoria, British Columbia. White supremacy sustains and shapes both settler colonial processes and racial capitalism (Dorries et al. 2019).

Data Collection and Analysis

As part of a broader study of homelessness and drug use, we initiated fieldwork in Victoria in the summer of 2023. We conducted 65 in-depth, semistructured interviews with people who sleep unsheltered and/or spend significant time on the streets and recorded field observations. By spending time in public spaces (e.g., parks, sidewalks, alleyways) in the city’s downtown core and adjacent neighborhoods with visible homelessness and drug use (Centennial Square, Topaz Park, and along Pandora Avenue), we got to know street-involved community members who slept and/or spent most of their time outside. This allowed us to broadly get to know local PEH and other street-involved people, allowed them to learn and gauge who we were and what we were doing, and allowed us to establish rapport. Consistent with the larger study’s participant recruitment strategy, we did not partner with any local organizations; instead, we engaged in traditional street-based fieldwork to include a diverse sample, including those who do not access community services due to bans, distrust, and/or disinterest (Schäffer, Stöver, and Weichert, 2014). Participant recruitment was achieved through fieldwork and nonprobability snowball sampling. We either approached or were approached by people spending time in these spaces and, upon explaining the purpose of the research, study parameters, and ethical obligations, invited people to participate in an interview. Participants were compensated $30 cash for their time and knowledge. All individuals invited to be interviewed agreed to participate in the study.

All interviews were conducted in public spaces chosen by participants, such as in parks, on sidewalks, and in alleyways. We stopped data collection upon reaching thematic saturation (Guest et al. 2006; Hennink, Kaiser, and Marconi 2017). Given the public nature of the interviews and the frequent presence of participants’ acquaintances/friends, we encouraged them to sit with us in semiprivate spaces (e.g., out of earshot, with fewer people passing by) within their chosen locations. Most participants agreed to have their interviews audio recorded (n = 56), which we then transcribed verbatim. We took detailed notes on the remaining nine interviews. We used a general interview prompt guide consisting of open-ended questions about participants’ perceptions of and experiences living in Victoria. We asked participants about safety risks, policing, experiences with shelters, transitional housing, other community services, encampments, and drug use. The interviews averaged 34 minutes and ranged between 15 minutes and 75 minutes.

Given our fieldwork strategy and because all our research was outdoors, we were also able to observe happenings in real time, including being present before, during, and after by-law enforcement arrived at multiple encampments. We spent 10 consecutive days in Victoria, completing 8 to 12 hours in the field daily. Over this period, we conducted interviews, had informal conversations, and observed interactions among PEH and between PEH and institutional actors, including by-law officers, daily. For example, we spent time on Pandora Avenue during by-law officers’ morning sweeps, observing a range of by-law actions from warnings to mass encampment discarding and spent time with PEH following their property being confiscated. The researchers did not interact with by-law officers. Moreover, we went with several participants to try to “retrieve” their items. The researchers each carried field notebooks, writing brief notes throughout the day, and once fieldwork concluded at the end of each day, the researchers spent time writing about what they had observed and reflected on their experiences that day.

Informed by Braun and Clarke (2006) and Maxwell (2012), we examined and reexamined the interview data throughout each data analysis step. This included reviewing, reading, and rereading interview transcripts and fieldnotes, which allowed for the identification of initial free codes. Application of an open coding process resulted in the initial identification of 21 organizational themes (e.g., safety/violence/victimization, formal social control police/private security/by-law officers, barriers to improving one’s situation) and 99 substantive themes (e.g., getting “farmed,” ⁹ safety in park, experiences in park, experiences with Victoria police). To confirm the organizational and substantive themes sufficiently represented the coded data/participant quotes, the researchers completed a final reread of the coded data. The data informing this article are derived from 3 organizational themes (e.g., access/use of space, Pandora/Centennial, formal social control by-law officers) and 18 substantive themes (e.g., encampment removal by by-law officers, ticketing by by-law officers, experiences with by-law officers, positive views of by-law, negative views of by-law, governing use/access to park).

Findings

Participants who reported sleeping/living outdoors emphasized that their interactions with by-law enforcement exacerbated and in some cases, constituted the primary arduousness of being unsheltered. Navigating by-law officer presence and practices shaped participants’ well-being by creating physical, mental, autonomy, and relational harms and forcing them into a constant state of mobility. Ultimately, we argue that by-law practices sustain and reproduce homelessness.

