Dignity, drugs, democracy

Eric Weissman, a social scientist and doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Individualized Program (INDI), recently defended a dissertation on the relationship between housing and homelessness. He spent nearly 13 years researching and filming his subject matter — but before that, he experienced the life first-hand.

After completing his master’s degree in sociology at the University of Toronto in 1986, Weissman struggled with debilitating addictions and intermittent homelessness. Ten years later, with the support of friends and family, he was able to turn his life around and get clean.

This tumultuous decade informed Weissman’s next move. “I decided to channel what had been a personal disaster into a form of insight that would allow me to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the area of homelessness,” he says.

That work would yield a video series and book chronicling life in two unique communities.

Weissman’s video project came first. In 2002, he turned his camera towards Tent City, a community of street people who set up temporary housing in an abandoned lot on Toronto’s waterfront.

These research interests took him to Portland, Oregon’s Dignity Village — the first municipally sanctioned public space governed by the formerly homeless. The area, which sits on the outskirts of the city, served as the site of Weissman’s fieldwork. It was championed as an example of a grassroots utopia and potential solution to homelessness throughout North America.

Weissman first visited the village in 2010. A year later, he returned to immerse himself in its daily life and capture the stories of its inhabitants. But instead of a shining example of housing activism, he discovered a community ravaged by drugs.

“Though founded in deeply democratic values, the village had failed horribly at giving residents the potential to find hope,” he says. “There were factions between villagers and a general incapacity to administer village affairs. Sadly, only around 18 per cent of villagers found stable housing once they left, and the rest returned to homelessness.”

Weissman’s time in Dignity Village yielded Dignity in Exile: Stories of Struggles and Hope from a Modern American Shanty Town. Filled with in-depth conversations, intimate photographs by Nigel Dickson and QR codes that link to videos, the book is an account of what went right and wrong in the encampment