Medicine, Faculty of
Non UBC
Medicine, Department of
DSpace
Manson, Daniel
Fast, Danya
This article explores the experiences of young people navigating an evolving system of housing and homelessness services in Vancouver, Canada. Despite recent shifts toward Housing First policies and calls for prevention-oriented initiatives, many young people continue to rely on temporary emergency accommodations. Amid a surge in youth homelessness and unstable housing in Vancouver, our study examines young people’s “homing” strategies across time and place and temporary and more permanent living environments. We draw from an ongoing ethnographic study that began in 2021 and has involved over 70 interviews and 100 h of fieldwork with 54 young people aged 19 to 29. Our findings emphasize that feeling at home extends beyond having a roof over one’s head for an extended period of time. A focus on homing strategies—that is, the day-to-day practices, routines, and forms of sociality that generate a sense of stability and care even in un-homelike places—highlights how young people can be better supported in making themselves at home in the places where they live, potentially preventing returns to street-based homelessness. This study contributes insights to youth homelessness prevention policies, urging a strengths-based approach that aligns with young people’s needs, priorities, and desires for homemaking.
Citation: Manson, D.; Fast, D. MakingHomes in Un-Homelike Places amongYoung People in Vancouver:Implications for HomelessnessPrevention. Youth 2024, 4, 885–904.https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4020057Academic Editors: Jacqueline Sohn,Rebecca Stroud and JacquelineKennellyReceived: 22 March 2024Revised: 21 May 2024Accepted: 5 June 2024Published: 9 June 2024Copyright: © 2024 by the authors.Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.This article is an open access articledistributed under the terms andconditions of the Creative CommonsAttribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).ArticleMaking Homes in Un-Homelike Places among Young People inVancouver: Implications for Homelessness PreventionDaniel Manson 1,2,* and Danya Fast 1,21 Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3, Canada;danya.fast@bccsu.ubc.ca2 British Columbia Centre on Substance Use, Vancouver, BC V5Z 1M9, Canada* Correspondence: daniel.manson@bccsu.ubc.caAbstract: This article explores the experiences of young people navigating an evolving system ofhousing and homelessness services in Vancouver, Canada. Despite recent shifts toward HousingFirst policies and calls for prevention-oriented initiatives, many young people continue to rely ontemporary emergency accommodations. Amid a surge in youth homelessness and unstable housingin Vancouver, our study examines young people’s “homing” strategies across time and place andtemporary and more permanent living environments. We draw from an ongoing ethnographic studythat began in 2021 and has involved over 70 interviews and 100 h of fieldwork with 54 young peopleaged 19 to 29. Our findings emphasize that feeling at home extends beyond having a roof over one’shead for an extended period of time. A focus on homing strategies—that is, the day-to-day practices,routines, and forms of sociality that generate a sense of stability and care even in un-homelikeplaces—highlights how young people can be better supported in making themselves at home inthe places where they live, potentially preventing returns to street-based homelessness. This studycontributes insights to youth homelessness prevention policies, urging a strengths-based approachthat aligns with young people’s needs, priorities, and desires for homemaking.Keywords: homing; home; homelessness; young people who use drugs; prevention; temporary housing1. IntroductionThis article examines the experiences of young people who use drugs (ages 19 to 29)as they navigate an expanding system of housing and homelessness services in Vancouver,Canada. Vancouver’s policy response to homelessness has historically reflected broadertrends in North America and Europe, with a focus on addressing homelessness primarilythrough shelters, safehouses, and short-term transitional housing [1,2]. More recently, in2017, as part of its Rapid Response to Homelessness program, the City of Vancouver investedin the expansion of Housing First-inspired supportive housing projects aimed at providingmore permanent pathways out of homelessness [3,4]. This was an important shift awayfrom managing homelessness toward providing low-barrier access to housing with in-tegrated primary care, mental health, substance use, and social (e.g., life skills training)services intended to help prevent residents from returning to homelessness [5]. Accordingto the Rapid Response to Homelessness framework, supportive housing in Vancouver mustinclude 24/7 staffing and provide daily meals, access to free or low-cost laundry services,group and individual life skills programming, and social and recreational programs. Staffin supportive housing buildings are formally tasked with connecting residents to commu-nity programs and education and work opportunities, as well as income and disabilityassistance [4]. The objective has been to swiftly provide housing for individuals facinghomelessness or at risk of homelessness and particularly individuals who struggle withmental health and substance use challenges [6]. Distinct from earlier approaches, individu-als can reside in supportive housing without being required to maintain abstinence fromYouth 2024, 4, 885–904. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth4020057 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/youthYouth 2024, 4 886substance use or engage in treatment [7]. While these programs serve young people overthe age of 18, there is currently no dedicated supportive housing for minors in Vancouver.As part of its comprehensive housing strategy, the City of Vancouver has outlineda “Housing Continuum” that extends from low-barrier shelters and transitional hous-ing for people experiencing homelessness to affordable independent rental housing andhomeownership [8]. Along this continuum, there are a number of options available toyoung people who use drugs. Youth homeless shelters offer temporary accommodation,typically in dormitory-style settings, and provide access to basic necessities and linkedservices to young people under the age of 25. Safe houses for youth offer discreet andsecure emergency housing for individuals between the ages of 16 and 18 who are exitingunsafe situations. Safe houses are meant to transition young people rapidly into morestable and long-term forms of housing. Transitional homes for youth are temporary andhighly structured group living situations in apartment or detached market rental housingthat are designed to assist young people transitioning out of government care, unstablehousing, and substance use treatment and recovery programs. In Vancouver, this type ofhousing often requires young people to maintain abstinence from substance use and accessconnected educational and vocational programs meant to foster an eventual transitioninto independent housing. Supportive housing facilities offer permanent or long-termhousing units supplemented by on-site support services that include substance use andmental health treatment and life skills training, providing residents with ongoing assis-tance to ideally maintain housing stability. Much of Vancouver’s supportive housingstock is modular housing, rapidly deployable prefabricated housing units typically con-sisting of self-contained studio or one-bedroom apartments. Modular housing typicallyoffers similar support services to supportive housing. Most of Vancouver’s supportiveand modular housing is not specifically designed for young people, but those over age18 may live in units in adult buildings. Young people over the age of 18 also reside ingovernment- and privately-owned single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels. Many of thesesingle-room dwellings with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities were built in the early1900s, and their physical conditions vary widely [9]. While government-owned SROs aresubsidized, rent for privately owned SROs regularly exceeds the shelter allowance fromsocial assistance payments, and residents are frequently subject to eviction [10]. Despitethe recent move toward a Housing First-inspired approach, most government