Unsheltered Homelessness in Urban Parks: Perspectives on Environment,Health,and Justice in Salt Lake City,Utah

Introduction

Cities and urban domains are often ideal sites for critically considering the concept and practice of public space. Cities are “necessarily public—and therefore places of social interaction and exchange with people who are necessarily different… The city is the place where difference lives.” ¹ Urban public space is a space of diversity, where residents, visitors, politicians, managers, and other constituents come into contact and interaction with those who are more likely to think, look, talk, and behave in ways that are somehow “different.” Included here are those facing homelessness, among the most marginalized populations, in dire need of voice, representation, and possibility. ² Individuals facing homelessness should be involved in “right to the city” ³ movements, which seek to reclaim the city as a shared and cocreated space of inclusivity, where democracy is produced and subsequently flourishes. Right to the city approaches have broad implications, as appropriately conceptualizing the urban is a precondition for understanding society itself. ⁴

This justice-oriented struggle for a right to the city is central to understanding urban homelessness and its interconnections with public space. As individuals facing homelessness necessarily lack continuous uninterrupted access to private space, their lives are lived in the public realm. ⁵ Public space is a necessary precondition for democracy at large, although it is even more intimately vital for those facing homelessness. However, access to public space varies substantially for different people based upon individuals' identities, norms, and values, ⁶ with dire implications for people without consistent access to housing.

For those facing homelessness, pubic space is an issue of existence. Often, their very freedoms to be are curtailed, based upon their access to public space, as “no one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere he is free to perform it…” ⁷ In unpacking the experiences of homelessness and the urban poor, there is a persistent conundrum associated with public behavior, rights, and legal ramifications:

Those who live in public space engage in acts that are constantly seen and viewed by passerby… [T]hose whose acts are public are ultimately more vulnerable to being accused of indecency, if not illegality. On the other hand, those whose most basic functions as well as deviant behaviors take place in the privacy of apartments are much less vulnerable to appearing indecent or being stigmatized by accusations of breaking the law. ⁸

In many cities, simply existing and being in public space are cause for police engagement and harassment, if not being explicitly illegal. Of 187 cities surveyed between 2011 and 2014, 34% had citywide laws banning camping in public, 43% prohibited sleeping in vehicles, and 53% banned sitting or lying down in certain public places. ⁹ These laws, prominent across the United States, criminalize particular activities—sitting, resting, sleeping, and others—that are fundamental to human existence. Criminalizing these basic behaviors compounds problems associated with homelessness. Particularly as municipalities enact and enforce laws specifically targeting individuals facing homelessness, it becomes common to stigmatize their behaviors, appearances, and their overall visibility in the urban landscape, as individuals facing homelessness, those whose lives exist by definition in the public domain, are often visible representations of poverty.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) defines unsheltered homelessness as including people who live in “a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, sidewalks, abandoned buildings, or on the street.” ¹⁰ Streets, alleyways, transit stations, abandoned buildings, vehicles, and other spaces in the urban environment serve as sleeping locations, storage facilities, and homes for those facing homelessness. In addition, many facing unsheltered homelessness reside in less built urban spaces such as parks, canyons, riverbeds, greenfields, and brownfields.

Unsheltered homelessness, individuals living outside of permanent housing options or available shelters, ¹¹ is thought to be increasing, with >100 “tent city” urban encampments across the United States, ¹² and cities planning for their continuation. ¹³ Some encampments hide to avoid legal problems or evictions and must move frequently, whereas others are widely known by law enforcement and city planners and last for decades. Self-sheltering encampments have seen a reported 1342% increase in the number of unique homeless encampments from 2007 to 2017, in every state in the United States. ¹⁴ Encampments tend to draw increased attention to unsheltered homelessness, and the conditions faced in these settings can vary considerably. Camps are often thought of as “the most visible and politically toxic manifestation of a city's homeless crisis.” ¹⁵ As part of right to the city movements seeking more just accommodations for those at the lowest ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, there are general needs for basic affordable housing as part of urban policy, and also more urgent sanitation infrastructure in the existing camps. ¹⁶