Perceptions and Strategies: Navigating Victoria’s 7-to-7 By-Law

Victoria’s 7-7 by-law was the most consequential and onerous for participants to make sense of and abide by, specifically concerning when, where, and how they were permitted to have their dwellings up and property out. A critical element of how PEH experienced the 7-7 by-law was how by-law officers operationalized the formal guidelines that stipulate people must “take down, pack up and remove their tent and belongings” by 7 a.m. (City of Victoria 2024c). Indeed, all participants emphasized that in practice, this meant by-law officers expected all their possessions (including tents) to “be mobile” (Carter, man/Indigenous/29 years old), meaning, all of their property had to be demonstrably moveable (e.g., via shopping carts, backpacks, or carried on their person) by 7 a.m.

Participants reported by-law officers routinely seized their tents and other personal belongings not packed up and mobile by 7 a.m. Most were aware of the legal parameters surrounding by-law officers’ authority to impound and discard (i.e., send to a landfill) their belongings; participants explained that by-law officers share information sheets providing information on “acceptable” places to shelter and by-law rules (City of Victoria 2024b). Despite the legal basis ¹⁰ for impounding PEH’s property (City of Victoria 2024a), PEH uniformly perceived these seizures as “theft” or, using local street terminology, “getting farmed.” Although getting farmed has traditionally referred to having your items stolen by other street-involved or unhoused persons, several participants explained when it comes to “getting farmed,” “it’s by-law that’s the worst” (Anna/woman/White/27 years old). This language adaptation clearly articulates the perceptions and impacts of property seizure. In this way, getting farmed by by-law officers is an articulation of violent victimization and harm from state actors.

The 7-to-7 by-law was typically enforced via large, coordinated sweeps (concentrated on and around Pandora Avenue in downtown Victoria) but also included smaller sweeps of localized encampment clusters within city limits. Although both forms manifested in the governance of PEH via their possessions and negatively impacted PEH, the spectacle of the mass Pandora Avenue “sweeps”—and its contribution to the relational harms imposed on PEH—necessitates dedicated elaboration. Many participants described routinized, organized, and mass sweeps of homeless encampments on Pandora Avenue (where many people camped overnight). Chanice (woman/White/49 years old) emphasized that tenting on Pandora is permitted and that by-law officers don’t “bug” PEH at night “as long as we’re in our spots; like our designated spots . . . and have those tents down by 7 in the morning.” Although sheltering in public spaces is permitted overnight, the 7 a.m. deadline was widely known. Abby (woman/White/28 years old) explained what happens: “At 7 a.m., they’ll [by-law officers] come and tell everyone to leave right away.” Those failing to pack their tents and belongings risked losing everything. Abby continued, “By-law’s there taking people’s tents down and throwing people’s stuff out.” Chanice reported, and we witnessed during fieldwork, that when PEH do not have their items together in time, “the city truck will come around and grab all the tents, all the belongings, everything in there, and garbage it.” These sweeps have devastating consequences on PEH, exacerbating harm and further entrenching them in homelessness (see the following).

Moreover, by-law officers’ strict governance of where PEH could sleep and when they could have their belongings in public space was especially frustrating for Indigenous persons, who questioned the city’s authority to restrict their movements given their relationship to land. Chase (man/Indigenous/47 years old) astutely drew attention to the colonial ideologies underpinning these by-laws: “I was . . . in a tent and I was like trying to pitch it up and everything. And they’re like ‘You can’t do that!’ You know what? Excuse me—like for one, you are on MY ancestor’s land!” The governance of PEH on unceded territory is rooted in settler colonial law and policies that have long sought to displace Indigenous peoples (see also Braimoh et al. 2023; Christensen 2017).

Exacerbated Uncertainty: There Are Rules, and Then There Is Reality

The legal rules establishing the parameters of acceptable sheltering locations and times created daily pressure on PEH to dismantle their homes, pack up their belongings, and be ready to move before by-law enforcement’s early morning arrival. Participants did not report, nor did we observe, by-law officers’ daily encampment attendance; sweep frequencies ranged from one to two times per week to more ad hoc attendance (see also Bell 2024). However, the by-law makes daily enforcement possible. Accordingly, by-law officers can enforce the law daily, including seizing and discarding tents and belongings not adequately packed up, moveable, and/or removed from public space. This possibility—the daily threat of by-law enforcement—forced PEH to try to pack up and be “mobile” early and often daily to avoid possible confrontations with by-law officers and protect their belongings. Because by-law officers often arrived around 7 a.m., PEH must be moving well before then, sometimes necessitating packing up in the dark. Tom (man/Indigenous/29 years old) describes how he protects his possessions from being taken: “I pack up too early for them to get to me.” The possibility of by-law enforcement conditions responsibilizes PEH into daily action—packing up, being ready to move, and trying to obey by-law rules. Responsiblizing governance strategies impose paternalistic techniques to mold PEH and other marginalized groups into “compliant” citizens (Baker, Evans, and Hennigan 2020; Werth 2012). These governance strategies operate within a pervasive web of rules and expectations that regulate the most seemingly mundane aspects of PEH’s daily life, including when they are permitted to sleep and rest.