spendingand policy attention in Vancouver continues to be primarily oriented toward temporaryemergency accommodations along the housing continuum, such as shelters and transitionalhomes [11].Across North America, the number of people experiencing homelessness and unstablehousing has continued to grow dramatically since the early 2000s. Vancouver recorded a32-percent increase in street-based homelessness between 2020 and 2023, the largest spikeobserved since formal counts began in 2005 [12]. Eight percent of those counted were under25 years old, and a third of those counted had a history of government care involvement.Indigenous people are overrepresented in all levels of the child welfare system and inhomeless counts in Vancouver and the rest of Canada [13–16]. As Métis scholar JesseThistle [17] (p. 6) has noted:Indigenous homelessness is not [only] defined as lacking a structure of habitation;rather, it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens ofIndigenous worldviews. These include individuals, families and communitiesisolated from their relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other,animals, cultures, languages and identities.Indigenous experiences and definitions of homelessness may be unique from those ofsettlers, and it is likely that many metrics and prevention policies do not adequately accountfor these more holistic definitions of home and homelessness. Indigenous young peoplehave been at the center of national residential school and contemporary government carepolicies that have collectively removed them from their homes, shaping intergenerationalexperiences of homelessness [18]. Both Indigenous and settler young people often expe-Youth 2024, 4 887rience “hidden homelessness” (i.e., staying or “couch surfing” temporarily with friendsor extended family members) and are therefore excluded from street-based homelessnesscounts. Thus, the number of young people under 25 years of age experiencing unstablehousing is likely much higher than formal counts reveal [13,19]. The growing numberof young people experiencing unstable housing and homelessness in places like Vancou-ver highlights the inability of Housing First models to definitively reduce homelessnessindependently of other policy and programming shifts.Efforts to shift Canadian homelessness policy toward a prevention-oriented modelare currently underway, and the potential for large-scale implementation across provincialjurisdictions needs to be explored in terms of the impacts on young people [20]. This isespecially true for young people who use drugs and are experiencing structural oppressionalong overlapping axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. As our team has de-scribed elsewhere, young people’s drug use patterns are powerfully shaped by the physical,psychological, emotional, and spiritual harms associated with seemingly “endless” cyclesof street-based homelessness and unstable housing [21,22]. These harms are compoundedfor those whose cycles of residential instability include time spent in institutions such asfoster care and group homes, correctional facilities, and hospitals [23]. According to a2023 provincial coroner’s report, more than half of the 353 toxic drug-related deaths ofyoung people under 29 years old took place in the housing environments described aboveor in public settings associated with unstable housing [24,25]. In other words, the harmsassociated with young people’s substance use and housing instability often extend into thehousing environments ostensibly designed to address experiences of homelessness.In 2019, the Government of Canada committed to a national prevention-orientedresponse to homelessness called Reaching Home, with key objectives that include a 50%reduction in chronic homelessness by 2027, targeted support for Indigenous people, anddeveloping coordinated systems of access in provincial and municipal contexts to connectpeople to local housing services [11]. A coordinated access system involves establishingdefined community access points and a common assessment tool to better prioritize andmatch the needs of individuals and families with available housing interventions [26].This policy response has important implications for prevention because it recognizes theneed to disrupt the link between the involvement of Indigenous and other young peoplein government care and homelessness and housing instability. It also recognizes thatreducing the number of young people entering homelessness requires better coordinationbetween the homelessness sector and other systems of care (e.g., government care, mentalhealth services). Reaching Home relies on public health conceptualizations of homelessnessthat target particular populations with evidence-based resources that increase in intensityaccording to levels of risk and are aimed at connecting individuals to stable homes [27].Reaching Home is an important step toward creating a multifaceted prevention-orientedresponse to homelessness in Canada. Yet, important questions remain regarding whatconstitutes a “stable home” or even home more broadly among young people who haveexperienced residential instability across their lives [28]. In order to understand the impactsof prevention-oriented homelessness policies on young people in settings like Vancouver, itis necessary to examine what stability and home mean to them as they navigate multipleliving environments. Indeed, a growing body of literature has examined the relationshipsbetween home, homelessness, and housing, including among young people [29–32]. Care-ful ethnographic attention to the strategies that people living in un-homelike environmentsutilize to create provisional senses of home has demonstrated that homelessness is oftenmuch more than the absence of a physical dwelling, and “home” and “homelessness” arenot mutually exclusive [33–37]. For those with inconsistent access to a physical dwelling,senses of home are often shifting constellations of meanings, routines, and material objectsthat span public and private settings [36–40]. Home and homelessness can be “reciprocallylinked through people’s impulse and need to . . . enact dwelling practices despite the ab-sence of a home” [39] (p. 184). Importantly, previous work reveals that homelessness is notYouth 2024, 4 888experienced passively by young people, but rather as an ongoing attempt to create sensesof home [38,41,42].In this article, we center young people’s experiences as they inhabit and move betweennodes in Vancouver’s expanding system of housing and homelessness services. FollowingPaolo Boccagni [43], we describe young people’s “homing” strategies in these settings,as well as during periods of street-based homelessness. Boccagni [43] (p. 585) defineshoming as “a set of home-related routines and practices, and . . . an underlying existentialstruggle toward a good-enough state of being at home”. A focus on homing provides avantage point into young people’s attempts to bridge the types of homes they experiencedin the past and are experiencing in the present with those they aspire to experience in thefuture. The emphasis on good-enough states of being at home is important in the contextof homelessness prevention because it highlights both the fragile circumstances in whichhome is achieved and those in which “a need or desire for home is articulated withoutbeing met” [43] (p. 593).We also examine parallel experiences of “unhoming” among young people, includinglosses of home as a result of getting “kicked out”, eviction, fleeing violence, and aging outof systems of care and supervision [44]. As Peter Somerville has argued, homelessnessencompasses deprivation across physiological, emotional, territorial, ontological, andspiritual dimensions, including losses of bodily comfort, love, privacy, rootedness, andhope [45]. These multidimensional experiences of homelessness and processes of unhomingcontinue to be powerfully racialized in our setting. The service and policy landscape“‘holds up’ only some subjects as they practice home, while it ‘pulls under’ racializedothers” [46] (p. 937). A focus on both unhoming and homing processes underscores theoftentimes racialized estrangement, uprootedness, and alienation that many young peoplemust contend with alongside continual attempts to make homes for themselves in thecity [45,46].Youth prevention policies can draw from young people’s homing strategies—boththose that result in finding a “real” home, even temporarily, and