The Bylaw State, is an important exploration of municipal power and the outsized impact that the exercise of that power can have on vulnerable people.More specifically, their book shows that a complex web of municipal bylaws, often thought to be relatively benign, is used to target and remove homeless people from public space simply because they are homeless.Such removals have devastating consequences for unhoused people who have their personal possessions destroyed and are forced into a cycle of moving from one location to another at the discretion of municipal officials.Though scholars have long argued that municipalities use bylaws in harmful ways, 1 Flynn and Hermer make a significant contribution to this body of scholarship by focusing on the minutiae of the bylaws that municipalities in Canada use to carry out homeless encampment evictions.Going further, they argue that bylaws are the main way that municipal governments have responded to rising rates of homelessness.The Bylaw State proceeds in eight chapters, with Chapters 1-3 providing context as to the social, political and legal background against which encampment evictions take place.Homelessness has been steadily rising in Canada since the late 1980s. 2 In recent years, with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and tightening housing markets, the rates of homelessness have skyrocketed.There has not been a comprehensive count of the number of
Alexandra Potamianos (Mon,) studied this question.