Furthermore, the inconsistent and unpredictable nature of by-law enforcement attendance and time frames for individual tent clean-ups contributed to difficulty in how PEH planned, navigated, and responded to by-law officers. The time someone had to pack up reportedly ranged between 5 minutes and 20 minutes before by-law officers impounded their property. As Trevor (man/Indigenous/47 years old) explained, by-law officers only “give people like 20 minutes to move or start packing up their stuff.” This created uncertainty and pressure because for many, such early and quick packing may be unreasonable or unfeasible. Indeed, dismantling one’s home takes great effort and can be time-consuming. These grace periods—which can vary from officer to officer and day to day—are essentially little more than by-law officers giving PEH some additional time to return public space to its approved aesthetic, catering to the White, middle-class sensibilities (Speer 2018). Strategies of displacement are central to settler colonial governance (Braimoh et al. 2023). Their impacts must be navigated by all PEH who are characterized as “out of place,” disorderly, criminal, and unsafe (Amster 2003). The matrix of poverty governance in a settler colonial context structure enduring policies that disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples. Moreover, the impacts of the by-law and its enforcement have pervasive impacts on PEH that are exacerbated by this inconsistent approach.

During these grace periods, many participants experienced heightened stress and anxiety due to the potential consequences of being unable to meet by-law officers’ tight cutoff point. Kaba (man/White/40 years old) and Grace (woman/Indigenous/45 years old) explained how “First thing in the morning,” by-law officers arrived and told them to pack up their tent and belongings: “We had no dope this morning, and by-law came by and said we had 10 minutes to get our shit together. And there’s no way we would have been able to. I thought we were gonna lose everything this morning. They left, luckily.” Although Kaba and Grace were spared by-law enforcement action the morning we spoke with them and did not have their belongings taken, their experience shows how by-law officer discretion creates uncertainty for PEH. Further compounding these challenges and exacerbating PEH’s uncertainty and anxiety is that many do not (routinely) have working watches or cellphones to know the time, set alarms, and/or time themselves to ensure they are complete within allotted time frames.

Further creating a disempowering environment of incessant and sometimes unavoidable risk and loss, participants noted that some by-law officers do not adhere to the legally mandated processes or the general/compassionate etiquette of issuing timed warnings, allowing PEH the opportunity to try to “save” their things from seizure. Trevor (man/Indigenous/47 years old), for example, explained that although by-law enforcement is expected to give PEH notice and time to pack up their things to avoid property seizure, he described instances where they failed to provide fair warning: “I’ve seen them just tape off an area and just start throwing everything into the back of their dump truck.” Despite familiarity with the by-law rules guiding encampment clean-ups and, specifically, the impounding or discarding of tents and other personal property and making every effort to abide by the state rules, many participants believed they could not prevent having their items seized.

Apart from seizing tents and other items PEH may use to make shelter for sleeping outdoors, several reported by-law officers “often” (Ryan, man/White/27 years old) seize other essential items, including those that could easily be carried on their person. Jeremy (man/White/40 years old) was particularly reflective and frustrated at by-law seizures, reporting they take “everything,” adding “we’re talking right down to your wallet, your jewelry, you know, your medication, anything that’s in the tent.” Ryan similarly reported by-law officers taking his ID. Other participants, too, reported by-law officers’ other egregious actions. Dave (man/White/25 years old) defeatedly shared that by-law officers “threw away my winter boots, fucking when there’s still snow on the ground.” Notably, it appears the city confirms it may impound “life supporting” items, including IDs, tents, sleeping bags, medications, cellphones, medical devices, and waterproof/winter clothing (City of Victoria 2024a). The violent loss of personal and survival belongings (e.g., IDs, medication) reinforced participants’ views that by-law officers’ seizure practices were intended to cause unreasonable harm over and above merely enforcing camping rules.