those that reflect unmetdesires—to build a strengths-based approach that seeks to support young people in movingtoward the homes they desire. While we agree that prevention policies must go beyonda reliance on crisis-oriented homelessness services, our work underscores how rapidrehousing efforts may also be insufficient if they do not accommodate the kinds of homesthat young people’s strategies are oriented toward. Young people’s homing strategiesalert us to day-to-day practices, routines, and forms of sociality and care that powerfullyshape senses of stability and home, even in un-homelike places and in the face of variousprocesses of unhoming. Youth homelessness prevention can attend more closely to homingstrategies to better enable the capabilities of young people to create homes that allow themto move toward the futures they want for themselves [47].2. Materials and MethodsThis article draws from an ongoing qualitative and ethnographic study led by the firstauthor that began in 2021 and explores young people’s experiences navigating unstablehousing, homelessness, and “institutional circuits” that include shelters, government carehomes, hospitals, juvenile and adult criminal justice facilities, and residential detoxification,treatment, and recovery sites [48–50]. As we have argued elsewhere, supportive and modu-lar housing in Vancouver has increasingly become part of these wider institutional circuitsthat young people who use drugs must circulate through [50]. This study on housing,homelessness, and institutional circuits is embedded within a longitudinal program of qual-itative and ethnographic research led by the second author that examines young people’ssubstance use, care, and housing trajectories in Metro Vancouver. Collectively, we seek amore nuanced understanding of the individual, social, institutional, and historical contextsthat shape young people’s movements in and out of homelessness and their experiencesduring those periods when they are ostensibly housed. Our objective is to identify criticalmoments in young people’s housing and homelessness trajectories when intervention couldYouth 2024, 4 889strategically bolster their homing efforts and prevent them from entering or returning tounstable housing and homelessness.2.1. Interviews and FieldworkTo inform this analysis, the lead author conducted 78 qualitative semi-structuredinterviews and follow-up interviews with 54 young people aged 19 to 29 who have currentor past experience with unstable housing (see Table 1). He also conducted 10 interviewswith housing service providers working in shelters, transitional homes, and supportivehousing programs. This study included approximately 100 h of fieldwork in the placeswhere young people were living, spending time, and accessing services. Many of theinterviews took place at a frontline research office in downtown Vancouver, but interviewsalso occurred in fieldwork settings, such as public parks, youth-dedicated drop-in centers,and the housing environments where young people were living. Participants were recruitedvia the second author’s networks and also via the distribution of recruitment postcards tointerested young people in the aforementioned fieldwork settings. In order to participate inthis study, young people needed to be between 14 and 29 years old, have experience withsubstance use in the past six months, and have lived in a form of non-market rental housingin the past year. We chose this age range to align with the lower end of the age ranges at theyouth-dedicated drop-in centers we frequented, although the youngest person to participatein this study was 19 years old. The upper end of this age range encompasses experiencesof aging out of government care and the majority of youth services in our setting, whichgenerally occurs around age 25, and the aftermath of these experiences. We defined non-market rental housing as encompassing youth and adult shelters, transitional housingprograms, supportive and modular housing, SROs, as well as residential detoxification,treatment, and recovery programs.Table 1. Sociodemographic characteristics of participants.Baseline CharacteristicSamplen %GenderCisgender 46 85Transgender 6 11Nonbinary 2 4Woman 19 35Man 33 61EthnicityIndigenous 25 46White 16 30Black, South Asian, Multiracial 13 24Housing TypeStreet-based homelessness 10 19Youth shelter 11 20Transitional home 10 19SRO 6 11Supportive and modular housing 14 26Market rental 3 5Institutional involvementGovernment care 26 48Criminal Justice 15 28Acute mental health care 15 28N = 54. Ages of participants ranged from 19 to 29 years old, and the average age of participants was 23 years old.Youth 2024, 4 890During interviews, young people were asked about their experiences navigatingunstable housing and homelessness in Vancouver across time and place. Participantswere asked to reflect on how their housing situations intersected with movements throughgovernment care, criminal justice, and acute, mental health, and substance use care systems.Each participant was also asked how they defined “homelessness” and “home” in relationto the experiences they shared with us and were invited to provide opinions on the practicaland policy changes that could be made to address their specific challenges. Interviewsended with a question about what each young person’s “ideal” home looked like. Allinterviews and many fieldwork activities were recorded and generally lasted between 1and 2 h. All participants received a CAD 40 honorarium for their time and were asked toprovide written informed consent before participating [51]. Service provider participantswere asked to describe their experiences working with young people across time and placeand about their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities faced by young peoplenavigating housing instability in Metro Vancouver. Ethical approval for study activitieswas received from the Providence Health Care/University of British Columbia BehavioralResearch Ethics Board (H21-02315).2.2. AnalysisData collection and analysis for this paper took place concurrently over the course ofthe study period and were guided by critical ethnographic and community-based partic-ipatory action research frameworks [52,53]. Critical ethnography extends the insights ofconventional ethnographic approaches by building on the situated knowledge of partici-pants to critique existing bodies of knowledge and suggest new ways of understandingparticular phenomena [54]. Relatedly, community-based participatory action researchleverages meaningful partnerships with marginalized communities in order to create moreequitable research relationships and works to address social inequities that are identifiedby community members [55]. For this study, we worked extensively with our researchprogram’s Youth Health Advisory Council (YHAC), which is composed of young peoplewith lived and living experiences of homelessness, housing instability, intensive substanceuse, and entrenchment in institutional circuits [50,56]. Throughout the course of this study,we met with the YHAC at least bi-weekly to discuss experiences related to housing, home-lessness, and homelessness prevention, ensuring the ongoing relevance of our lines ofinquiry and findings to young people who are actively navigating the interventions wedescribe herein.Fieldnotes and interviews were transcribed verbatim and anonymized before beingcoded using NVivo software. In collaboration with the YHAC, we created an initial codingframework that included broad descriptive themes (e.g., “street-based homelessness”,“moving between systems”). Over the course of this study, we worked with the YHACto refine our codebook and evolving analysis of the data. The theme of homing surfacedduring our meetings with the YHAC, as well as over the course of a two-day housingsummit with 34 youth that we organized in collaboration with the YHAC in October2023. During planning for this event, the YHAC insisted on a move away from “damagecentered” [57] research that highlights the myriad forms of marginality that young peopleexperiencing unstable housing and homelessness endure. Instead, they challenged us tofocus on how young people are able to create provisional senses of home in un-homelikesettings. With this in mind, we returned to the ethnographic and interview data we hadcollected since 2021 and found numerous instances in which young people describedhoming strategies. That is, they described the day-to-day