Jeff Karabanow bridges action and fieldwork in the struggle to end homelessness

Jeff Karabanow is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. He has worked with homeless populations in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Guatemala. His research focuses primarily upon housing stability, service delivery systems, trauma, and homeless youth culture. I want to say, first, that right now we don’t even really know how many people are currently experiencing homelessness in so-called Canada. The number could be anywhere between 150,000 to 300,000, according to the Homeless Hub, a research centre at York University. That is too wide of a range. What that range says is that our system cannot see unhoused people. The tools we are using—for example, Homeless Hub is using AI now to predict that the number will swell to over half a million people by 2030—the tools we are using to measure and respond to the problem are fundamentally broken. One of the big themes in this conversation is the idea of vulnerability, or rawness. It’s clear to anyone who is paying attention that the people who are living unhoused are vulnerable. They’re vulnerable to extreme weather, to so-called “deaths of despair,” they’re vulnerable to violence, among other forms of harassment and precarity. But the other side of vulnerability has to do with those of us who are housed, and who are buffered from the serious social issues that exist right outside our door. Much of what Jeff does is about breaking down barriers. The visible and invisible barriers to radical social change that keep the solvable problem of homelessness in a state of perpetual disaster. We break down those barriers in this conversation: they include systems of policymaking that exclude first voices, academic research practices that don’t authentically include a community-based aspect, a reticence about cultivating what Jeff calls “caring, authentic spaces” in a world that sometimes punishes us for trying. Engaging with everyone is really what’s required to get answers pushed into place, but that means looking seriously at the hierarchies, the opaque strategies of exhaustion, that privilege some and punish others. It also means taking seriously the effects of our histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that are about extraction and exploitation of the land and people. I know it’s a lot, but that is where the language that Jeff uses for outlining the problem becomes so valuable. At the heart of it is just this idea that, actually, housing is the “foundation of… healthy, dignified living.” As much as he gestures to the importance of being raw and real and letting emotion be an acceptable part of political communication, Jeff is also really emphatic about the fundamental question of dignity and dignified living, which is the crux of recognizing the displacement of people onto the streets by an unfeeling system as a clear and present disaster. People shouldn’t have to show their resilience the way this system makes them. People need homes, they need subsistence, they need a proliferation of spaces where a strong culture of care exists. They do not need a system that seeks to silence and sideline them, push them aside. Maybe the most striking thing that Karabonow explains in this conversation is that the solutions are simple. What’s complicated is the matter of building the relationships necessary to influence policy. This is why he drives home the fact that political action is crucial, collective struggle is important, making sure we’re using tactics that move people is essential. Because, in his words, “homelessness has always been a disaster.” When that disaster is visible, that is the time to act with a sense of urgency, but even and especially when that disaster is invisibilized, it is still time to act with a sense of urgency.