Keep Movin’

The 7-to-7 by-law effectively necessitates that PEH are always on the move. Participants spoke extensively about how by-laws and practices regulated where, when, and for how long they could stay in one space, emphasizing their need to be quickly “mobile” at any time. Sean (man/44 years old) eloquently described PEH’s pressure for incessant motion (Tillman 2023) to avoid the seizure of one’s possessions:

It’s like, you have to be on your toes. You can’t just build a little structure, and you can’t tent forever. You have to be mobile or ready to be mobile because by-law [will] come in and take all your clothes and shit and throw all of your shit out.

And as Rob (man/White/52 years old) similarly explains, by-law officers “just keep on tellin’ us MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” Forced mobility is a key feature of the contemporary regulation of PEH’s bodies in public space (see also Beckett and Herbert 2001). Tillman (2023:640) describes this as “incessant motion” whereby law enforcement’s role is to “place marginalized bodies into incessant motion . . . not allowing bodies to rest” to reinforce racial and, we posit, other (e.g., economic) hierarchies. In this way, belongings—not bodies—become the target of regulation in Victoria. Yet as we outline, the bodies and belongings of PEH are in practicality enmeshed.

Paradoxically, in practice, the 7-to-7 law also restricted and constrained PEH’s movements. Consider how Jonathan (man/White/25 years old), who tented in a local park outside the city’s downtown, described the limitations by-law practices imposed on PEH: “Some people they’re too afraid even leave their stuff to go to the bathroom right there beside the parking lot. Because they show up that quick and your stuffs gone.” The public washroom was less than 100 meters away from where he and several others had set up their tents. Illuminated by these participants’ experiences are the autonomy harms that ensue when PEH’s belongings are used to exert control over one’s abilities to engage in the most mundane and human daily actions. The resultant impacts of these by-laws and their enforcement demonstrate how the governance of life-sustaining behaviors (e.g., using the bathroom) are constrained beyond traditional accounts that describe the criminalization of public urination, for instance (Aykanian and Fogel 2019). For PEH in Victoria, choosing to use the public bathroom still carries with it criminalizing and harmful impacts because one’s belongings may be taken while they are gone.

Participants also noted that by-law enforcement differed by area and time, adding another layer to where someone might choose to tent. Bobby (man/Indigenous/29 years old) explained, “When I camped around here, I lost everything.” Consequently, Bobby chose a new location to tent, hoping to avoid having by-law officers taking his things again. Moreover, “acceptable” areas to camp were also at the discretion of individual by-law officers irrespective of what the law said. Accordingly, political motivations—especially concerns about the optics and aesthetic of visible homelessness—could also necessitate PEH’s immediate relocation. Jonathan described a time when he and another PEH camping in a local park had to relocate their tents and possessions to effectively sanitize municipal government publicity:

They [by-law officers] moved us up there from down here because the mayor was doing a photo-op for the new field, and they didn’t want tents in the background. . . . [By-law officers said] we “have to pack up,” be mobile, ready to go. . . . And if they [by-law officers] came back again and we hadn’t moved 10 feet or whatever, we would get impounded.

However, “an ability to lead relatively autonomous lives will be dependent on the control people exert over sufficient economic and social resources necessary to act on their life choices” (Pemberton 2016:30). In this context, by-law officers are but one group of actors who exert significant control over the available resources PEH can access, posing a threat to their belongings and thus, restricting their movements.

Harms, Violence, and Impacts: Social Harms and State Violence

The harms experienced by PEH vis-à-vis the by-laws that regulate their belongings are pervasive, intricately linked with one another, and deeply impactful to survival efforts and general well-being. Although Pemberton (2016) enumerates three distinct forms of harm, we demonstrate how the governance of PEH via their belongings produces a myriad of social harms that cannot always be parsed out from one another. Specifically, we outline the impacts of these by-law regulations to people’s physical, emotional, and mental well-being; the constraints on autonomy and agency; and how these regulatory forces are foundationally destructive to belonging. We do so not in a way to disaggregate these harms but to demonstrate how each are often connected, operating in conjunction, and have cumulative effects that sustain homelessness.