practices, routines, and formsof sociality that allowed them to achieve a good-enough home characterized by senses ofstability and social connectedness, even while experiencing street-based homelessness orexplicitly temporary living arrangements. These moments of good-enough home could beshort-lived and interrupted by the realities of poverty, substance use, mental health crises,and processes of unhoming. We worked with the YHAC to understand how brief momentsYouth 2024, 4 891of home and broader homing strategies could be better supported by interventions designedto prevent homelessness.3. ResultsAt the time of their first interview, the young people who participated in this studylived in a range of circumstances that included street-based homelessness, couch surfingtemporarily with family and friends, youth-dedicated shelters, transitional homes, privateand government-owned SROs, supportive and modular housing buildings, and, in a fewcases, private market rentals (see Table 1). Homing, in these contexts, had both spatial andtemporal dimensions. Homing was enacted in the present moment but also tended to beoriented toward future achievements and past experiences of home and unhoming [43]. Wehave organized our findings to reflect these temporal dimensions of homing and unhoming.First, we attend to the past, during which many young people experienced being kickedout of family homes and cycling through a series of foster care and group homes. Second,we examine how young people were able to make homes in un-homelike places in thepresent moment. Third, we turn to young people’s aspirations for future homemaking andthe obstacles they faced as they moved toward what comes next.3.1. UnhomingYoung people often described leaving family homes that were characterized by un-safety and instability. They recalled experiences of being forcibly kicked out of family homesor leaving under circumstances of relative chaos. This was the case for Toni, a 24-year-oldIndigenous woman who, at the time of our first interview, had just secured privately-ownedSRO housing after many years of street-based homelessness. She described being kickedout of her mother’s house when she was 16 years old as follows:I think if my mom hadn’t kicked me out, I might have been able to beat theaddiction right in the beginning. And, you know, even finish high school and goon to college. My mom had abandoned me, pretty much, is how it felt. I alreadydon’t have my dad in my life—so, no Dad, no Mom. Like, no family. I was like,I’m all alone. Who’s going to tell me right from wrong? Who’s going to be like,‘Hey, you can’t do this, this isn’t okay’? Like, ‘Something’s going on with you,can I help you?’ I didn’t have that.Many young people framed their experiences of being kicked out or leaving childhoodhomes as escapes from places that no longer felt like home. Yet these escapes were oftensimultaneously a painful process of estrangement that involved the uprooting of the day-to-day practices, routines, and forms of sociality that had previously constituted a fragilesense of home [58]. Put another way, leaving even an imperfect home involved leavingbehind a place characterized by senses of familiarity and connectedness. Toni asserted thatleaving was ultimately not her own choice and that avoiding being kicked out could haveprevented her substance use from escalating in ways that continued to foreclose her future.After being kicked out of her mother’s house, Toni moved in with her aunt (who was,at that time, living in a trailer) but was soon removed by child protective services andplaced in government care. She reflected that while she was officially removed from heraunt’s home to provide her with a more stable and safe home, Toni once again encounteredsignificant instability and unsafety upon entering government care. As she recounted:I got forced out of my aunt’s place and they stuck me in care, and then my firstfoster parent kicked me out because of addiction and my refusal to go to church.I’m not religious. It was very like, ‘You have to go to church every Sunday’.I’m Indigenous. You’re going to force an Indigenous person to go to a Catholicchurch? So, she kicked me out. During that transition, like, going from my firstfoster parents to my second, um—the second place is where my addiction gotreally, really bad.Youth 2024, 4 892In her second foster care placement, Toni was hospitalized numerous times for mentalhealth and substance use-related emergencies. Toni explained that on one occasion, shereturned to her foster care home only to realize that the family had not noticed that she hadbeen in the hospital for a week. Soon afterward, Toni left that foster care home and begancouch surfing with friends and sleeping on the streets for several months until she finallysecured a room in a privately owned SRO.Toni did not romanticize the circumstances she had endured while living with hermother and then her aunt. However, the instability, cultural unsafety, and neglect sheendured while moving through foster homes contradicted the notion that these placeswere stable and safe homes. Previous research has argued that the imperative of childprotection services to provide apprehended children with a more stable roof over theirheads and greater physical and psychological safety obscures the social network disruptionthat fundamentally undermines young people’s sense of being in “real” homes [59]. Toni’sstory and our broader research findings similarly underscore how experiences of socialrupture complicate the notion that home is simply a stable and safe place to live where basicneeds are met and there is an absence of violence. Rather, many young people experiencedmoving through foster care and group homes, as well as being kicked out and runningaway, as a loss of homes that were simultaneously “space[s] of belonging and alienation,intimacy and violence, desire and fear” [60,61] (p. 136).3.2. Homing in Un-Homelike PlacesThe young people we spoke with expressed a marked difference between being housedin the sense of physically having a place to stay and sleep, and having a home [62]. Theyoften spoke about how they created a sense of home in places they lived only temporarily,such as youth shelters. One way that this was achieved was by enacting day-to-day prac-tices and routines that “attain a sense of comfort, even a sort of familiarity and belongingin spaces that are not [typically conceived of as] welcoming, safe, or familiar or that are inworlds that [also potentially] “undo” them” [63] (p. 169). These were indispensable waysof creating senses of predictability and order amidst enduring experiences of temporaluncertainty, which we have defined as a “painful and frustrating inability to move throughtime in desired ways despite the promise of greater stability that housing is supposed toengender” [50] (p. 2). Through these homing strategies, many young people were ableto establish a fragile “good-enough” home that existed alongside ongoing experiences ofviolence, economic precarity, and frequent substance use and mental health-related crises.Being able to stay in one place, even for more than a few months, could contradictthe state of (oftentimes forced) mobility that characterized many participants’ childhoodsand experiences of street-based homelessness, as well as experiences navigating housingservices in Vancouver—a city with the highest rate of eviction in Canada [64]. Residentsof SROs and social housing are especially vulnerable to eviction because they often lackaccess to provincial tenancy protections [64,65]. As Toni explained when reflecting on hermove into a privately-owned SRO after a period of street-based homelessness:I’ve moved around so much in my lifetime that when I first moved into my placeI was living out of a cardboard box. I refused to unpack. I was like, I’m probablygoing to get evicted or, like, something’s going to happen so I’m going to have tomove, right? And then I finally got to a place [the SRO] where I was like, okay,I’m going to be here for a while. I can unpack. And I, like, set my stuff up. And Iwas like: home.Similar to many other young people in our setting, Toni kept their belongings in acardboard box to protect them across a series of moves between foster homes, shelters,treatment and recovery facilities, the streets, and SROs [22]. In this context, unpackingthe cardboard box at the SRO was a powerful homing strategy that signified Toni’s intentto make a home there. The fragility of this