by Lys Granier

This essay is part of my ongoing research into the moral aesthetics of housing, shelter, and public order in North American cities.

MONTRÉAL, QC / PORTLAND, OR

Forget the promise of housing reform.

Across North America, cities are pouring millions into the theatre of “public order”. One of its biggest plays is the swift dismantling of tent communities. Through it, politicians claim action while avoiding having to actually house anyone.

The ‘Iron Law of the Sweep’ holds that municipal policy will always prioritize the immediate, visible removal of distress—the aesthetic of order—over the slower, more complex, but ultimately cheaper work of solving the distress itself.

The Point-in-Time count of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development shows that roughly 653,100 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2023. This represents a 12% increase from 2022 and the highest recorded since national tracking began in 2007.

In Montréal, shelters such as Mission Old Brewery are operating at or near full capacity year-round. They routinely turn away people during winter. They also experience sustained strain on emergency beds and services. In this case, the term “overflow” has basically lost its meaning. “I was calling shelters and they were full every day. That never used to happen before.” said Stéphanie Lareau, a worker helping unhoused people in Montreal, to CityNews.

This year, the conflict centered on a large encampment on Notre-Dame Street in June 2025. The Ministry of Transport (MTQ), which controls the land, moved to clear the site. The land is provincial, but the sweep was coordinated with municipal police and sanitation. Advocates for the roughly 30 residents argued that forced eviction when shelters were already full violated their right to life, liberty, and security of the person under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The encampment sat along Notre-Dame Est on MTQ land near the Port. Eviction notices were posted in early June 2025. The unhoused residents had already begun packing what they could carry: a tent, a sleeping bag, a few documents in a plastic sleeve. They’d seen dozens of sweeps before—near the highway, under bridges, near train-tracks—in the interstitial spaces of the city. As one resident, P.A., told a reporter while hauling his gear a few hundred feet across a fence line, he’d been awake for two days straight “moving my things.”

In Montréal, the main constraint on municipal power is rooted in Canadian rights law. On June 18, 2025, the Quebec Superior Court agreed to halt the clearance. Subsequent extensions pushed the injunction’s effect into late August 2025 while the case proceeded.

Within days, Montréal had shrugged off both its own consultation process and the court’s warning shot, insisting that “safety” required business as usual—meaning dismantling camps with nowhere for people to go.

The injunction landed just after the city’s independent consultation body, the Office de consultation publique de Montréal (OCPM), released its report Itinérance et cohabitation sociale à Montréal in late June 2025. The report explicitly recommended an immediate moratorium on dismantling encampments until Montréal adopts a clear, rights-based encampment policy co-developed with people experiencing homelessness. City officials publicly declined the core demand for a moratorium. They emphasized “safety,” “cleanliness,” and “cohabitation” as reasons to retain the power to dismantle camps, despite the OCPM’s recommendation. Safety for housed residents, cleanliness for commercial corridors and cohabitation assumes there is somewhere to inhabit.

The contradiction was glaring: acknowledge the homelessness crisis, praise the OCPM’s work, and then dismiss its central recommendation. In the meantime, continue the very practice the report condemned. The city chose the appearance of decisiveness over the work of collaboration.

Ultimately, the injunction turned out to be just a procedural delay, not a policy shift. While the Notre-Dame camp was temporarily protected, encampment clearances continued elsewhere in the city. This pattern cemented that the default policy was removal rather than accommodation.

Cross the border to the U.S., and the constraint vanishes. Why? Not because the need is different, of course it isn’t, but because the Supreme Court decided cities don’t owe unsheltered people anything at all.In June 2024, the Court’s 6–3 ruling in Grants Pass effectively overturned the Ninth Circuit’s Martin v. Boise protections, holding that civil fines or similar penalties for public camping do not inherently violate the Eighth Amendment, even when shelter is unavailable. Advocates warned that the decision gave license for cities to intensify criminalization of unhoused people in public spaces.

With this federal guardrail removed, the real constraint on sweeps in cities like Portland became budgetary. A question of political will and political power. Portland’s primary enforcement unit is the Impact Reduction Program (IRP), responsible for dismantling encampments and clearing debris. In the FY 2025–26 budget, IRP was slated to receive roughly $16.7 million, about triple what it cost a few years earlier. Portland’s Impact Reduction Program now costs more than some of the city’s actual housing programs, making the cost of removing tents eclipse the cost of preventing their appearance. According to Kaia Sand, Executive Director of Street Roots: “We have never swept our way out of homelessness. We never will.”