Increasingly, urban public spaces are planned and managed with homelessness as a central concern, and the nonhuman physical environment as both a tactic and an outcome. For instance, private consulting and education firms, using techniques such as “crime prevention through environmental design,” ¹⁷ host trainings for city planners, managers, architects, and law enforcement on how to manipulate the physical material environment to discourage homelessness in parks and elsewhere. More than 75% of park and recreation agencies use, or are considering, design and infrastructure elements that discourage homelessness in parks, while also acknowledging that public municipal parks are vital for surviving homelessness. ¹⁸

Research usually examines unsheltered homelessness as a sociopolitical problem, or as a population in need of human physical and psychological health. However, recent interrogations from political ecology perspectives engage with various ecological dimensions of sociopolitical conditions, including the environments produced by and through unsheltered homelessness. ¹⁹ From similar critical perspectives, emerging research has engaged more explicitly with environmental justice dimensions of unsheltered homelessness, where access, availability, and inclusivity are emphasized. ²⁰ Such critical approaches can examine how public space and nature interact with homelessness to produce forms of social and environmental justices in the city.

Social and environmental justice concerns in parks and protected areas have often focused on large conservation areas, ²¹ or smaller urban parks and their public planning processes, ²² and their accessibility based upon issues of race, gender, class, and/or geography. ²³ However, research has yet to examine ways in which urban natural public spaces support three distinct pressures: urban populations and their increasing outdoor recreational needs, the imperatives of ecological integrity and conservation, and how these spaces serve as residences for individuals facing homelessness.

Context and Methods

This research addresses outdoor recreationists' perceptions of unsheltered homelessness in City Creek Canyon (CCC), a riparian corridor traversing the urban–wildland interface directly adjacent to the urban core of Salt Lake City, Utah. CCC is densely treed with rolling hills, home to coyotes, bobcats, mountain lions, foxes, moose, elk, deer, and numerous avian species. CCC has a 6-mile paved roadway (open seasonally) adjacent to a perennial stream, ideal for many types of outdoor recreation. In addition to outdoor recreation, City Creek is a culinary water supply for Salt Lake City. As many as 21% of people facing homelessness in Salt Lake City sleep outdoors, ²⁴ and CCC is a space where people facing homelessness often socialize, eat, sleep, use the bathroom, and reside. Recreational corridors such as CCC suggest a linearity to user behavior, and also may necessitate increased encounters with others, meaning that canyon goers, regardless of their housing status, are likely to encounter one another. CCC is a location where outdoor recreation, conservation, and homelessness intersect in seemingly incompatible ways.

In this study, researchers intercepted and surveyed nonhomeless outdoor recreation participants of CCC to determine their awareness of homelessness, as well as their perceptions of recreational and ecological impacts of homelessness in the canyon. Researchers collected data from users entering the mouth of CCC, using stratified random probability sampling approaches to ensure a representative sample of CCC users. Research participants were asked to read a series of eight statements concerning homelessness in CCC. These items indicate the degree to which people experiencing homelessness are perceived to use CCC and provoke feelings concerning safety (awareness factors), and the perceived impacts of homelessness on ecological systems (environmental factors). Participants were asked the degree to which these aspects of homelessness are occurring, and also the degree to which these aspects of homelessness impact their recreation. The items were scored on Likert-type scales, ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 5 (“strongly agree”).

Results and Discussion

A total of 332 useable surveys were collected detailing CCC outdoor recreation participants' demographics, recreation use history, and perceptions of homelessness and its environmental impacts in the riparian corridor. Demographics of research participants (Table 1) show relevant gender diversity, as well as reported age, income, and education levels. As compared with both national and local averages, the population of CCC users is decidedly skewed toward white people (89.3%), relatively high income (>75% of users report income >$50,000, whereas Salt Lake City's median income is $47,243), and relatively high levels of education (>80% of users have a 4-year degree or higher, 9% higher than Salt Lake City). There were no significant differences for race, income, and education between genders, or between weekday and weekend users of CCC.

Analyses of users' perceptions of unsheltered homelessness in CCC indicate that users understand that individuals facing homelessness use the canyon and the facilities, but that neither of these awareness factors actually has a substantial influence on participants' recreation uses or trends in CCC, and these items were not judged to be substantial concerns (Table 2). Data were compared across gender categories, and no significant differences were found between male and female CCC users on any item in the survey. Scores >3.00 “neutral” indicate that these items are more agreed with than not, whereas scores <3.00 indicate that these items are more disagreed with than not.