home was shaped by the open drug use andviolence occurring in her building. Toni had used drugs intensively in the past but, at thetime of her move into the SRO, was working on recovery, including by regularly attendingYouth 2024, 4 893Narcotics Anonymous meetings. She had created a daily routine that involved attendingmeetings and limiting her substance use to cannabis and, occasionally, alcohol. Witnessingopen drug use and violence in her building made her worry constantly that “somethingwas going to happen” to her housing, resulting in yet another move. Nevertheless, Toniconcluded, “[For now] I can shower here and lock my door and lay in bed and, like, play withmy cat and, like, cook some food and just relax”. Toni seemed to have found a good-enoughhome in the present that nevertheless felt under future threat, demonstrating that homing isalways “intimately connected to a belief in the security of future trajectories, which—whenthreatened—[reconfigure] what home means in the present” [45] (p. 10).As Toni and a number of other young people described, unpacking and displayingpersonal objects could be powerful homing strategies that create a sense of stability [40].Many young people have experienced losing their belongings while moving from placeto place, and displaying personal objects could be a way of anchoring themselves in thepresent [33]. This was the case for Clara, a 23-year-old white woman who was living in asupportive housing building on a floor designated for young people aged 19 to 25 at thetime of our first interview. Clara described how, when she first moved into her supportivehousing building, she painted her room, put up posters and shelving, and decorated herspace. Since leaving her family home when she was 16 years old, Clara had lived inseveral youth and adult shelters, two different SROs, and a market rental suite and had alsoexperienced periods of street-based homelessness. Clara reflected that across many of theseplaces, it had not been clear to her whether decorating her room was an option. Indeed,young people’s previous experiences cycling through multiple housing and homelessnesssituations meant they were often unable to make themselves at home in these ways [66].In addition to being able to unpack and decorate, having access to amenities thatfacilitated certain kinds of daily routines powerfully supported young people’s homingstrategies. Dawn, a 21-year-old South Asian woman, had recently moved from a grouphome (where she had to share a room with several other young people) to a youth transi-tional home at the time of our first interview with her. As she reflected:I chose the [transitional home] because it was my first very own apartment. It’sa bachelor suite. [It has] a kitchen, not a kitchenette, but like a kitchen kind ofthing: oven, fridge, microwave, and then where you do your dishes. And thenthere’s an open space for your bed and everything. But I got a bunk bed becauseI wanted more space down below. Oh yeah, and you got your own bathroomwith a tub, which is amazing!For young people like Dawn, Clara, and Toni, homing aspirations included desiresto cook and do dishes, have a bath, choose and arrange furniture, and decorate. Thesepractices and routines are perhaps reclamations of what Susan Fraiman [67] (p. 158) calls“domesticity in pieces” that have often been “shattered under the pressure of homelessness”.Such practices and routines were critical homing strategies because they made livingenvironments feel like more than just a physical roof and four walls. For many youngpeople, “normal” domestic routines in particular allowed them to focus not just on wherethey currently lived (which could often be a temporary situation) but on how they wantedto live and feel at home in a general sense. Domestic routines were one way that youngpeople attempted to establish predictable daily rhythms and senses of stability that had, formany, never been available to them. Putting these sorts of routines in place also enabledsome young people to turn their focus to creating deeply desired social connections andrelationships.3.3. Homing as Social ConnectednessYoung people’s homing strategies often involve attempts to create an “intimate senseof normality associated with home” in conditions that are perceived as non-normal, in-cluding through particular forms of sociality [43] (p. 594). In particular, close relationshipswith friends and romantic partners who shared experiences of residential instability andsubstance use and mental health challenges could powerfully engender a sense of being atYouth 2024, 4 894home in un-homelike places [68]. This was especially the case for young people who lackedsupportive family relationships and had experienced fragmented connections with otheryoung people in the foster care and group home settings they cycled through [65,66,69,70].Curtis, a 23-year-old Black man, had recently moved into an SRO in the same buildingas his romantic partner at the time of our first interview. He explained that home wasinextricably connected to being with others and, in particular, his romantic partner. Reflect-ing on his housing and homelessness experiences, Curtis concluded “you can be in a prettyshitty place but have good people with you, and its fine”. After spending eight months in jail,Curtis connected with a romantic partner who then invited him to live in her SRO unit.Curtis spent almost all his time with his partner, and the couple often visited our frontlineresearch office together. After a few months of living together, housing agency staff at theSRO offered Curtis his own unit on a different floor of the building, which he reluctantlyaccepted. Although he still lived in the same building as his partner, Curtis confided “Idon’t want to move in somewhere and be by myself. I don’t like being alone. And I kind of feel likethat sometimes [in the SRO]”. Curtis longed first and foremost for the sense of home that hehad created with his romantic partner in their shared SRO room.Cristina, a 24-year-old Indigenous woman who was living in a privately-owned SRO atthe time of our first interview with her, similarly reflected on how close social relationshipshelped her feel safe and loved while experiencing street-based homelessness for severalyears, as follows:I tried to be with people as much as I could. There used to be a little crew ofus [sleeping outside together] and it was awesome. We had—we used to callthem ‘cuddle puddles’ and it’s where, like, at some point when the daytimeis over, we would all meet up at one spot at night and do the cuddle puddlething—[cuddling together] like penguins and stuff, right? It’s really fun and youactually feel loved and stuff for a bit.Cristina mentioned multiple other instances when the social connections she madehad created a sense of home in un-homelike places. She recounted living in a tent cityin an urban park as a member of a group of people who cared for each other. Cristinaaffectionately recalled an instance when a resident who had received a large sum of moneyorganized a large gathering for the tent city residents rather than spending the money onthemselves. The residents also organized an area in the center of the tent city where theygathered bottles to recycle to generate income. Cristina reflected that these practices androutines helped to establish a feeling of social connectedness and care. At a certain point,she left the tent city and moved into a transitional home for women. Cristina initially feltexcited about her new unit, but certain aspects of her living situation felt less homelike thanher previous experiences on the streets and in the tent city, which she described as follows:It was weird for me because [the transitional home] was an all-women’s thing andI was the only one who wasn’t a sex worker. So, like—I was having everybodylook at me weird when I’m not [involved in sex work]. So, for the first year ofliving there, like when I got [the housing placement], I would mainly just go backto the tent city and just use [the transitional home] as like a storage unit, youknow what I mean?While from an official perspective the transitional housing placement was much moresecure than the tent city, it did not generate the sense of routine, social connectedness, andcare that, for Cristina and others, created a sense of good-enough home in un-homelikeplaces. Cristina continued to spend time away from the transitional home, and ultimatelyher unit was given to someone else. The