"A homeless camp is better than a homeless shelter."

This is a common sentiment among the homeless, and it demonstrates how broken shelter typology is. The Sentiment is so prominent that I will refer to it with a capital S.

The Sentiment indicates that shelters do not address the needs of the homeless - our clients. Any time clients' needs aren't fulfilled with formal architectural solutions - informal solutions take hold. Sometimes, the solutions involve informal uses of the shelter spaces or subversion of its rules. However, most of the time, the solution is to reject shelter typology outright and to establish a self-built and self-managed homeless camp. This will be referred to as an Informal Solution.

The Sentiment angers and baffles the house-owning onlookers who try to invalidate it outright:

"There are rules in the shelters, and the homeless don't like to follow these rules."

This is true. Both the camps and the shelters attest to that. However, shelters and camps tell different stories of the shelter rules.

What are the shelter rules, and where they came from? Why are they a point of contention for the homeless?

In 2022-2023, I volunteered at homeless shelters and visited homeless camps. I heard the complaints of both employees and residents. In this article, I will summarize my findings about shelters, explore the validity of the Sentiment and outline why the shelter typology is broken on a fundamental level.

Note: this is part 1, where I explore the positive sides of camps and the negative sides of shelters. In part 2, I will do the opposite: negatives of camps, and positives of shelters.

The traditional shelter segregates the clients "to keep peace and avoid drama." Within the existing typology, it is a valid reason. However, the rule ends up severing existing communal and social ties. Also, if you are experiencing homelessness for the first time, it might be hard to navigate a network of specialized shelters and find the one that would take you.

Shelters for Individuals

• Age and sex. Most commonly, shelters serve individuals. Individuals are segregated depending on age and sex. People younger than 18 are referred to youth shelters. Males and females get sex-specific accommodations. Transgenders are referred to separate shelters.

Shelters for Families

• Family. Families are parents or legal guardians with underage children in their care. Other family arrangements are not accepted: families with older kids, families with no kids, uncles/nieces, boyfriends/girlfriends, friends, grandparents/grandchildren. Such families, despite members supporting and relying on each other, are compelled to split up and seek shelter as individuals. The only way they stay together is if they are of the same age and sex group.

• Unusual groups. Poverty creates unusual groups that do not conform to the ideas of a traditional family or span across multiple families — for example, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, and her sister with an adult son. The shelter does not accept such groups.

• Pets. Pets are often considered family members, and they are also not allowed. You are compelled to give up your pet to a local animal shelter, which is obviously a traumatic experience.

Informal Solution

• Anyone is welcome. Camps accept the wildest family and group arrangements. Individuals and groups weave themselves into the fabric of the camp, forming communities. Segregation happens willfully and as needed.  For example, camps form social clusters around having kids or owning pets where supplies are shared among the members. Others prefer to keep to themselves and pitch their tent slightly at a distance.

• Pets allowed. Pets serve as emotional support, alert about intruders, and provide a sense of achievement because you, despite everything, can still take care of your pet.

The poorer you are, the worse the formal architecture treats you. You are no longer accommodated - you are expected to accommodate. Architecture becomes unaware of your personality, culture, and needs. Value Engineering runs rabid and engineers the value out of spaces, making them uninhabitable and uninviting.

Living quarters

• Feel. The formula for housing the homeless is to take a living space and squeeze the living out of it: hospitality, customization, personalization, privacy, etc. Walls get thicker and tougher, treating all clients as unruly in advance and giving them a sense of existential dread upon arrival. You feel, even if you can't express it, that the place will pounce on you, pick you apart, then put you together into a new person, for better or for worse.

• Personalization. Shelters will resist any attempts to customize them and make them your own: stickers, graffiti, posters, etc. Any attempt to leave your mark will be treated as vandalism and removed. The shelter continuously resets to its default blank state. While removing profanities is understandable, how does the "God loves you" message or a sticker hurt present or future occupants? Are blank black steel beds with no trace of use that much better?

• Density and Privacy. You have no control over who your neighbors are, how close they are, and how much privacy you have. Additional privacy barriers you attempt to set up, such as curtains, will be removed for your safety: if you overdose, the staff needs to see it to come to your aid on time. Shelters are always overcrowded and are of set high density. You are expected to be intimately close to people you don't know and tolerate their sounds, odor, and their activities. The chief sound complaint is snoring. The chief odor complaint is bad breath. The chief activity complaint is masturbation (at this point, any of us would prefer a tent that only leaks water). Also, people in shelters change in front of everyone. They could go to the bathrooms and do it there, but it would leave their items exposed to theft.