In Portland, sweeps can mean what former camp resident Raven Drake described witnessing: a contractor slashing her tent open and refusing to let her grab her belongings, leaving her soaked and without a winter coat.

The budget has grown, but the method hasn’t changed. One councilor called the strategy “criminalizing poverty” and pointed out that it’s both costly and ineffective, even as deaths among unhoused Portlanders have surged. Portland resident Teresa Stratton, 61, a ProPublica contributor, wrote that her husband’s ashes were taken: “I feel alone, scared, empty.”

Councilor Angelita Morillo introduced Budget Amendment “Morillo 1,” proposing to cut $4.3 million from the IRP’s sweep operations and redirect that money to rental assistance, food banks, and immigrant/refugee support services. Mayor Keith Wilson framed the $4.3 million cut as a threat to “livability”. As if the danger was uncollected trash, not the fact that thousands of people have nowhere to sleep. Effectively, the move was to pass a housing crisis as a simple sanitation problem the city can pay to remove.

When the vote finally came, on November 12 2025, the council chose the quick, camera-friendly sweep, over the slow, less showy, work of keeping people alive.

Based on published estimates from permanent supportive housing programs in U.S. cities (roughly $10,000–$25,000 per person per year, depending on local costs and service intensity), that $4.3 million could instead fund a year of housing and support for a few hundred chronically unhoused people. Hundreds of lives changed.

So, we have two countries, one border, different legal systems, but the same instinct: clear the tents first, figure it out later. Sweeps solve a political problem: they make homelessness disappear from view in the blink of an eye.

The cases of Montréal and Portland—operating under very different legal regimes—converge on the same municipal logic: the aesthetics of order are treated as a core service. Shelter: optional.

In Montréal, a Charter-based rights framework and a formal consultation process (OCPM) both push the city toward a moratorium on encampment dismantling when alternatives are absent. Valerie Plante’s municipal leadership, however, rejects a blanket moratorium and continues to authorize sweeps. In doing so, the city is treating injunctions as inconvenient procedural interruptions rather than the moral or policy turning points that they should be.

In Portland, post-Grants Pass, there is no longer a constitutional barrier to punitive enforcement. The only real constraint is what the city chooses to fund. Faced with an explicit option to shift $4.3 million from sweeps to housing and food, the council went with the sweeps. The ACLU of Oregon’s said in a statement on Portland’s camping ban: “Camping ban will criminalize poverty — further impeding real solutions.” “Encampments are the physical manifestation of our housing crisis.” said Marie-Josée Houle, Federal Housing Advocate, to The Rover.

By contrast, some jurisdictions have demonstrated an alternative by reallocating resources towards Housing First models. One such municipality is Medicine Hat, Alberta, which announced it had effectively ended chronic homelessness by 2015. In the U.S., Houston, Texas, reports roughly a 60–65% reduction in homelessness since 2011. These show that sustained investment in housing and support can produce real, measurable declines in homelessness. A limitation remains the vulnerability to broader housing market pressures.

Encampment sweeps cause loss of identification and vital documents, medications, tents, and survival gear, disrupt relationships with outreach workers and health providers. They are associated with worsened health outcomes and elevated risk of death, especially when people are pushed into more hidden and dangerous locations. Chabot, a grandfather with stage 3 lung cancer from Montréal, told the court he’s trying to stay alive while sleeping under an overpass and commuting to radiation therapy. In ProPublica’s national project on sweeps, Stephenie, 45, from Portland writes about her purse taken in a sweep: “it had everything I needed to survive in it.”

The National Protocol for Homeless Encampments in Canada, authored by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, describes forced evictions of encampments without adequate alternatives as a serious human-rights violation. The Federal Housing Advocate (FHA) has called encampments a human-rights crisis, urged governments to stop forced evictions, and pressed them to adopt the Protocol’s rights-based approach. “Encampments represent an effort by people who are unhoused to claim their human rights and meet their most basic needs,” said Marie-Josée Houle from the FHA.

Until cities fund housing with the same urgency, coordination, and political will they devote to removing tents, the outcome is all but guaranteed: fewer tents in view, not fewer people in tents. Former director of Portland’s Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS) confirms this: “Sweeps don’t reduce homelessness. They just move it. Often into more dangerous places.”

The cases of Montréal and Portland prove that whether constrained by a constitution or just a budget, the municipal impulse is the same: to elevate the aesthetic of order over the fundamental right to shelter. We call it “public safety,” but the Iron Law of the Sweep is the sustained, cynical decision to fund the stage crew over the actors—to spend millions on the swift, empty theatre of erasure, rather than the slow, unglamorous work of saving lives.