tent city was eventually dismantled, and shecirculated between several youth and adult shelters before securing a unit in the SRO,where she was living at the time of her interview.Cristina’s perception that the streets and tent city offered possibilities for homemakingthat were lacking in her more “stable” housing placement was something that a number ofYouth 2024, 4 895the housing providers we interviewed also mentioned. For example, as Arthur, a socialworker who worked with a transitional housing program, reflected:We have the tent cities because people feel safer in their community than they dobehind four walls and a door. There’s no use putting someone who’s 22 years oldwho has [never lived on their own] in a place, whether it’s supported or not, ifthey have no idea where to start [with making a home there].Many housing providers recognized that most of the housing available to youngpeople did not adequately generate the forms of sociality that the latter deeply desiredand were essential to homing. They saw that the success of housing programs—in thesense of creating the conditions that will encourage young people to stay for extendedperiods of time and stabilize various aspects of their lives—often hinged on the extentto which these programs could foster a sense of social connectedness among residents.In reality, as we have described previously, supportive housing buildings could actuallyfurther isolate young people from each other by prohibiting access to multiple floors andthrough strict guest and overnight visitor policies [22,23,50]. As Rachel, a youth workerat a different transitional housing program from Arthur observed, a sense of isolation inhousing units could accelerate substance use and mental health crises and increase thelikelihood of eviction or a young person’s own decision to return to the streets and tentcities (as happened with Cristina). Rachel reflected as follows:It’s hard when young people move in [to their own units] because their friendsbecome family out there [on the streets and in tent cities]. So, it’s tough whenyou move somewhere new and you don’t really know where you kind of fit orbelong. It’s easy to relapse [on substances] really fast.Yet, homing strategies could also include the social worlds that young people createdwith support staff in the places where they lived. Young people frequently articulated howrelationships with staff were not just a means of connecting them with various resources,including more permanent housing [71]. Instead, young people often remarked on thesenses of social connectedness that they fostered with certain staff members—in particular,those who talked to them about their personal lives and future aspirations in ways thatresembled family members and friends. Such relationships were not confined to housingwith integrated staff, such as supportive, modular and transitional housing, but couldalso be formed in un-homelike settings, such as shelters and residential treatment centers.For example, Chad, a 20-year-old Indigenous man, described being assigned a housingworker when he began staying at a youth shelter. Chad explained that his experienceswith homelessness were shaped by a difficult relationship with his mother, who insisted onthe two of them living together despite the fact that they had both been evicted from theirshared housing several times following altercations. The housing worker helped Chadto successfully navigate this relationship with his mother and helped him to secure hisown market rental apartment. Chad was ultimately evicted from the apartment followinga substance use relapse and had returned to living in shelters during the time of ourinterviews with him. However, he emphasized “I still call [the housing worker] to this day.He’s, like, actually one of my good friends”.It is important to acknowledge that relationships with housing staff and workers werenot always equanimous and often involved interpersonal conflict. However, participantsfrequently positioned their relationships with staff and workers alongside their friendshipsand romantic relationships in ways that suggest the former constitute part of a broader“human infrastructure” that fosters homing in un-homelike places [72]. Toni, introducedabove, recounted a story about the importance of staff relationships while living temporarilyin a low-barrier women’s shelter. As she explained:The support staff were really friendly and they honestly are what made it feellike an actual home. They were super sweet. I remember around Christmas timewe were in the kitchen area and, like, blaring music and we had wrapping papereverywhere with presents and the staff were sitting there with us, like, wrapping.Youth 2024, 4 896And it was really sweet because it just felt like a family and a home. It was thefirst Christmas where it was stable and it just—it felt like home.Even in this un-homelike shelter environment, Toni experienced the routine of wrap-ping presents and the festivities of preparing for Christmas with staff as a form of socialitythat evoked a sense of being at home. It was the relationships with staff and the practicesand routines that they undertook together (in this case, related to Christmas) that createda good enough sense of home in the present and oriented Toni to the kind of home thatshe wanted for herself in the future. Like for Chad, the women’s shelter staff also playeda critical role in helping Toni secure market rental housing, which she lived in for a yearfollowing her time at the women’s shelter. Toni was evicted from this rental suite whenshe adopted a cat—acquiring pets being another essential homing strategy among manyof the young people we talked to—which was a violation of her rental agreement. Tonirecalled that she pleaded with the landlord to accept a larger pet damage deposit or toallow her to make other arrangements for the cat after receiving the eviction notice. Ul-timately Toni left the rental suite with “her cat, a bag of clothing and some food” and spentthe next several months couch surfing, staying in shelters, and spending periods sleepingoutside until eventually moving into an SRO, where she was living during the period ofour interviews with her. Critically, Toni emphasized that she had not been able to finda good enough home and the sense of social connectedness that characterized this sinceleaving the women’s shelter.3.4. Homing and What Comes NextYoung people’s attempts to make homes in un-homelike places ran parallel to theiraspirations and attempts to move toward more permanent future homes. Participants’descriptions of desired future homes varied but often involved descriptions of places fromwhich they could even more effectively develop “normal” day-to-day practices, routines,and forms of sociality. Dawn (introduced above) described the kind of home she wantedfor herself as follows:A place to use [drugs] without, like, any guilt or shame, and to have friends overwhen I want to. And then the independence of, like, shopping for myself, groceryshopping and, like, learning how to do that.For Dawn and many others, homing aspirations encompassed both practices androutines like grocery shopping, as well as greater self-determination in relation to drug useand socializing with friends. Alternatively, Jackson, a 22-year-old Indigenous man who wasstaying at a youth shelter at the time of his first interview, longed for a home characterizedby the daily routines of school and work. Jackson moved into a transitional housingbuilding in downtown Vancouver directly after leaving government care when he was 19years old. His tenancy was supported by a provincially-funded Agreement with YoungAdult (AYA) subsidy that covered the costs of rent and tuition as long as he was attendinga recognized education, rehabilitation, or job training program. Jackson explained that,initially, he was looking forward to this transition from government care to transitionalhousing but soon began experiencing anxieties about traveling to school each day viacomplicated bus routes. He began missing school regularly and using alcohol intensively.Jackson eventually stopped going to school altogether and his AYA was terminated, whichmeant that he also lost his unit in the transitional housing building. When trying to imaginewhat home might look like in the future, Jackson reflected:I would like to start with school first to get back on the AYA program. And get,like, a day job and then work on my schooling at night. Yeah. And