The physical and mental health harms precipitated by (threats of) property seizure—irrespective of whether they are conducted “by the book” or more “compassionately”—illuminate the vast ways governance strategies impact people’s ability to live dignified lives, extending “beyond mere physical survival” (Pemberton 2016:28). Furthermore, the limited “warning” windows necessitate PEH hastily pack up their belongings or risk losing them. This immediacy, however, can pose additional and far-reaching risks to PEH over and above having their possessions seized. To illustrate, for Grace and Kaba, in their rush to pack their tent and as many other possessions as they could within 10 minutes, unsurprisingly, any semblance of careful and orderly packing and organizing was gone. Indeed, during the hurried cramming of their most vital possessions, Grace somehow lost her legally prescribed methadone. In Canada, individuals are put on methadone maintenance programs to reduce illicit opioid-use-related harms, including helping them manage opioid dependence, reducing blood-borne pathogen transmission, and in some cases, maintaining users’ connection to service providers (Strike et al. 2013). During a time of toxic drug poisoning crises across Canada, such programs can mean the difference between an opioid user dying and surviving/thriving (Bardwell et al. 2024). ¹¹ This combined with other participants’ narratives of by-law officers seizing other medications also portray the hidden ways by-law officers may impede PEH’s access to harm reduction, medical care, and potentially life-sustaining medication (see also Greene, Urbanik, and Geldart 2022). This is a clear and undeniable form of physical and mental harm because such hindrances to health care access can limit PEH’s ability to achieve/maintain “sufficient health” to lead active lives—or may threaten their lives altogether while simultaneously fostering extreme stress and uncertainty (Pemberton 2016:28–29)

There are also additional consequences of failing to abide by the 7-to-7 law that some participants experienced. Some indicated that when PEH cannot get moving or have their items sorted and packed fast enough to satisfy by-law officers, they (or their police supports) may subject them to physically violent victimization. Sydney (woman/White/57 years old) illuminated what may happen if “you don’t wake up in time to get your stuff down.” Referencing her husband, she shared:

He slept in. And they [by-law officers] said, “We’re here. You need to get up and get your tent down.” And he’s like, “Ok, just let me get up. Let me get up and out.” And he was going to try and get up. He’s got a bad back; he has to literally roll to his side, go to his knees. He goes, “It just takes me a couple of minutes.” [By-law officer yelled] “Get out now!” And next thing, you know, his legs were grabbed. So FLUNK! Back down he goes, on his chest. They grabbed him by his feet, and they dragged him out on his back.

As evidenced by what happened to Sydney’s partner, the pressures of by-law officers’ practices are compounded for PEH living with health issues, disabilities, or injuries. Moreover, despite difficulties in ascertaining accurate statistics, in Canada, people with disabilities are approximately 4 times more likely to experience homelessness than people without disabilities (Canadian Human Rights Commission 2025). Critical disability studies argue that a central way people with disabilities experience oppression is by being “pushed into and/or maintained in a state of homelessness” (Maybee 2020:360). Those unable to jump to their feet and abide by officers’ orders immediately may risk being violently removed from their shelters before having their belongings seized. These instances of violent victimization and the callousness that some PEH experienced complicate some work that positions by-law officers’ approaches to be reluctant criminalization (Martino et al. 2024). As Mikey (man/Indigenous/24 years old) explained, highlighting the odd and visceral reaction to such devastating actions: “It’s weird seeing people throwing out everything that someone owns and like smiling while they’re doing it, you know?” Several other participants echoed this sentiment and highlighted perceptions of being “harassed,” “bullied,” “tormented,” and “taunted” by by-law officers. The harms PEH experience at the hands of by-law officers are pronounced.

Although reports of the physical victimization that Sydney’s husband experienced were not echoed by all, many PEH described the mental and emotional toll these governance strategies create. Jonathan astutely described the need to be vigilant and ready to leave an area and take all of his possessions immediately to protect them from the “constant” threat of by-law enforcement seizure. He emphatically spelled out the consequences of this perdurable threat: “I’m not a paranoid person at all, usually, by any means. But I can’t hear a [truck] backup beeper now without turning my head.” The relentless need to be mobile or face losing everything one owns and other potentially serious repercussions (e.g., fines, violence) viscerally impacts PEH. Jonathan’s narrative further illuminates the deep mental health harms imposed on PEH via the potential of property seizure because it demonstrates how this has manifested “in a sense of anxiety over the unpredictably of life, feelings of helplessness and worthlessness” (Pemberton 2015:29).

