“Bureaucrats with Badges”: Bylaw Enforcement and the Invisibilization of Homelessness
Abstract
ABSTRACT Homelessness affects at least 25,000 people every day in Canada alone. Although research has documented responses to homelessness involving the police and private security, there is much less scholarship investigating municipal bylaw enforcement officers’ role in the governance of homelessness. We explore how bylaw officers regulate homelessness in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on surveys and semi-structured interviews with bylaw officers, our analysis demonstrates that bylaw officers have been called upon to manage a “crisis of complaints” related to the increasing visibility of homelessness across Ontario. To manage these complaints, bylaw officers rely on burden shuffling, first, moving people along because it is the most efficient way to manage homelessness complaints in their jurisdiction. Bylaw officers also engage in bureaucratic burden shuffling, reclassifying complaints to other agencies. We argue that, through their mechanisms of enforcing public space orders, bylaw officers engage in reluctant criminalization using invisibilization tactics. These strategies constitute another form of pervasive penality, or a punitive process of policing, through move along orders and threats of arrest, ultimately leading to the invisibilization of homelessness. Such responses increase the precarity that often characterizes unhoused people’s lives and misrepresents homelessness as a deviancy issue rather than a human rights violation.
Ingestion failed: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/srv/app/app/worker.py", line 85, in run_once process_job(db, job) File "/srv/app/app/worker.py", line 39, in process_job pdf_path, info = fetch_pdf_temp(candidate["url"]) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ File "/srv/app/app/downloader.py", line 129, in fetch_pdf_temp raise ValueError(f"PDF source returned HTTP {response.status_code}.") ValueError: PDF source returned HTTP 403.
No local PDF is available.
GROBID Extracted text; discontinued.
This text is generated from TEI extraction for accessibility, search, and TTS. Formulas, tables, figures, page layout, and references may not perfectly match the original PDF.
No accessible text representation is available. The text extraction service has been discontinued for the time being. If you require this service, for accessibility or any other reason, please submit an issue/request on this page.
Metadata
Issues
No public issues have been filed for this DOI.
Submit an issue
Record history
| When | Event | Field | Old | New |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-18 19:37:53.011249+00:00 | identifier_assigned | DSEID | DSEID-000-7324105 |