• Regimen. Shelters adhere to a strict regimen. Namely, you are expected to check in and out every day at a specific time, or you will lose your spot the next cycle. A long line of people on the street want a spot at a shelter, and keeping a bed open, even for one night, is to deny this bed to someone on the street. The times of checking in and checking out are always inconvenient, either too early in the morning or too early in the afternoon, which often disrupts efforts to escape homelessness, such as finding and keeping a job or reconnecting with friends and relatives.

Trash. Shelters are cleaned daily from an excessive amount of trash. This cleaning routine is often cited as a reason for clearing all clients out every day. While messy people exist and are the reason I'll never live with roommates again, I don't think they are a direct reason for the overall mess. Mental illness aside, I believe three reasons are at play:

1. Excessive density. Excessive density, by default, makes a mess (see any alley or street in NYC or a small apartment with four children).

2. No ownership. The fact that people are unable to make shelter feel like home. When you don't have any claims to the space you occupy, you don't care to keep it clean. Talk to any cleaning professional at a hotel and find out what state they find the rooms in.

3. No trashcans. Even in long-term family shelters, there are no trashcans in the units. No trashcans are at bunks or even at the ends of the bunk alleys. The best way to deal with trash at shelters is to collect it into bags (often not provided by the shelters) and then dispose of it in a centralized container. If you don't have a bag, you will leave trash lying around. Imagine if you had to walk every scrap of paper down the block. Even someone devoted to cleanliness would give up one week into this arrangement.

Storage

• Emotional investment.  When you are homeless, you don't have many items. That makes the items you have precious. We might view them as garbage, but for the homeless, these items are a necessity and bear an emotional weight. You are forced to give up most of your items at the entrance shelter, which also becomes a traumatic experience.

• Storage amount. Storage at shelters is limited. Some shelters have no storage at all, while others provide you with a locker. Items that did not fit into a locker will spread throughout the shelter, occupying every nook suitable for storage, such as under beds and on top of lockers. The shelter does not tolerate this improvised storage, and the residents are forced to remove their items "because other residents would steal them." However, the items come back to their places as soon as the staff sweep is completed. Clearly, the clients take the risk of theft over simply throwing the extra items away.

• Storage duration. Individual shelters will force you to leave in the morning and take all the items with you "to clean the shelter and give others a chance to stay." On top of that, the lockers at shelters are of irregular size and do not fit standard bags. Storing your items becomes a constant hassle of loading and unloading your bag and locker. Imagine living in an airport security line, loading and unloading all your possessions every morning and evening.

• Theft. The chief cause of fights, commotions, and drama at shelters is theft. It is hard to keep track of your possessions due to limited secure storage and the overall density of accommodations. Because you load/unload your items every day, it is easy to misplace something and suspect theft, which will cause a conflict with nothing stolen. Also, shelters dread the day when benefit checks come in - the tide of drugs, new items, theft, and the resulting drama and erratic behavior will be high for about a week until accounts are drained.

Informal Solution

• Freedom accommodations. It is a common misconception that any roof is better than a leaking tent. And yet, the leaking tent is yours. You have full control over the way it looks and where it is placed. You can mold and stretch it to your liking, making the architectural fabric flexible. You can claim as much space as you need. You can permanently store as many items as you need. You choose your neighbors. You keep your pets. You have no such luxuries in a shelter. A shelter roof, as nice as it is, is someone else's roof and will resist any attempts to make it feel like home. You have no control over anything, even the thermostat - the main selling point of shelters. At the end of the day, it becomes easier to overcome the exposure challenges of the street than the social challenges of the shelter.

• Storage as building fabric. Camps are knitted from the items and memories of the better times. The items are used to create, subdivide and organize spaces. Meanwhile, the architectural fabric of the shelter consists of indifferent steel, concrete, and cinder blocks with no emotional weight.

• American Frontier. The homeless continue the tradition of tent living on the American frontier. This nomadic way of life in the free country is all but lost today (as the free country became subdivided into lots and claimed). Perhaps there is an argument for reviving this simplistic typology within the modern metropolitan fabric. Some people are not meant for the city, and we should not punish them for it.