Given the detrimental consequences of having your tent and all your possessions taken by by-law officers and the uncertainty about getting all/any of it back, Samantha (woman/White/20 years old) had to be diligent to reduce the likelihood of property seizure: “I had like half a nap at night, and then I woke up at like 7:30 at night, and I was like, I gotta pack up for by-law! I was freaking out.” Although Samantha understood the rules, she explained the challenges in adhering to them: “It’s supposed to be packed up and mobile. But when you have that much stuff, it’s not necessarily so easy to make it mobile.” Samantha explained interrupting her sleep and being overwhelmed with knowing her possessions could be taken and that she was packing up in the middle of the night in darkness. As Samantha’s experiences indicate, the structure of the 7-7 law coupled with by-law officers’ discretion enact a sense of unpredictability that is often shaken by seemingly random and unexpected occurrences, contributing to levels of distress PEH experience daily that can be further compounded by expensive fines and citations.

Beyond this, however, PEH’s forced mobility via the 7-to-7 law unmasks yet another form of social harm: autonomy harm. Participants were acutely aware of how the city regulated them through their belongings, limiting their agency. Bobby underscores how this happens:

By-law officers come in, and they tell everyone to put down the tents—they’re taking everybody’s freedom away. It’s a public place. You can sit anywhere you want. And they’re showing you “Hey, we’re taking your freedom away. You can’t sit here or sleep here.” Yeah, they do that everywhere.

By-law officers’ strict regulation of PEH’s movement impacts their sense of freedom and ability to exist in public spaces, meaning PEH “remain powerless in significant decision-making processes” (Pemberton 2015:30), such as where to sit or sleep. Accordingly, PEH are not able to lead relatively autonomous lives because frequent by-law enforcement limits their “ability to act with confidence or certainty, and to pursue, unhindered, their life choices” (Pemberton 2015:30).

Further exacerbating the show of punitive state power vis-à-vis the flex of municipal powers and the resultant harms for PEH during these sweeps is that by-law enforcement often arrives with a heavy contingent of police officers. Trevor explained this large show of force to us: “They’ll have cops, like at least 10 cops walking up and down the block, telling everyone to leave. Arresting people if they have a warrant” (man/Indigenous/47 years old). We witnessed how these mass sweeps operated as a well-oiled machine, producing a spectacle of violence. For example, during sweeps, enforcement actors parked their vehicles and gathered near the encampments. They would then walk to each campsite, warning that it would be removed. Within 20 minutes, by-law officers and clean-up crews began removals, and police officers monitored residents during the clean-up. Although most of the time police stood back, when encampment residents showed signs of anger/frustration (e.g., yelling), police immediately intervened. This not only compounds the violence of the sweeps themselves but also exacerbates the risk of further criminalization, with police officers attending the scene, intently surveilling PEH when they are concentrated and often cornered in an area (to comply and remove their belongings to by-law enforcement’s standards), and potentially taking criminal-legal action against the those who fail to comply. Situating these experiences in understandings of pervasive penality (Herring et al. 2020) and the shadow carceral state (Beckett and Murakawa 2012) illuminates how processes of criminalization are not undertaken strictly by police and other criminal justice actors and instead are part of an expansive web of administrative tactics that reproduce carcerality. Moreover, how by-law officers and police officers work in conjunction demonstrates that the primary mechanism through which social problems may be addressed is via carceral measures.

By-law regulations and enforcement sometimes also resulted in citations or fines. The added insult of being fined was pervasive, as Jeremy passionately described, “This is people that have nothing, nothing else in the world, and they take everything that you have. . . . And then, [laughs] they give you a ticket!” Samantha articulated how the day before we met, by-law officers arrived at the tent she shared with a friend and that officers were “good” to them, telling them they must disband their tent and have it mobile. The officers left to enforce the 7-to-7 law elsewhere, during which time, Samantha hurriedly tried to pack all their possessions up. Samantha was not finished by the time the officers returned (45 minutes) and said they consequently issued her a fine along with “a warning saying if they came by tomorrow and our stuff was up, they were going to impound it.” For PEH, monetary sanctions can be debilitating, further exacerbating and entrenching poverty (Herring et al. 2020).

In practice, by-law officers ultimately propel the issues and disorder they are intended to curtail. Indeed, they effectively remove any accumulated possessions—identification, tools, money, cellphones—that PEH could use to improve their situation and even secure housing. Accordingly, enacting the 7-by-7 by-law compromises not just “human flourishing” (Pemberton 2015) but also survival. Willow (woman/Indigenous/age missing) recounted by-law officers recently “stealing” her and her partner’s tent and other property, sharing she knows they will not “get it back.” She then went on to say, “The only thing they left behind was dirty laundry. And some other miscellaneous shit. They took our bikes. They took our empties. They took . . . Mike’s work stuff.”

