When residents of Ghent complain about unhoused individuals on their streets, the conversation usually goes one of two ways. It either becomes a discussion about social services — shelter beds, outreach workers, mental health resources, all of which matter — or it becomes, uncomfortably, a conversation about enforcement: more police, more citations, more pressure to move on.
What almost never comes up is zoning.
Which is striking, because urban planners and public health researchers have spent fifty years building an evidence base showing that the physical and regulatory conditions of streets are among the most significant determinants of who uses them, how, and with what effect on safety for everyone present.
Jane Jacobs was right, and we keep forgetting it
Jane Jacobs wrote about "eyes on the street" in 1961. The idea is deceptively simple: streets are safe when they are used, and they are used when there are things to do on them at multiple hours of the day. A café generates foot traffic at 7am. A lunch spot does it at noon. A bar does it at 10pm. A dry cleaner does it on Saturday morning. Each of these uses extends the window of time during which a street has natural human presence — not because anyone planned for it, but because commerce organically produces density of movement.
A residential-only street — particularly one where residents move between cars and houses without lingering — has a much narrower window of natural activity. Early morning, early evening. A few dog walks. The street is vacant for the majority of its hours.
Vacant urban streets are not neutral. They are spaces where people who have nowhere else to be concentrate — because everyone else who was otherwise there has left, or never had a reason to come. That is not a moral judgment about unhoused people. It is a description of how space works when it is underused.
The specific mechanism in HC-G2
HC-G2's prohibition on commercial uses removes the primary mechanism by which urban streets self-activate. There is no coffee shop to open at 6:30am and keep a light on. There is no lunch counter generating movement at midday. There is no evening establishment creating a reason to walk past the same block twice.
The result is exactly what you observe: blocks that are architecturally beautiful, densely populated, within walking distance of many people's daily needs — and yet dead at the sidewalk level for most of the day. The population that fills that vacancy is not filling it out of spite. They are filling it because it is, structurally, a void.
This is not unique to Ghent. It is a documented pattern in urban neighborhoods where use restrictions — whether from historic zoning, residential-only designations, or simply suburban-style land use planning applied to dense urban fabric — have removed the commercial layer that would otherwise activate the streetscape.
What activation actually does
The research on what happens when ground-floor commercial uses are introduced to previously commercial-dead streets is consistent across contexts. Foot traffic increases throughout the day. Informal social ties form between business owners and regular customers. Eyes are on the street at more hours. The public-private threshold — the zone between buildings and sidewalks — becomes occupied and monitored informally.
These changes do not eliminate homelessness. They do not provide housing or mental health services. The people who are currently sleeping in Ghent's parks and sitting on its stoops do not disappear when a café opens next door. But the quality of the street environment changes for everyone — including them. A street with active uses has more informal support infrastructure: a place to get water, a bathroom, a bench in front of a business where presence is normal rather than anomalous.
More importantly: street activation reduces the concentration effect. When streets have mixed uses, no single block or stretch becomes the default location for people with nowhere else to go. The activity is distributed. The streets become genuinely shared rather than de facto sorted by who has alternatives and who doesn't.
The enforcement alternative and why it doesn't work
The instinct to respond to street-level discomfort with enforcement — moving people along, issuing citations for loitering or camping, increasing police presence — is understandable. It is also, by the evidence, ineffective at producing the outcome residents say they want.
Enforcement moves people. It does not reduce the number of people or their need for somewhere to be. The structural vacancy that made Ghent's streets the default location remains. Within days or weeks of any enforcement sweep, the same conditions reassert themselves, because the underlying cause — the absence of competing uses for the space — is unchanged.
Moreover, enforcement in a commercially dead street produces a particular dynamic: it positions residents and unhoused individuals as adversaries competing for the same dead space. Commercial activation changes that dynamic. A street with a lunch spot and a yoga studio and a bookstore is a street where housed residents, customers, business owners, and people experiencing homelessness are all present in the same space, at the same time, with legitimate reasons to be there. That is not utopia. It is just a street that works.
What this campaign is and is not
This campaign is not about homelessness directly. We are not a social services organization and we are not proposing housing policy. We are proposing a zoning text amendment that will permit neighborhood-scale commercial uses on ground floors in HC-G2.
But we want to be honest about why that matters beyond the obvious quality-of-life benefits for residents who want a coffee shop. The current dead-street condition in Ghent is not an aesthetic problem. It is a spatial equity problem. It concentrates vulnerability on a set of blocks that the zoning code has stripped of the mechanisms that would otherwise distribute and reduce that concentration.
We are asking for the right to fill the vacancy with something other than nothing. The people who currently occupy that vacancy are not the problem. The vacancy is.
REFERENCES: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Chapter 2: "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety"; Robert Sampson et al., research on collective efficacy and neighborhood disorder (American Journal of Sociology, 1997–2012); Urban Land Institute, Active Ground Floors: A Framework (2019); National Alliance to End Homelessness, on environmental conditions and unsheltered homelessness.