How city design limits homeless people to camping and sleeping in public spaces in Salt Lake City

Irregular stones fill a strip of parkland that was once green with grass near the homeless women’s shelter in Salt Lake City. A metal armrest protrudes from the banks of the city’s Fairmont Park. And in Pioneer Park, which was once the epicenter of the homeless in the state, there are no banks.

These subtle environmental interventions are largely invisible to many in Utah’s capital. But homeless people recognize the projects as a way to discourage those who have no home to camp in certain areas or sleep in public parks.

The rocks that were recently placed near Geraldine King’s Women’s Resource Center at 700 South, for example, “made it so that they could not camp on that side,” observed a homeless woman, who declined to be identified, in a recent interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. “So there is nowhere to go.”

Proponents of so-called “hostile architecture” say that it is sometimes necessary to end unwanted behavior. But opponents and academics studying the effort say it sends a message to people who live without a roof that they are not welcome in the community and do not belong.

“Those [are] visual cues and visual cues that there are certain members of our society that we do not want in certain places; they are not welcome, ”said Sarah Canham, associate professor at the University of Utah in the Department of Urban and Metropolitan Planning. “We are essentially dehumanizing them.”

“Defensive architecture”, as it is also known, is sometimes geared towards skaters, with designs characterized by metallic buttons protruding from previously smooth surfaces that prevent someone from going down them.

Many other examples are aimed at homeless communities, with anti-homeless architecture in cities around the world ranging from anti-sleep benches to street spikes or window sills with spikes that prevent someone from resting in a particular area.

But people outside these populations hardly ever realize how their environment is designed to favor some behaviors over others, noted Canham, who teaches a course in the United States that examines the distribution of social, environmental and economic resources in cities.

“People who are not subject to these feelings of dehumanization and otherness are not necessarily aware of it,” she said. “They kind of go through society and the world and everything is fine because they don’t have that constant confrontation with the things that are trying to keep them out and trying to keep them down.”

Whether visible to the general public or not, Canham argues that the effort to prevent people living in the homeless from using public spaces in certain ways is problematic, because design cannot solve the basic challenges that cause people to live. people become homeless or barriers that prevent them from leaving the streets.

“Essentially, the effect is to move them completely, and we have to ask where?” she said. “If there are people who are not sheltered, they have to go somewhere and you don’t have enough shelter beds for people. And so it’s like, what is our system solution that we’re talking about? “

‘Rocks don’t do any good’

The parking strip in front of the Liberty Senior Center in Salt Lake City – nestled between Geraldine King Women’s Resource Center on the street to the west and Taufer Park immediately to the east – used to be a popular place for homeless people to pitch a tent. .

But the space recently became inhospitable for campers after the senior center tore the grass from the park’s strip and put rocks in its place earlier this year.

Paul Leggett, a spokesman for the aging and adult services division of Salt Lake County, said in an e-mail that the rocks are “an environmental design intervention to prevent long-term encounters there.”

“These meetings were not compatible with the use of the building for the Aging and Adult Services,” he added. “By installing the rocks, we were also able to solve public health problems outside the facility.”

The center decided to lay the stones, he said, after regular vandalism and human waste became such a prevalent problem that a landscaper said he would no longer be willing to provide services if things didn’t change. There were also elderly people who came to the center who reported to employees “that they did not feel safe about getting lunch”, which prompted the elderly center to move its lunch program temporarily to a different building.

After the camp was cleared in October 2020, the senior center found that the grass and irrigation system had been damaged and decided to replace it with stone “as a more sustainable option, as well as something that would deter these health concerns. return to the center, ”said Leggett.

Rocks have also recently been added to a park strip a little further on, at the corner of 700 South and State Street.

Penny Payton, a 45-year-old woman who stayed at the Geraldine King Resource Center, said in an interview that she recognizes that rocks are a way for homeowners to “protect their business”.

“But I just think they are doing it the wrong way,” she added.