The difference between occurrence scores and influence scores is positive for all eight items, indicating that awareness of occurrence consistently outweighs those items' influence on recreational behavior. No mean score for the influence items is >3.00, indicating that people tend to broadly and comprehensively disagree that homelessness is influencing their recreation in CCC. Of note, the largest difference score between awareness and occurrence is for items concerning presence of homelessness (1.30) and using this area to sleep (1.23); users recognize that homelessness exists in CCC, but it does not weigh heavily on recreation choices and behaviors. From a park and public space management perspective, it should be noted that the lowest occurrence item concerned feeling unsafe because of homelessness in CCC. Visitors more agree than disagree that individuals facing homelessness are perceived to be present in the canyon, sleep in the canyon, and use the facilities (restrooms and water fountains) in the canyon. All three of the environmental items had scores <3.00, indicating that visitors do not see individuals facing homelessness as having a negative impact on the environment, wildlife, or water quality. The perceived impact on water quality scores may be low because CCC provides seasonal restroom facilities throughout the length of the canyon.

Conclusion

This research contributes to the literature concerning urban unsheltered homelessness and the perceptions and management of urban parks. Park visitors reported ambivalence toward the presence of homelessness, its potential impacts on recreational behaviors, and its perceived impacts on ecological functioning, including water quality and wildlife influences. For individuals facing homelessness, these findings may be a matter of existence in the fabric of the urban environment. As antihomeless laws and ordinances continue to regulate publics space throughout U.S. municipalities, acceptance of individuals facing homelessness in parks and other less-built areas is a vital resource for their presence in urban public space. Furthermore, as opposed to streets, alleyways, and other aspects of the built environment, temporary residence in unbuilt spaces may provide respite from a number of social and environmental difficulties. For instance, residing near waterways provides individuals facing homelessness with access to drinking and bathing water, and cooler more comfortable shaded areas in the summer, but also increases exposure to pathogens and legal persecution. ²⁵ Parks and protected areas can also provide a sense of place and safety, even as such locations are often associated with restrictive ordinances and aggressive law enforcement.

In addition, this research illustrated that both environmental concerns and fear of homelessness in parks by outdoor recreation participants are less absolute than perhaps previously thought. Residing in parks may have a number of ecological effects, but participants indicated across demographic groups that these impacts are not primary concerns. In addition, both female and male participants indicated that there was not a substantial concern for safety in the presence of unsheltered homelessness in CCC. These results suggest a favorable response toward a type of libertarian paternalism ²⁶ in engaging with homelessness, where social service institutions can demonstrate support and concern, while also respecting individuals' independence and freedom of choice. Furthermore, these findings of decreased fear and decreased concern of environmental impacts support the critical urbanist idea of right to the city movements, where vulnerable populations, such as those facing unsheltered homelessness, need space, voice, and representation, a perspective fundamentally aligned with various justice orientations. Increased acceptance of people living in public space by dominant groups points to a possibility of a more socially and environmentally just organization of our urban environments. Right to the city movements “seek to establish a different kind of order, one built not on the fears of the bourgeoisie but on the needs of the poorest and most marginalized residents.” ²⁷ Analyses from this study suggest that such right to the city movements may have support in these efforts.

Urban parks and public spaces remain pivotal spaces in projects seeking greater justice. Access to these spaces, for all community members—rich and poor, of all races, genders, and expressions, human and nonhuman—is vital in a flourishing democracy. Public spaces, though, are not evenly distributed throughout the urban environment, and these spaces have different attributes that make them more or less amenable to various community members and groups. ²⁸ Through the provision of a variety of urban ecosystem services, parks and urban green space provide physical, psychological, social, ecological, and economic benefits to urban residents. For people who rely on public space for their survival, their social acceptance and perceived nonthreatening presence in parks and protected areas are a necessary imperative. Unsheltered homelessness, at its core, is an environmental justice issue. This research suggests that park and protected area users in Salt Lake City understand that people facing unsheltered homelessness are both present and a manageable social and environmental concern.