Because any homeless discussion instantly turns into an Ad Hominem attack on HN, let me preface this with please don't respond to my comments with that.
Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
Furthermore, as we've seen time and time again, this is a shortsighted, temporary alleviation that ultimately dooms a neighborhood. Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
Homelessness is a hard problem to solve because it requires individual attention. Measures like these make it worse, not better. If the city wants to help, the best thing they can do is listen to local charities, outreaches, churches, etc and clear the regulatory path for them.
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
> “One of the largest groups of homelessness we see growing is simply people who don't have enough money to pay rent, and that’s new,” [the director of housing and homelessness in Halifax] said, adding that includes seniors, students, and entire families.
> They note that multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax - none of which, they say, are affordable. “We would like to be treated like people,” said Samantha Nickerson, who lived with her fiance, Trent Smith, at the same encampment [...] “Some of us really are trying hard to get our lives back together and work.”
So, have we seen exactly this time and again? In this instance, if property values drop, would the encampment really move somewhere else - why? - or would it move into the now affordable properties?
Property values don't need to drop for there to be more affordable housing. And even if they were to drop, is that _really_ a bad thing in the medium to long term (e.g. should residential or other land be an investment in and of itself)?
> And even if they were to drop, is that _really_ a bad thing in the medium to long term (e.g. should residential or other land be an investment in and of itself)?
Given that for many people owning their house is the only way to preserve some sort of inheritance for their children...
It's doomed anyway because when their grandchildren get their turn of needing money, the population won't be growing and the value of land will be decreasing.
True that, and in isolation that is indeed the case. Yet, even more people than that across the world cannot even do that.
What I am (partly rhetorically) asking is: Is it really a workable long-term solution to guard this global land owning minority (which I am part of) if it means continued homelessness, inequality, societal and monetary costs associated with it will continue to plague everyone. To me it seems like yet another question of externalities whereby we externalise the effect and cost of guarding what we have while everyone pays, and those that pays the most are the ones with the least.
> Given that for many people owning their house is the only way to preserve some sort of inheritance for their children...
It shouldn't be, it sucks up valuable investment from productive business and (imo) condemned Canada to the economic malaise happening right now. The only way to beat inflation in a risk-adjusted manner should be to invest in some kind of productive business, and not land-squatting.
Not sure if you're in Canada, but all our national governments, and the current one explicitly, has made it far less attractive to try to build capital outside your home. The only thing protecting homes is the instant political death that would result from those who vote in volume. You could make real estate a far less attractive financial investment if you don't tax the stuffing out of every other type of wealth accumulation. It's just so much easier and more politically lucrative to increase the captial gains tax on those "fat-cat doctors" and give everyone else a "tax holiday" with their own money, suspending one of the fairest and most effective taxes.
While its true its still only worth a house. If more housing drives home prices down, its still worth one house. If prices go up, its still one house. When your kids need a home of their own in the area they need one house per kid. One house does not become multiple houses in any market unless you buy worse houses, throw in a loan, or move away where homes and job opportunities are less. In either case, whatever housing policy happens doesn’t change much about how this form of inheritance works. And if these kids never buy a house and merely rent and throw money in the stock market, their kids might inherit more than any equity gain would have given them I expect and doesn’t require lucking out being born early in a hot housing market either.
It's not depreciating at the moment and hasn't been (aside from some brief dips) for many years. If you want to change the status quo, it has to be gradual.
Turning this into a discussion about "affordable housing" is missing the point altogether.
Most of these people have debilitating mental illnesses and/or drug addictions.
To assume all they need is a shiny subsidized apartment over a Starbucks and they'll put on a suit and go to work tomorrow is preposterous. In the HN utopia, they'll work remotely.
These people are chronically unemployable for a reason. Until you fix the reason, you won't solve this problem.
Instead of focusing on getting them the help they need, cities focus on things like how many tents can we allow in the public tennis courts or how many sheds can we build in the car park before we declare success.
> Most of these people have debilitating mental illnesses and/or drug addictions.