The best solution for her would have been to allow her to camp there overnight, but to let people out in the morning. Better yet, she said, local leaders should have built more beds in the resource center system for homeless people.

“I really think they should have built Sears at the shelter,” said Payton, referring to the large closed department store on State Street and 700 South. “We would have a lot more space than this, we could accommodate a lot more.”

For Michelle Nathan, a 48-year-old who sometimes camped in the area nearby the women’s shelter, the rocks are “truly an answered prayer”. She hopes they will keep some people away who she says are strategically staying in camps to attack women who “leave” the shelter for breaking the rules.

“I said the rosary to make the boys go,” she said. “I don’t believe that the men should be camped here.”

But a homeless woman interviewed by The Tribune, who declined to be identified, said the group of campers who had previously settled in front of the senior center did not leave – they just moved out onto the street.

“All that is happening is that they are dispersed,” she said. “They are [still] waiting for the women to leave. If you go to watch, most of the women who leave are disabled, mentally ill, some kind of vulnerability. And there are predators out there waiting for them. The point is that the rocks do no good. “

Discouraging overnight stays

While the rocks present a relatively new case study of hostile architecture in the city, other examples are older, such as “anti-sleep” benches in several Salt Lake City parks that have an armrest in the middle that prevents someone from lying through them.

These benches are not present in all public spaces in the city, not even in some of its largest. The Salt Lake Tribune did not find them in Liberty Park, Sugar House Park or Washington Square outside City Hall, for example.

Armrest benches have probably become more common in the city over the past decade and are only placed in a park when an old bench needs to be replaced, according to Kristin Riker, deputy director of public land in Salt Lake City.

These armrest seats, which will become the standard for replaced seats in the future, are installed for a variety of reasons, she said, including accessibility, since seats with backs and armrests “better accommodate the elderly and those with disabilities. accessibility”.

But Riker said that seat design is also one of several methods the city uses to discourage overnight stays – including “lighting, tree and bush maintenance and security” – in accordance with city laws that close parks at night and prohibit camps.

“The parks are closed at dusk for irrigation and also for security reasons,” she said by email. “Illegal activity can occur in Municipal Parks late at night and this activity can have an impact on the daytime use of the park by city residents. Ultimately, our role is to ensure that city parks continue to be safe public spaces for everyone who wants to use them. “

Hostile architecture often takes the form of a physical object that prevents people from using space in a certain way. But the lack of an object can also influence the way people use public space – such as the absence of banks at Pioneer Park in the Rio Grande neighborhood of Salt Lake City, which was once the epicenter of services for the homeless in the city. .

The lack of benches has a disproportionate impact on people “looking for a place to rest or sit during the day because you don’t have a home or are out of the shelter during the day,” said Canham.

Riker said the benches were removed from the park more than five years ago. As the city begins a public engagement process to hear how residents want new funds to be used to improve the park, benches can be added back, she said.

Scott Howell, a leader of the Pioneer Park Coalition, said he cannot remember a time when there were benches in the park and did not think that their absence was the result of a concerted effort to prevent homeless people from using the space. .

And if it were, he said it is something he would not personally support.

“You can’t segment the park market in my opinion,” he said. “A park is a place for everyone. If some people lie down on a bench, I think it might be me lying on a bench. This could be you going there, taking 15 minutes in the beautiful, strong sun and just enjoying it. “

The best way to deal with the homeless problem, he said, is to get people who are homeless “get back to work and help them get to mental health appointments, help them recover from addiction.”

“I don’t know much about [hostile architecture], “he added.” But I don’t think it’s a way to resolve this. “

Canham agreed that defensive architecture is not a long-term solution. Finally, she emphasized that public spaces are for everyone – including people who live without a roof.

“In these public spaces we are all neighbors,” she said. “We are all in this together. We are all part of this community, so it is not appropriate, in my opinion, to suggest that one person is more valuable than another. And for having these symbols in our communities that purposely exclude a section of our community … this is not the community I want to live in. ”