Abstract
The most recent point-in-time count by the Department of Housing and Urban Development found that almost 800,000 people experienced homelessness on a single night in 2024, an all-time high. Homelessness and housing issues more broadly are seemingly permanent fixtures across local, state, and national politics. Homelessness has even reached the Supreme Court on more than one occasion in recent years. Alongside homelessness are the concomitant debates about why people are unhoused and what to do about it, which tap into cultural, moral, and policy debates that go back decades and even centuries. All of this makes the topics of housing and homelessness evergreen for sociology instructors in a wide variety of courses.
Into this cultural milieu around housing and homelessness came Living in Tents, a 2018 documentary, modest in length and scope, about three small homeless encampments in St. Louis in the 2010s. Director and producer Paul Crane encountered these encampments while working on a class project, and he started filming to “tell the story of this place,” befriending residents and even living there for a time himself. Apart from the opening moments of the film, Crane mostly keeps himself out of the frame, instead centering the voices and experiences of the homeless themselves, interspersed with other local voices, including service providers, volunteers, and government officials. Although the film is of professional quality, it retains an intimate, grainy, handheld feel. Crane opts to add little narration after the first few moments of the film, which allows people to speak for themselves (aside from the obvious but important fact that Crane, like any director, decides what to show us and what to leave on the cutting room floor).
The film begins with Crane introducing us to three small homeless encampments—Sparta, Hopeville, and Dignity Harbor—north of downtown St. Louis that contain 70 to 100 people. A central character we meet right away is Wulf, someone who is “experienced at being homeless” and serves as the de facto mayor of Sparta, enforcing rules and supporting its residents. We also meet Dave and Bonnie, a newly homeless couple who Crane follows throughout the film. From there, Crane shares his footage of life at the camps, interspersed with filmed segments of other voices. We meet others who are unhoused, like Jeff and Blake. There are also forays into various topics, such as the condition of local shelters or the volunteers who support the tent city. There is little overarching narrative to the film until about two-thirds of the way through, when a homicide at one of the encampments prompts the City of St. Louis to clear the tent cities. The city offers free apartments to all tent city residents for a year, after which they are to pay the rent themselves. The remainder of the film follows a few of the residents and some of the volunteers through that time. Filming ended in 2014, and the film itself ends with final updates, circa 2017 and 2018, of the situations of several of the characters a few years after filming had ended.
The primary strength and weakness of the film are one in the same: the lack of narration or interpretation to make sense of what we are seeing. Crane is largely sympathetic to his subjects, humanizing their experiences and describing the encampments as “a real community where people enjoyed life and cared about each other.” He lets people speak for themselves. However, precisely because Crane refrains from interpreting what we see and hear, the film becomes a canvas on which many interpretations about homelessness can be painted. For example, a few of the “talking head” comments insinuate that mental illness and substance use are widespread among the chronically homeless, and residents themselves talk often about struggles with drugs and alcohol. The actual relationship of these conditions to homelessness is complex—and well researched—but the film does not unpack that complexity aside from simply letting its subjects speak. The lack of narration and interpretation, including the absence of any sociological or scholarly voices, gives the film an agnosticism about the many swirling debates around homelessness that might allow misconceptions to go unchallenged. Viewers might see what they want to see. In this way, the film is a sympathetic portrayal without a coherent theory of the case.
This stripped-down approach to documentary filmmaking is laudable in many ways, and it forces the viewer to listen and observe carefully. For example, toward the middle of the film, Crane splices together different voices around the perennial question about why people live in encampments. We hear excerpts from a local call-in radio show that articulate both sides of the debate, some saying the homeless want to live like this and others saying that they are good people with nowhere to go. In fact, the film even has both of these lines of argumentation from the mouth of the same person! Jeff, one of the camp residents, first tells the camera, “I’m here because I choose to be here and not in a shelter. But now, don’t get me wrong, if I had a place to be, I’d be there. Now obviously, I don’t have nowhere to go, or I wouldn’t be sitting here.” However, in the next sentence, he adds with a sense of satisfaction that he has been “living for free” for almost eight years. The viewer is not given a definitive answer as to why people are encamped.