Do they, or don't they? If that's true, the article was misleading.
I mean that's the standard trope, sure, and it makes homelessness into an intractable problem about needing hordes of social workers and clinics, but there's a lot of implication here that these particular homeless are mostly people who can't afford the available rents.
> These people are chronically unemployable for a reason. Until you fix the reason, you won't solve this problem.
That might make you feel better about not caring or doing anything to fix the problem, but you have the causation flipped around. Once you are homeless, employers will no longer employ you.
This is a problem with our economy and is a societal problem. You can keep your head in the sand, but that means you are not helping to solve it and are helping to perpetuate it by remaining ignorant of the cause.
That used to be the case. However, the current government jacked the immigration numbers exponentially over the last few years. This seriously exacerbated an already growing problem with housing affordability. Also, the huge immigration (via temporary workers and student visas) has suppressed wages. These combined we now have a housing crisis that contends for worst in the developed world.
It isn't just mentally ill people who are homeless.
You're absolutely right. And the reason isn't because you have to be that bad to be homeless, but that if you're not that ill-equipped, you're usually in the category of the invisible homeless, couchsurfing or living in your car, etc.
Completely disagree. You're right that a lot of homeless people have mental health or drug addictions, but that's often caused by not having housing.
People start out well-meaning and lose their homes for financial reasons, then get unwell from years on the streets. Block off the top of that pipeline by building more homes for people.
A cynical observer might suspect that the reason there is a high regulatory burden leading to only unaffordable-for-poor-people buildings is that the voters no more want a really affordable apartment building next door than they want a homeless encampment
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
Just want to respond to that specific point. You are right in the absolute but in practice "we" indirectly allow companies/civil groups to use public space for different purposes.
Some places are places for everyone to enjoy and having people privatize is a net loss for everyone like parks but a lot of public space is just unused space that nobody has ever stepped on because it's in a weird location or for some other reason and no one really cares to use it. I think it's reasonable to allow people temporarily (while it remains unused for the collective) in those spaces to remove a bit of the pressure of not having a home and having to constantly struggle for the bare minimum.
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
How do you reconcile this with the existence of private property at all? The lands of the planet earth were not formed with deeds attached.
I think it’s rightly and plainly frustrating for the sole reason that the e.g. parks, sidewalks, bridges, etc that the homeless live on (and, are now directly christened by the government to do so in Halifax) are quite literally funded by taxpayers for public (read: taxpayer) use. Rightly or wrongly (but let’s be real: often rightly) parents (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe bringing their children into these areas; young women (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe walking in these areas. Crime is higher, drug use is higher, broken window theory, etc.
Here’s my unpopular opinion: I fully support making homelessness a jailable offense. A bed, meals, and heat in the winter; we’re not talking about the end of the world here, and I’m comfortable with my tax dollars funding that because I _do_ have some empathy for the homeless. But, not infinite empathy. We need better social programs, we need to work with the charities and churches as you say, I’m also very supportive of some kind of jail-adjacent jobs program that houses and feeds the homeless in exchange for employment.
the emotional part of my brain is aligned with you, but the pragmatic part knows this is an extremely expensive way to solve the need. Aside from the massive operating costs, what happens come spring - release them back into the wild?
My general take is: Finding an empathic solution to the problem is surfacing increasingly end-to-end solutions; government subsidized/paid housing, subsidizing food banks, etc. Homelessness is a bigger problem in urban areas with high density, where all of these components to a solution (e.g. the land upon which a shelter can be built) are very expensive and difficult. The first step toward finding a better life for many of these people is actually to get them into areas where the cost of living is lower.
This angles into, any solution to this problem has to happen at the state level. It can't happen at the city level because cities are usually homogenous; they don't have the right levers to pull. It also can't happen at the federal level because homeless problems are definitely regional and local. This is, I think, actually the root of many of America's homeless problems: Cities are usually blue but states are usually red, so any suggestion that the rural areas need to help with city problems, despite the fact that cities are massive economic subsidies on rural areas, is rejected.