Willow and Mike’s experiences demonstrate how much of what by-law officers steal is essential for PEH’s comfort, survival, and critically, ability to escape homelessness. To illustrate, when by-law officers seize a bicycle, which for many PEH, “is your only transportation” (Jeremy man/40 years old), this not only limits their movements across the city (including seeing family/friends) but can also hinder their ability to access critical services, such as shelters, soup kitchens, food banks, and potential work sites, and to travel to by-law enforcement’s central office to reclaim their seized possessions. This, therefore, can produce notable material harm, further exacerbating their dire circumstances and effectively obstructing their efforts to improve their lives. It can also produce relational harm, augmenting PEH’s exclusion from social relationships and potentially disbanding their supportive social networks and limiting meaningful social contacts (Pemberton 2015:30). Moreover, stealing PEH’s “empties” (empty bottles and cans) decreases the money they have available to them because many collect empties to exchange them at recycling centers for money. ¹² Furthermore, taking “Mike’s work stuff” could hinder his ability to earn money and forge a path out of homelessness for himself and/or Willow. Critically, according to Willow’s account, the by-law officers who took their things were not naive to the importance of these items in their lives. Asking, or rather, demanding, “What the fuck?!” when she noticed what they were taking and the negligible things they left for her and Mike, Willow reports the officer responding, “Well, we took things that mean the most to you.”

Jonathan (man/White/25 years old) had a similar experience. He was emphatic in claiming by-law officers “fucked me over in a lot of places,” illuminating the frequency with which this occurs and, critically, that these encounters traverse different city areas. For Jonathan, encounters with by-law officers did not merely result in the loss of material property but also produced reverberating consequences. He was on a waiting list for housing and was saving up for the necessary damage deposit:

They fucked me out of my last place I was gonna get because he came in and impounded and threw away all the stuff—all the cell phones and electronics I was working on. Because that’s what I do; I fix cell phones, and I unlock them [to sell] and everything. They threw all those out. So that put me back a few [thousands].

Beyond discarding the items Jonathan uses to earn a living, this by-law seizure delayed his ability to access housing, which could have allowed him to sleep and keep his possessions off the very public property by-law officers are tasked with policing. The compounding harms of having items such as those necessary for alleviating poverty (either as transportation to work, e.g., a bicycle, or ID that may be needed to access resources or housing) are tantamount to physical harms and autonomy harms.

Critically, the near guarantee of having by-law officers seize/dispose of one’s tent and other important items has pushed some PEH to weigh the risks of possession seizure against sleeping outdoors without a makeshift shelter. To illustrate, Scott (man/Indigenous/35 years old) has abandoned tenting altogether, opting to instead sleep outside without protection from the elements to avoid contact with by-law enforcement. Undeniably, however, sleeping without any form of shelter subjects Scott and other PEH to additional (climate/victimization/theft-related) risks that tenting may hinder. Despite being intimately aware of the compounded risks sleeping unsheltered may pose, he realizes this is the only way he has a chance to maintain his possessions. He explains this also enables him to avoid by-law interactions entirely: “As soon as I see them coming, I take off.”

The previous accounts uncover how participants’ attempts to limit the frustrations, losses, and harms involved in being subjected to the 7-to-7 by-law have pushed some to give up the (semblance of) safety, warmth, and comfort tents and other makeshift shelters provide. Ultimately, PEH can “choose” between (a) risking by-law enforcement exacerbating their marginalization by taking their only possessions (and potentially fining/assaulting them) and (b) augmenting their marginalization by subjecting themselves to weather-related and other risks to avoid the former option. Irrespective of which “choice” they make, the consequences are the same: The existence and enforcement of the 7-to-7 by-law notably compounds the challenges of attempting to survive on the street. The governance of PEH vis-à-vis their possessions utilize punitive measures that punish them for failing to comply with established by-laws. However, PEH are simultaneously expected to be responsible citizens, capable of avoiding property seizure. The diverse governance strategies that are deployed produce palpable harms and further entrench many within homelessness.