Although this multivocal approach is nuanced in some ways, I watched the film feeling like this tact could also inadvertently reinforce, rather than correct, preexisting myths about the homeless in the minds of viewers. An effort to show multiple perspectives can sometimes feel like all sides are equally weighted, which is not always the case. For another example, Bonnie and Dave, who are newly homeless at the beginning of the film, end up back on the street at the end of the film after the opportunity for a government-provided apartment for a year. Crane also notes at the end of the film that 75 percent of the camp residents who received apartments were back on the street 18 months after first receiving their housing. We know from ample, rigorous research that there are very effective housing approaches for most people exiting homelessness, but an impressionable viewer will likely leave this film with the idea that government interventions are ineffective and that most spending on homeless services is wasted. To that point, Crane concludes the entire film by noting that the city had spent tens of millions on homelessness over the preceding 10 years, only to have homelessness rise. This statement requires context and nuance that the film is not generally interested in providing. The film’s story is not the whole story.
For these reasons, this film is best deployed within the structure of a classroom, where an instructor can use the film as the jumping-off point for rich discussion while adding sociological and academic resources. There is no lack of empirical research about all facets of housing and homelessness to employ in class, depending on the aims of the course and the amount of time devoted to the topic. Recent worthwhile book-length treatments of the topic include In the Midst of Plenty by Shinn and Khadduri (2020), Homelessness Is a Housing Problem by Colburn and Aldern (2022), and Doubled Up by Harvey (2025). For bite-sized pedagogical companions that are accessible to undergraduates, I recommend “Pathways Home,” an eight-episode podcast series that ran in 2023 and 2024 as part of the UCLA Housing Voice podcast, in which they interview the authors of some of the leading empirical research about homelessness and housing interventions (UCLA Housing Voice 2023). The TRAILS database has a helpful menu of classrooms ideas about housing in a resource titled “Evicted Activities” (Medley-Rath 2019), based on another worthwhile housing monograph, Evicted, by Desmond (2016). And if an instructor is feeling ambitious, TRAILS even offers a resource on hosting a tent city (McKinney and Snedker 2017a), the experience of which is also the subject of a research article in Teaching Sociology (McKinney and Snedker 2017b).
Another interesting facet of the film is Crane’s choice to emphasize the voices and experiences of several volunteers who work with the residents of the camps. Starting about a quarter of the way into the film, Crane narrates that he wanted to know what drove the volunteers to do this work. He profiles several helpers, including a few that took unhoused individuals into their own homes. Crane also airs critical voices about the volunteers, again from local talk radio, about the ways that they are “enabling” the camps. The volunteers themselves are even shown thinking out loud about what they are doing and why, wondering with introspection about the benefits and drawbacks of their involvement. The inclusion of this narrative thread about the volunteers raises many worthwhile questions about the nature of charity, what really helps the homeless, and what responsibility the housed have to those who are unhoused. This aspect of the film could be the basis for some very interesting and fruitful classroom discussions, especially among students who want to help.
The best aspect of Living in Tents is that it sympathetically touches on numerous aspects of the complexity of housing and homelessness, even if it does not attempt to answer those questions comprehensively. The hope is that a curious and open-minded viewer will watch this film and have more questions than answers: Why are these people unhoused? What is the relationship of substance use or mental illness to being chronically unhoused? What options do cities have for dealing with encampments? Why do people refuse service? Why do shelters not accept couples? Why do people choose camps? What interventions actually work? What kind of volunteering helps, and what hurts? Would I take a homeless person into my home? The benefit of showing this film in a sociology classroom is that the instructor can then create space to discuss these questions, supplemented with empirical and scholarly voices. It could also be worthwhile to invite a local service provider to class to better understand how these issues are playing out closer to home. Despite its flaws, Living in Tents definitely has a place in a sociology classroom, and it would have relevance to students from high school to graduate school.
Overall, Living in Tents humanizes the chronically homeless with a degree of intimate access that is rare. And even though the film depicts events from almost 15 years ago, the issues it raises are evergreen. The film is an obvious fit for a housing course, but it also merits consideration for classes such as Social Problems, Social Stratification, Urban Sociology, and even Introduction to Sociology. With a running time of just under an hour, it would be watchable in its entirety in just one class period, which adds to its appeal. However, regardless of the course, I would refrain from showing this film unless there is an opportunity to debrief and discuss. Living in Tents is intimate and unassuming, but it has some weaknesses, most notably the lack of sociological and empirical underpinning to provide much needed context for a topic rife with misinformation and mythologizing. However, in the right pedagogical hands, Living in Tents is a worthy foundation on which a capable instructor can build a sturdy home.