One angle around this is, I suggest, to leverage the prison system. Most large prisons are built in more rural areas; or at the very least, most cities have a rural prison nearby. All of the real costs should be lower than even partial-end-to-end costs of caring for the homeless inside the bounds of a city; housing is more dense and lower quality, meals are cheaper, land is cheaper, prison labor recoups some costs, etc. Rural populations will be more accepting of a migration of homeless through the prison system versus just bussing them out of the city and leaving them (an extremely untenable solution).
But, obviously beyond this, there needs to be support beyond just dropping them in a prison in a cornfield somewhere. This gets into: States should seriously think about a New Deal-ish jobs program utilizing outgoing prison labor. Many of these rural areas are short on hands for hard labor. Housing is cheap to build in these areas. We should have a paved path to tell people migrated like this: "We aren't going to stop you from going back to the city. But, if you stay here and commit to two years, here's an apartment, its free as long as you work this job, and you'll also make minimum wage."
For the red-leaning rural areas, this is a great opportunity for private-public partnership. Lots of private farms would love a source of labor like this (in fact, the idea mirrors a very real source of labor for many farms in the west historically; farms provide a bunk house and food, and recruiting happens when people walk out of prison, this is a very Americana solution).
I don't think a solution like this works for the major-major hyper-blue cities like NYC/SF/LA; their homeless problem is just too big. But, Halifax is a city of ~400,000 people. I've spent many years in American cities in the ~500k pop range; obviously something might be structurally different in Halifax that I'm not aware of, but the homeless problem in these cities is far more tractable. Most of these cities are in states which lean red; the biggest problem up to this point is usually just getting state government on-board; telling the red state government that they can jail the homeless? They love that. Then its just a matter of the second half, which becomes the new hard part.
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right
Letting people freeze to death is not right either. This a matter of choosing "least bad" of the short term options. There are no correct options in the short term. There are long term correct options, but they are very expensive.
> Furthermore, as we've seen time and time again, this is a shortsighted, temporary alleviation that ultimately dooms a neighborhood. Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
As noted in the article, according to judicial precedence the city has to either 1) provide shelter or 2) allow encampments. Since they cannot do the former in the short term the best they can do is to set up a structure that allows them to choose where the encampments go that does the least harm and the harm that does occur can be mitigated.
> If the city wants to help, the best thing they can do is listen to local charities, outreaches, churches, etc and clear the regulatory path for them.
The governors mansion in Halifax has like 30 rooms and a giant garden. Maybe they should make that a homeless shelter instead of foisting it upon low income communities.
The best thing is making their own housing and easing the regulatory burden so that it's easier to make housing in general.
The housing that's affordable now, that people praise, was mostly made during a time in which the regulations to build were much less burdensome. A bit ironic, isn't it?
At the same time, taking a natural resource[land] and reserving it for exclusive whether it be private or public ownership is also not a right. It's a consequence of the myth of necessary order - that the garden is preferable to the wild, that boundaries and order are necessary to function, but like this, the comprehensive ownership of land is in fact the cause of this very issue. If there was a wild or commons, this problem would cease to exist.
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
I always viewed it as groups. Just homeless, homeless with mental health issues and homeless with addiction. Those last two often overlap. The first group is the easiest to address. The two last ones i personally think need to be treated with institutionalization and detox. Leaving them on the street to hurt themselves and others is in my mind horrendous.
No matter where you fall on the line between "seize all rental properties and give them to the homeless" and "if you can't buy a house you should go starve to death in the woods", I think most reasonable people would agree that giving open permission to set up a zone where laws barely apply and people who live there or happen to be don't get the same degree of protection and law enforcement as you could expect on the sidewalk in front of a Walmart to be a bad idea.
> Homelessness is a hard problem to solve because it requires individual attention.
No! It's precisely the other way around: it requires federal attention first and foremost. Homelessness is a societal challenge to solve, not one whose burden should fall on those communities that act charitable to fellow human beings and pick up the slack of those just busing the homeless off to the next Democrat governed town.
> Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
They gotta go somewhere, they're humans, not stray dogs, and 99% of the homeless aren't homeless by choice but because society failed to provide for them. I agree an encampment might not be the most desirable thing to have next to a residential area, but on the outskirts adjacent to some commercial zoning it makes sense. Add a bus line, provide basic sanitation and social services on-site... and start building fucking housing.
Blair Fix has an interesting analysis of this that suggests on a national scale we need primarily higher incomes at the bottom end. I'm fairly sure there are areas that also have insufficient houses, but I hadn't really considered the problem might just be people are too poor: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/08/22/from-commodit...
If the analysis is accurate it needs more than just affordable housing to be built.
Of course people are too poor, but any kind of wage increase will be immediately snatched up by the landlord caste.
I remember the days when Covid stimulus checks came 'round in the US, half of Reddit was up in arms over messages from landlords all but demanding they'd get their share (or the entirety of it).
Landlords should not exist for long term housing, period.
> I hadn't really considered the problem might just be people are too poor
I'm a little surprised by that- I thought that this was common knowledge? (But then again, there has been heavy propaganda against homeless people, and diverting attention that this has anything to do with an unfair economy, a la "homeless people are all crazy", "homeless people are all addicts", "homelessness is a choice")
I think it's less that than I thought that primary problem was just insufficient housing. Of course, both things can be true, particularly on a local scale.
From the article: "multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax"
For a small city, that's a significant amount of new housing. 50 years from now that will be affordable housing. The problem is that virtually all high density housing in Halifax is >100 years old and either has been gentrified or is already affordable. Approximately no high density housing was built 50 years ago that would naturally become affordable today.
> and 99% of the homeless aren't homeless by choice but because society failed to provide for them.
I'd like a citation for that claim.
> but on the outskirts adjacent to some commercial zoning it makes sense.
This only makes sense if you want to ensure they don't break the poverty cycle by isolating them to blighted industrial land cut off from society. This is the same issue plaguing many poor and low income communities which have been placed in undesirable parts of municipalities.
Well... the most recent stats I have for Canada [1] show: 41.8% financial issues (aka, housing becomes unaffordable thanks to exploding rents, wage stagnation and general inflation), relationship issues (36.9%) and domestic violence (13.3%) coupled with a lack of shelters, the remaining 10% are attributed mostly to (mental) health issues.
The US population will likely be skewed more towards mental health issues being the root cause, particularly combined with the opioid crisis (it's always hard to tell - do the drugs themselves cause the issue or are a ton of drug users just self-medicating because they have no access to healthcare or other ways to cope with stressors?).
From personal experience (aka anecdata) working in dodgy bars in Germany and hanging around with punks in my youth, the only people I know who "voluntarily" lived on the streets admitted to having mental health issues, mostly varieties of what I'd judge to be claustrophobia today.
> Where's the money coming from?
Reverse tax cuts for the rich, ban foreign investment into housing unless it's adding capacity to the rental market or it's used for primary residences. At least banning foreign investment is being tackled by Canada [2], but other countries should follow suit - the sooner the better.
> Mr Chauvin said the designated encampments are born out of a realisation that the city has run out of options to immediately address its housing crisis.
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
"Has run out of options" = "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing.
The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far. If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong. And yes, it would be great if governments could get off their asses and make housing themselves too.
> Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing.
Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Much regulation exists to prevent people from being injured or killed, or for other legitimate reasons. Let's at least start by acknowledging that. (Of course petty bureaucrats and regulation do exist.)
> The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far.
How is this obvious? By the fact there is not enough housing where people want to live, and too much housing in other less desirable places? In the Western world in general? In Canada? In the US? In specific areas of the US/Canada?
> If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong.
Unable... or unwilling? There's a difference between affordable housing and available housing. And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. For example, allowing developers to pay a one-time fine if they don't provide any affordable options in a new huge apartment block is probably a poor strategy.
I'm all for making things better. The "too much regulation" thing is just a bit too facile of an argument. In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.
> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance.
"Too much housing"? What does that even mean?
