Workshop identifies new approaches to tent cities

The UBC Housing Research Collaborative brought legal scholars, researchers, and community voices to the Learning Exchange to re-imagine housing advocacy together. Here is their report.

Sep 18, 2025
Cover of the "Confronting Sweeps: Reimagining Advocacy for Tent Cities" report. On the cover is an image of debris on the street with a Vancouver traffic barrier. At the bottom of the image is the name of the Principal Investigator, Alexandra Flynn, and the names of the people on the project team, Alina McKay, Gunreet Sethi, and Sarah Lewis. The bottom corner shows the Housing Research Collaborative logo.

When seeking court orders, municipalities often cite financial and legal liabilities reasons for clearing out tent cities in places like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

If they instead made support for encampments a core policy decision rather than an operational decision, it may remove those liability concerns in the eyes of the law.

This is one of many interesting recommendations from a recent report on encampments published by UBC’s Housing Research Collaborative (HRC). Called Confronting Sweeps: Reimagining Advocacy for Tent Cities, the report is the result of a full-day workshop funded by the Law Commission of Canada by the Housing Research Collaborative hosted at the UBC Learning Exchange in June.

The report also recommends creating a Homeless Bill of Rights that could help guide government action, affirm the rights of people who are precariously housed, and re-frame homelessness as a civil rights issue, something that the report says has been beneficial in other jurisdictions.

To read about some of the other practical recommendations, download the report here.

The workshop brought together legal scholars, frontline advocates, community organizers, and individuals with lived experience of housing precarity to discuss the implications of street sweeps, proposed zoning changes in the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District (DEOD), and restrictive bylaws that criminalize unhoused people for being in public spaces.

The Housing Research Collaborative is a research hub at the University of British Columbia that brings together housing researchers to focus on structural impediments and unaffordability within the housing system. To learn more about their work, go to the Housing Research Collaborative website.

The UBC Learning Exchange, located at 612 Main St. in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, offers free space to community and research groups working together on pressing community issues like housing precarity. To find out more about available space and resources, contact the Operations and Engagement Coordinator.