Home happens anyway: belongings and home in Vancouver's SRO hotels

Single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel tenants in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside live in 100-square-foot units within aging buildings with shared facilities. The institutional abandonment of these buildings creates challenges that affect tenant's homes. Using intimate ethnographic methods, this thesis seeks to understand how SRO tenants use their belongings to make a place into home by exploring the role of belongings in creating and subverting precarity and examining the intersection of property, care, and relationships. It highlights how SRO tenants conceive of home outside the normative understanding of home as one's "castle", instead focusing on the relationships of care constructed within the SRO hotels. This thesis concludes by unpacking how the relational nature of home for SRO tenants can be expanded beyond precarity and beyond the SRO unit to consider how "home" can be a strategy of resistance in challenging power structures and fostering community control.