“They’re Not From Here”: Homelessness as a Contestation of Community Identity for Mid-Size Cities

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Homelessness is growing across the global North, and so too is its visibility. Communities are struggling to respond to homelessness and anti-homeless sentiment from some housed people. While much of the scholarly attention focuses on major urban centres, mid-size communities are also grappling with visible homelessness, in some cases for the first time, with less knowledge and fewer resources to manage homelessness than their big city counterparts. In this article, we study a mid-size city in western Canada to examine how perspectives concerning homelessness, crime, and public safety among diverse groups converge and diverge to understand the root cause of the contention around homelessness. Our analysis uncovers how participants’ perspectives about homelessness in their community are intimately tied to claims of a lost small-town identity. These perspectives, we argue, have negative effects on people who are homeless, both personally as victims of violence and criminalization, and socially in the policies and practices to address homelessness. Using Wacquant’s concept of territorial stigmatization, this article reveals how efforts to exclude people who are homeless from the collective community conscience can have the opposite effect, creating the kind of ‘spatial taint’ across the whole city that these revanchist policies and discourses seek to deflect.