Having a lot of housing is good, it means lower prices, and tenants have more power than landlords. Plus, realistically, developers will stop building if there's a total flood, since a flood will lower prices and thus profits.
> In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.
Okay, two things:
1. There's actually very few places with non-strict housing regulation overall. Most places will at least have strict zoning around mandatory detached single family homes on large lots for most of their residential land.
2. People want to move where there are jobs. So even if some random rural counties actually do have almost no housing regulations, no one's gonna move there because surprise surprise, people need income. If you look at places with strong economies, it's rare to find a place with minimal regulation; even Houston isn't quite as unregulated as its reputation suggests.
It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China.
Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring.
That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things.
The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.
And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building.
And they did.
Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building.
P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.
It's definitely harder to analyze building for people actually buying homes vs renting, simply because buying property is susceptible to bubbles in a way that doesn't happen for people renting. People don't go irrationally beyond their means for rentals in the hope that the rental will appreciate in value in the long run and they'll be able to "hold onto it", because it's a rental.
Something similar happened to Spain recently, where there was a huge building bubble before (real estate was an insane % of the economy IIRC) and now they're not building enough.
Sure, absolutely. But we've also seen that landlords/owners are sometimes happy to keep units vacant. Or just use RealPage. How many vacant units are required? And where?
For what it's worth, I agree housing is nutty. But few desirable places have solved it. Not in the US, not in Canada, not in Europe. The "just build more" argument seems a bit simplistic. In an ideal world, it works. But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
7% vacancy rate is about the historical average for the US I think. Around there or a bit higher would probably be healthy.
> And where?
Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.
But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.
> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
???
I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
> Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.
> But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.
Relax. I said no such thing.
>> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
> ???
> I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
I'm just going to quote this for posterity, noting that you cut off "In an ideal world, it works." on purpose. Let's keep things civil, and not try to misrepresent.
I'm not misrepresenting anything. That you're apparently confused as to why rural villages are dying while major cities are very expensive is just baffling.
It's not even really related to it being hard to build, since even if it was easy and there was abundant housing, you'd still expect major cities to be at least somewhat more expensive than rural villages, and it being hard to build housing somewhere isn't why the rural villages are dying.
> Relax. I said no such thing.
Then what was the point of asking "and where?" Especially since "where demand is high" was already explained. What further answer were you looking for?
> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money.
Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe.
Rather, the problems tend to be:
* Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).
* Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with.
* Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits.
There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want.
Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in.
> How is this obvious?
It's obvious at both a macro and micro level.
At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand.
At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming.
California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing
> A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here.
> ...
> Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing.
They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development.
> Unable... or unwilling?
Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough.
And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it.
I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.
> "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).
As somebody who has spent a lot of money to live in a high-value area, not because of an investment in the property, but to avoid having my family exposed to inappropriate behaviors, yes let's keep out of the poors.
Affordable housing doesn't mean it needs to be in the same gated community as expensive housing, or in the same condo building. Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.
My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is. I don't want my children exposed to public drug usage, petty crime, violence, and other ills that perpetuate any place where the people reside who lack the mental stability, intelligence, or self-control to hold down a professional job. I don't want them seeing this behavior, and I don't want them being pulled into dangerous situations because of the people who are in the community around them. I pay a lot to ensure that doesn't happen, including the choice of school and where we live.
I say all this as someone who grew up in a poor family in a bad area and spent my entire life escaping and staying out so I can raise a family in a better circumstance.
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.
Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.
And let's be clear, calling it economic segregation isn't an exaggeration. The zoning that the US typically has is a form of gated community living enforced by the government. It's designed to separate where people live by class, and people like this poster are entirely for it.
Also:
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill
It is, actually, because it tends to limit social mobility.
People having enormous advantages or disadvantages because of their starting social class is less than great for society. Obviously we can't really eliminate all of that sort of thing, but we definitely don't want the government explicitly pursuing policies to encourage social stratification.
Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up. If there's no way to escape the ills of humanity, it means you're stuck in a situation where the next generation cannot be assured of a better life. The aspiration of the American Dream is very much about escaping all the antisocial behaviors which dominate the lower class and having a prosperous life where you can raise a family that has a better life than you yourself had.
It's segregation by dollars, not by any immutable characteristic, and I do not see that as morally wrong in any way.
I will not sacrifice my children on the altar of economic mobility. I dragged myself out of poverty to make a better life for my family, and others can do the same. The US has some of the highest economic mobility of any society in the world, partly because we segregate based on dollars rather than on immutable characteristics.
You seem to be very confused. The person I responded to literally called their own position segregation:
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill
They also said their position was classist:
> My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is.
Maybe the real jerk is the person who didn't read the replies and threw out insults anyway?
In any case, it is literally segregation, just by economics instead of by race. Why am I a jerk for accurately labeling something? If you call people in favor of separate schools by race pro-segregation, does that make you a jerk for "accusing people of being segregationists"?
It's mostly not the corporations in this case. I mean, there's the algorithmic price fixing that's a problem for sure, but if we had enough housing that would only be a minor issue. Price fixing is simply a much bigger problem any time regulations make it harder to get new entrants, new "disruptors".
Plus, there's an avenue that avoids corporations entirely: public housing. But our local and state governments can't get off their asses long enough to actually address the problem directly, it's so much easier to either let people suffer or blame dastardly 'greedy landlords'. (Landlords are greedy of course, but that's not new, and they can only make their greed manifest to the extent that competition is limited)
Bizarre article, it makes it sound like this is some new experiment and a contrast to the US?
Homeless camps were effectively legalized by a 2018 court ruling in the US, as long as there isn’t shelter space. Sounds simple enough, build more shelter space.
However in the west coast cities that was interpreted by local zealots as “shelter space that allows heavy drug and alcohol use”. A bed is not enough for this scenario, you need a separate structure per person.
West coast cities have been supporting camps like this (tiny) one in Halifax for decades.
Very recently the 2018 ruling was overturned, there are still thousands of camps supported by billions in government funding.
I wonder how poor people in tents will fair in Canadian winter. I'm imagining many people freezing to death. But maybe homeless encampments are better prepared than I'm imagining.
In any case I think it's a step in the right direction it's at least better than arresting homeless people for being homeless. What kind of dystopian nightmare city outlaws being homeless? Talk about kicking someone when they're down.
All that is left is to have law-enforcement round up homeless/unhoused person move them into those camps and we will officially be in the Star Trek timeline.
I would support this in my neighborhood given some kind of recourse for problematic repeat offenders in the community the same way we have for our housed neighbors.
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an ingenious legal innovation. Section 7 guarantees that everyone, “has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
Lawyers and advocates have used this mechanism to advance many notable improvements in human rights in Canada since the Charter came into force in the early-1980s. The camping example cited in this article is just one of many s.7 success stories:
1. In the last 20 years, s.7 forced the most conservative government of the last 50 years to permit safe injection sites, which have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives in the years since. In the immediate area surrounding “Insite,” the first such safe injection facility, overdose deaths decreased by 35%. This compared to only a 9% decrease in the rest of Vancouver. [1] At the facility itself, there were zero overdose deaths, because medical staff were able to administer naloxone in every case. While the approach remains controversial, in Canada there is no debating that addicts have a right to “life, liberty, and security of the person,” even in the context of using illegal drugs.
2. The Supreme Court used Section 7 to strike down Quebec's ban on private health insurance, ruling that excessive delays in the public system could threaten security of the person when patients face serious physical pain or death [2]. While this challenge perhaps puts the single-payer public provision of healthcare at risk, ultimately it forced the provinces to take public healthcare more seriously and to invest more despite the financial challenges of doing so.
3. The courts established that Section 7 protects psychological integrity, particularly in child protection cases. This led to guaranteeing fair hearings for parents in custody matters and ensuring legal representation for indigent parents when necessary for a fair hearing [3]. The history of the Canadian state in relation to aboriginal children is awful and continues to be awful, but this ruling cracked the door open on making important changes to the system.