Problem: Preconditions

Some shelters implemented the Housing First policy because they recognized that fewer preconditions equal more clients. However, many shelters retain preconditions, whether implicit or spelled out.

• Sacrifice. Even Housing-First shelters expect you to sacrifice most of your possessions at the entrance, sever your social ties, and give up your pets (see above).

• Drugs.

• No drug dealing. "Homeless don't want to go do shelters because they can't do drugs there." This is another common argument seeking to invalidate the Sentiment. Sadly, the homeless can do drugs in shelters, and they do. Drugs follow misery and easily conquer typologies where misery is abundant: prisons, shelters, high schools, etc. The harsh rules and restrictions of typologies are irrelevant: drug dealers are heavily incentivized to overcome any obstacles the typology might present. As such, drugs are dealt in and around shelters.

• No active users. Many shelters have strict "no active users" polity as a precondition. Homeless are expected to defeat their addiction on the street, then come, which disqualifies over half of the potential shelter clients. Also, it's important to remember that addiction is not a direct cause of homelessness but a mere risk factor. There are 20 million people in the US with substance use issues, and only half a million are homeless.

• No drug use. Some shelters attempt to limit drug use on site. This rule is understandable in the context of existing shelter typology. With the occupant density as high as it is, drug-using clients close by would make it more difficult for clients in recovery to remain clean. In fact, shelters prefer to put people in recovery in a separate facility. Overall, eliminating this rule while keeping the shelter typology as is would be counterproductive. 

• Faith. Religion-based shelters at churches often require the clients go to mass as a precondition for staying. If your confession aligns with the mandatory mass - there is no issue. However, the mass becomes a ritual of forced conversion to another religion for all others. There are things to say about encouraging all churches to serve as emergency shelters to ensure a safety net for all denominations and beliefs.

Problem: Location

NIMBY. NIMBY stands for “not in my backyard.” Finding a spot for a shelter is always an issue. Nobody wants a shelter nearby, fearing it would drive down property values. Therefore, the shelters are pushed to the outskirts, to someone else’s less reluctant yard. However, shelters on the outskirts are also less effective as they are far away from job opportunities. The chief cause of homelessness is a lack of affordable housing close to the place of work, and the first goal of any shelter must be to fill this gap.

Informal Solution

All the camps I visited in Minnesota have things in common:

• Forgotten sites. Camps occupy misused, forgotten, and otherwise unlivable sites. The site needs to have relatively low foot traffic, or you will be displaced the same day. Examples of successful sites in Minnesota:

• Abandoned railroad under high-voltage lines,

• Green patch created by highway intersection,

• Green patch by the post office,

• Under the overpass,

• On the sidewalk under the skyway.

• Weather protection. At a minimum, the site needs to be sheltered from the wind by a large wall or trees. Protection from sun and rain is also preferable, so tents tend to pop in under overpasses.

• Access to jobs/hassles. Camps are close to downtown or other high-density areas, where they have access to jobs or hassles to get by. Also, downtown is a ripe target for begging, as many people there have disposable income.

• Transport. All camps are within walking distance (less than 3 minutes) from the tram, bus, or greenway.

We can see that the homeless have a knack for finding unused and uncontested sites of minimum conflict and taking advantage of existing structures. Perhaps, instead of resisting a camp in a certain location, we could formalize them and turn them into shelters.

Problem: Exile.

• Homelessness as punishment. Homeless disrupting the order of shelters will be escorted out on the street (with force if necessary) and forfeit their bunk. On one hand, I get the impulse to throw troublemakers out. On the other hand, troublemakers often suffer from mental distress and cannot be fully responsible for their actions. Even if they do, it appears that homelessness is used as punishment. I believe troublemakers should be referred elsewhere (hospital, jail) instead of being thrown out on the street. People should not be discarded - there must always be a place for them to go next.

Informal Solution

• Managing and tolerating. Imagine somebody on a bus having a meltdown on the seat next to you, and you can't move because the bus is full. Alternatively, imagine somebody having a meltdown at the end of the half-empty bus, and you can observe it from a safe distance and engage/retreat as needed. That is the difference between the crippling set density of a shelter vs the flexible density of camps. Overall, camps empower members to manage, aid, soothe, and, ultimately, tolerate troublemakers without a place to go.

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In part 2, as promised, let’s flip the issue upside down and see the positives of shelter and the negatives of camps. Continue to Part 2…