then try to get,like, extra money from, like, AYA and from the job and then eventually just rentmy own place.For Jackson, homing necessarily involved re-establishing the kinds of practices androutines that he had been attempting to undertake while living in the transitional hous-ing building. Unlike Dawn and others whose homing aspirations involved a significantYouth 2024, 4 897amount of independence from the outset, Jackson’s homing aspirations are perhaps bettercharacterized as beginning from a place of support (i.e., help via an AYA and with gettingto school each day), with a future transition to greater independence (i.e., renting his ownplace). Indeed, Jackson reflected during an interview that it might have been easier to keepattending school if he had continued living in his foster care home instead of moving to atransitional house downtown.While many young people were optimistic that they could eventually find a “real”home, others articulated a powerful sense of being stuck in their current un-homelikeliving situation and processes of unhoming [21,61]. These feelings could be powerfullycompounded by the fact that young people age out of most youth-dedicated services whenthey turn 25 years old. As Maria, a youth worker at a shelter, explained:It’s very heartbreaking to work with all these youth who age out of governmentcare [at age 19] and don’t have any family. Who do they go to? And then I canonly work with them until they’re 25 and it’s almost like a replication of thataging out [at 19]. It breaks my heart.Aging out often powerfully undermined young people’s homing strategies because itrepresented an abrupt rupture in the practices, routines, and forms of sociality that theywere sometimes able to establish in youth-focused programs. For participants who werenearing aging out, or who had already lost access to services, this shift was characterized bythe kind of instability and processes of unhoming that many had experienced across theirchildhoods and housing and homelessness trajectories in Vancouver. For young peoplewho had already aged out of government care, the prospect of losing access to sources ofsupport a second time was particularly disquieting. Selina, a 23-year-old white woman,was living in an abstinence-oriented transitional home and considering moving into amarket rental suite supported by a subsidy at the time of our first interview with her. Sherecalled how leaving government care precipitated a tumultuous period of street-basedhomelessness that coincided with an intensification of her substance use. She was veryworried about moving into market rental housing without any staff support, particularlygiven that she had only been working on her sobriety for one year after many years ofintensive substance use. As Selina explained:I’m trying to just, you know, move forward and focus on the next steps andeverything like that—like with my housing. But I almost feel like [market rentalhousing] would be too much independence and too much, like—just lack ofsupport for me right now. I do like having support and I feel like it’s important. Idon’t know if I even ever want to be 100% independent.Staff at the transitional home where Selina lived believed that she was ready tomove into market rental housing, in large part because she had been able to establishdaily routines and maintain abstinence from substance use for one year. Yet for Selina,moving out of the transitional home and into market rental housing meant dismantling herfragile social world with staff that had been essential to homing over the past year. Selinawas intimidated by the prospect of developing new social relationships and routines inmarket housing.4. DiscussionOur study contributes to previous work that shifts the focus away from home ashousing (i.e., a physical structure) toward home as a set of day-to-day practices, routines,forms of sociality, and aspirations that both foster homing in the present and orient youngpeople toward the homes they want in the future [62]. Homelessness prevention policieshave often too narrowly defined homelessness as rooflessness and neglected to considerhow young people also experience it as a lack of the predictable daily rhythms and sensesof social connectedness and care that engender stability [33]. Building on previous workthat has examined homemaking in un-homelike places such as tent cities, the streets, andtemporary shelters [31,40,73], our study encompasses not only young people’s homingYouth 2024, 4 898strategies aimed at modifying housing environments (e.g., through decorating) but alsothe establishment of “normal” practices, routines, and forms of sociality with friends,romantic partners, and support staff in these places. A focus on these homing strategiesacross multiple housing and homelessness settings has a number of policy implicationsfor creating a robust youth-oriented homelessness prevention framework in Vancouverand elsewhere.4.1. Policy RecommendationsFirstly, our findings align with calls to incorporate Indigenous definitions of home intoCanadian homelessness prevention policies by highlighting the importance of respondingto the homing strategies of Indigenous young people [74]. As Thistle has argued, theCanadian government must contend with the fact that “hundreds of years of colonial-ism have eroded, undermined, and supplanted Indigenous cultural practices and theirinclusive concept of home”, which encompasses young people’s abilities to participate insustaining cultural, social, emotional, and intimate relationships [17] (p. 16). Definitionsof homelessness that focus on the absence of physical housing do not adequately addressdisconnections from these kinds of relationships, including via traumatic childhood expe-riences of unhoming through government care involvement. Indigenous young peoplein particular must continue to contend with a policy landscape that disproportionatelyundermines the homing strategies of racialized others [46]. In general, research demon-strates that Black and other young people of color, as well as 2S/LGBTQIA+ and migrantyoung people and young women, are less able to enact homing strategies compared toother young Canadians because of a lack of access to gender-affirming, culturally safe, andantiracist housing programs [75–77]. Considerations of race, gender, and social justice andequity must be at the center of prevention policies and practices designed for young peopleexperiencing or at risk of homelessness [78]. Housing services for Indigenous young peoplemust center relationship (re)building, including hiring Indigenous staff members to supportyoung people in achieving desired senses of connectedness and care. Hiring practices couldalso include what Jessie Lund et al. [79] call a “cultural wellness mentor”, a person whoensures that Indigenous young people have access to cultural activities and desired formsof sociality and ceremony (e.g., smudging, sweat lodges and sharing circles, time withElders). This person could also actively connect young people with Indigenous-focusedhousing, work, and school programs.Secondly, our findings underscore how we can better support young people’s hom-ing strategies in both temporary (e.g., shelter) and permanent (e.g., supportive housing)housing situations. We argue that attending to these homing strategies is crucial to prevent-ing returns to street-based homelessness and unstable housing. Specifically, our findingsdemonstrate that when young people are unable to make homes for themselves in theplaces where they find themselves living for periods of time, they often eventually eitherface eviction (e.g., as a result of substance use and mental health crises often linked toenduring senses of homelessness or as a result of broken guest, visitor, and pet policies)or they make the decision to return to the streets and encampments where desired formsof sociality, social connectedness, and care are possible [21,22,64,80–82]. Funded program-ming in both temporary and permanent accommodations can support young people inunpacking their things and making spaces their own through decorating and, when pos-sible, arranging furniture to their liking [33]. Each young person could be assigned theirown small shelving area or end table for displaying personal items. Programming canfocus on supporting young people in undertaking everyday domestic practices and rou-tines, such as cooking, eating meals, washing dishes, showering, and doing laundry andother chores, as