Discussion and Conclusion

This article contributes to scholarship on the governance of poverty by focusing on two key dimensions: (1) how by-law officers govern PEH through their belongings and (2) how this governance produces several interconnected social harms. Our findings show that Victoria by-laws and the actions of by-law officers simultaneously subject PEH into a state of perpetual transience and perpetual (im)mobility. Focusing on belongings as a site of governance provides a window into “understandings of forced homeless mobilities” that Kaufman (2020:323) argues are currently “hindered by a lack of concepts linking social exclusion and spatial displacement” (see also Kaufman 2021). Our work provides one such link. As part of the “homelessness industrial complex” (Dej 2020), these by-law practices serve to manage and maintain PEH in their state of homelessness rather than assist them to forge pathways out of homelessness. Accordingly, for PEH, the right to their possessions is interwoven with their perceived right to improve their conditions. This is particularly concerning given the already negative health outcomes that PEH have, including higher mortality rates, higher rates of communicable diseases (e.g., tuberculosis), and injuries from climatic conditions (e.g., frostbite). Furthermore, considering Canada’s settler colonial context and the high number of Indigenous people who are facing homelessness, it is imperative to account for how colonial structures produce Indigenous homelessness and shape these forms of regulatory violence.

Carceral approaches to homelessness management are enduring (Speer 2018; Tillman 2023); indeed, as Dej (2020:185) argues, given the more tangible atrocities of the criminal justice system, such as lethal police violence, it may be “easy to dismiss the subtle and opaque forms of exclusion.” However, like Dej, we maintain that formally confiscating or informally stealing PEH’s belongings exacerbates social exclusion, perpetuates state harms against PEH, and exists within a web of state apparatuses that continue to rely on carceral approaches to social problems. These forms of “slow violence” (Kramer and Remster 2022; Ward 2015) are routinized and dispersed and move beyond the intent of policing actors. These social harms endure and continue to evolve through new and repurposed forms of governance. The actions and impacts of by-law officers are still absent from much of the scholarship on policing, state violence, and poverty governance. Through a social harm lens, we illuminate these more subtle or opaque forms of exclusion and tie these harms to the centrality of belongings when understanding poverty governance.

Participants experienced the seizure of their personal belongings by by-law officers as harmful (see also Talbot et al. 2024). The pronounced harm and the underlying logics of control and punishment require shifting the analytical understanding of these events from a focus on interpersonal experiences of “property seizure” to one of state violence. As Herring (2019:791) writes, “the state’s theft of homeless people’s property” was “viewed as a punishment worse than arrest” for PEH in San Francisco. Similarly, we demonstrate that having one’s belongings taken and the omnipresent threat of this is an obstacle to escaping poverty enacted by those tasked with poverty governance. Poverty governance approaches that use PEH’s belongings as the pointed site of regulation rely on punitive and responsibilizing approaches. These forms of regulation operate in tandem, producing a reality that neither compliance nor defiance will allow escape.

Christensen (2017:22) writes that “visible homelessness is just one manifestation of what is often a much more complex spectrum of experiences involving both gradual and sudden moves from a state of being housed to being unhoused.” Simultaneously, visible homelessness includes a myriad of states of having and not having possessions—an endless cycle of having possessions lost, traded, stolen by peers, and confiscated by various policing actors. The seizure of PEH’s property is a manifestation of state violence, not simply an individual experience. With only a few areas marked as permissible to put up a shelter, the strict time constraints coupled with indiscriminate property seizure ensure PEH will continue to endure preventable social harms. Here, we have extended the considerable research on punitive/revanchist interventions, to a context outside of the United States, and identified the temporal and spatial dynamics of governance strategies enacted by by-law officers. Furthermore, for participants involved in our specific study, there was considerable overlap in PEH and people who use drugs. Most of the participants we spoke with engaged in some sort of substance use. It is plausible and likely that these intersections could impact the ways by-law officers and other policing actors treat PEH. Our broader scholarship indicates the drugs are a structuring force more generally for PEH across the Canadian context. Here, we can only raise questions that this may have an impact on the ways authorities are mobilizing regarding PEH’s property and belongings. Further research is needed to ascertain perspectives from by-law officers, policing actors, and other stakeholders.

This article captures participants’ perceptions, experiences, and ways of navigating by-law actions in one city. Although we witnessed by-law actions on Pandora Avenue and other city spaces and were thus able to triangulate participants’ narratives via our own observations, our article is limited in that it does not capture governance actors’ experiences and how they narrate their work. Future research should expand knowledge on how municipal regulations surrounding belongings and space operate in other regions/localities based on the perspectives of PEH and workers. Future research should also investigate the impact of by-laws on specific groups, such as people with disabilities, who are overrepresented among the unhoused populations and experience additional obstacles and harm responding to by-law obligations.