well as larger undertakings such as attending school and work every day.Young people told us that it was often the ability to enact these sorts of daily rhythms thatcreated a sense of stability and home, even in uncertain circumstances [81,82]. While someyoung people desired ongoing support to create and sustain daily practices and routines,other participants wanted more independence and autonomy, including in relation toYouth 2024, 4 899substance use [65,78]. Housing workers should, therefore, actively and regularly openup conversations with young people to determine how they can best help them to feel athome where they currently are and plan for particular kinds of homes in the future [83]. Atthe moment, this kind of support tends to be concentrated in supportive and transitionalhousing environments but should be made available across the housing continuum tobetter foster homing and prevent returns to street-based homelessness.All housing interventions should also be designed to support desired forms of socialityand senses of social connectedness and care, which encompass friendships, romanticrelationships, and relationships with staff and workers in the buildings where youngpeople live. Among young people experiencing substance use and mental health challenges,studies consistently highlight the crucial role of social relationships in providing emotionaland material support and reducing isolation amid housing instability [84–86]. There shouldbe funded programming that supports young people with (re)building and maintainingconnections with family and friends who come to visit the places where they are living.Strict visitor regulations in many housing services may inadvertently undermine one ofyoung people’s most essential homing strategies, contributing to returns to street-basedhomelessness rather than ameliorating these [68]. In addition to supporting visits, thereare opportunities for housing programs to incorporate peer- and youth-led activities,including those that focus on routines such as regularly cooking and eating and playingsports and games together. Housing design should prioritize communal spaces with openlayouts and flexible seating, explicitly promoting lively sociality [87]. Regular plannedactivities and events should also involve socializing and collaboration between youngpeople and staff and workers. For example, funding should be available for group hobbiesand entertainment such as music, sports, video games, and cultural activities that bringyoung people, staff, workers, and other trusted adults together [73].Thirdly, we assert that a focus on young people’s homing strategies offers an alternativeprevention-oriented framing that more powerfully aligns with their needs, priorities, anddesires. Young people in our setting have called for a dedicated housing system thatresponds to the unique and diverse needs of young people (including minors) who usedrugs, are navigating complex mental health challenges, and are in recovery from substanceuse [88]. One way to incorporate young people’s homing strategies into such a systemis the establishment of youth housing advisories that actively involve young people indecision-making processes related to housing and program design and implementation.In addition to influencing policy, design, and programming, these advisories could alsoprovide critical opportunities for peer support, networking, and friendships among youngpeople with similar experiences, fostering desired routines, forms of sociality, and senses ofsocial connectedness and care.Finally, by examining young people’s homing strategies, our study aligns with theobjectives of a Positive Youth Development (PYD) framework. This framework assertsthat adolescence involves a critical period of cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and socialgrowth [89], requiring interventions and programming that promote positive long-termdevelopment in these areas [90]. Recent studies have posited PYD as a fundamentalcomponent of homelessness prevention and housing interventions designed for youngpeople. For example, Stephen Gaetz [91] argues that Housing First services for youthcan adopt a PYD framework to focus housing interventions on young people’s strengthsand goals, sources of social support such as family members and friends, and facilitatingaccess to educational and professional opportunities. Other studies have asserted thata PYD framework could help prevent young people from leaving government care andentering directly into homelessness by re-orienting programs to focus on young people’sautonomy in relation to their housing [92]. The homing strategies we describe can also besupported by the application of the homelessness (re-)entry prevention model describedby Martin Seager, known as the psychologically-informed environment model [93]. Thismodel foregrounds the benefits of fostering consistent attachments among small groups ofhousing residents and a “professional family” of staff members in housing environments,Youth 2024, 4 900strongly resonating with the homing strategies we identified. Taken together, these modelscan support young people’s homing strategies as they move toward adulthood and a visionof home that is not just focused on physical locale but rather on the extent to which housingenvironments nurture behavioral, emotional, and social growth [91,94]. Importantly, thesenses of home, stability, social connectedness, and care that are created by these kinds ofapproaches often mean that young people actively want to stay where they are, in somecases also determining that this is a good (i.e., relatively stable) time to work on substanceuse and mental health challenges. This is why it is also critical to adopt flexible age limitsacross all youth housing programs to ensure that young people have the time and supportthey need to develop the day-to-day practices, routines, and forms of sociality that allowthem to more successfully navigate substance use, mental health, and housing challenges.4.2. ConclusionsIn sum, by acknowledging and building on young people’s existing homing strategies,youth homelessness prevention policies will support their substantial strengths in navigat-ing challenging circumstances, as well as their deep desires for different kinds of futures.For the young people who participated in this study, home is never a finished project butrather an ongoing process of making and unmaking in the present that also often weavestogether past experiences of unhoming and future homing aspirations [95]. Supportingyoung people’s abilities to enact daily practices and routines and forms of sociality andcare need to be a central objective of homelessness prevention so that young people cancontinue to move toward the kinds of homes and futures they desire.Author Contributions: Conceptualization, D.M.; Methodology, D.M.; Investigation, D.M.; Projectadministration, D.M. and D.F.; Supervision, D.F.; Visualization, D.M.; Writing—original draft, D.M.;Writing—review & editing, D.M. and D.F.; Funding acquisition, D.M. and D.F. All authors have readand agreed to the published version of the manuscript.Funding: This research was funded by Making the Shift (F22-00963), a member of the Networksof Centres of Excellence Canada Program. The APC was funded by Making the Shift (F22-00963).Danya Fast is supported by a Michael Smith Health Research BC Scholar Award.Institutional Review Board Statement: This study was conducted in accordance with the Declarationof Helsinki and approved by the University of British Columbia/Providence Health Care BehaviouralResearch Ethics Board (H21-02315) on 3 February 2022.Informed Consent Statement: Informed consent was obtained from all research participants involvedin this study.Data Availability Statement: The original contributions presented in the study are included inthe article.Acknowledgments: We are grateful to all of the young people and providers who have generouslyshared their time and expertise with us. We also wish to acknowledge the contributions of the YouthHealth Advisory Committee, including Rainbow Dykeman. 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homing
home
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young people who use drugs
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temporary housing
Making Homes in Un-Homelike Places among Young People in Vancouver: Implications for Homelessness Prevention
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