4. The Supreme Court determined that imposing imprisonment without requiring mens rea (guilty mind) violates fundamental justice, establishing that Section 7 prohibits both substantive and procedural injustice [4]. This prevents the justice system from throwing people in jail whose mental capacity made it impossible for them to understand that what they were doing was wrong. Ultimately, it guides the justice system to ensuring that people with mental challenges are funneled appropriately into treatment rather than being put in jail. The police are also restrained from fishing expeditions where they bait low-IQ people into becoming terrorists only to be caught in the act (yes, that actually happened).
And more… The right to make reasonable medical choices without fear of criminal prosecution, the ability to choose where to live, parental decision-making rights regarding children's education and health, and more.
You have the right to free movement on public land. You may bring belongings with you. The government has essentially no power to evict or prevent homelessness.
This is a nationwide problem caused by the federal government.
I very much disbelieve that Halifax only has 200 homeless. Completely impossible, implying someone is murdering the homeless or the city falsified this number. The latter being where im going.
It's very sad to me that we allow our federal government to do this to our fellow citizens. We imminently need an election.
there were some homeless issues during the financial crisis during Harper. Lets not politicize needlessly.
We know homelessness is a crisis now and not from many decades of low to no homeless issues. Exception being above.
So whats the supply demand if it were a free market?
World war level immigration numbers attempting to blitz the 2030 worker shortage problem. Leading to a large increase to demand. Smart long term, but short term we now have significant consequences.
But the federal government also intentionally and heavily decreased supply.
Carbon tax greatly impacts mining, concrete operations, lumberjacks, etc. A regressive tax that's in each cycle doing increasing damage to the economy. We are getting uncharacteristic tax breaks and shameless $250, not because of any attempt to buy votes, but because the economy is collapsing. Major productivity crisis.
But worse yet... 5% interest rates on mortgages?
The entire real estate market, which is highly manipulated by the federal government has some extreme consequences that need to be addressed.
The winner of the next election can simply stop doing the above and it should solve the problem.
If you curfew all the parks, which government can do. It means all the homeless will be on the steps of city hall or any sidewalk anywhere.
Steps of city hall will be the one place you can never ever curfew or otherwise hinder access to. Short of emergencies act, but Canadian taxpayers will now foot the bill of $2million for each ottawa protestor.
So hows those park curfews working out? Not many implemented eh?
I have decades of experience with homelessness, as a journalist, a direct outreach activist and for brief periods as a homeless person myself, many years ago.
Most homeless people don't start out mentally ill or addicted to drugs, but people who are mentally ill or addicts often end up homeless because there's no support system for them, at least in the US. Your local mental health system is a lot more poorly funded and overstressed than you almost certainly realize, and the same is true of drug treatment programs. It's easy to say people shouldn't have started doing drugs; as easy as it is to say that nerds who can't just get laid should learn not to be creepy dorks, and just as ignorant of reality.
Many homeless people become dependent upon booze or drugs to either numb the suffering of their existence or to keep going under horrible conditions. If you weren't allowed to sleep anywhere for fear of arrest or assault, you'd probably take speed too, despite what you might believe about yourself from the comfort of having a roof over your head.
There are serious logistical problems inherent in all the solutions that affluent people consider "obvious", because they haven't actually thought them through or lack the life experience to understand why they won't work. Building housing out of the way where you don't have to see it is a nonstarter, and if you can't logically deduce why you have no business expressing a firm opinion about the situation... but I'll spell it out for the slow folks.
If you're homeless, and you get a room, what's the next step? You might think it's getting work but in fact, due to America's idiotic state/federal system, it's usually getting ID. Where do you get ID? Government buildings. Where are those usually located? Downtown. Where can a person with limited skills get work? Day labor. Where do you go for day labor work? Usually downtown. But where is the actual work done? Usually in the suburbs or industrial districts, which means you're commuting on a bus from wherever you got warehoused away so people don't have to look at you to downtown, and then off to the suburbs, often back downtown to get your pay, and then back out to Human Warehouse Land.
I met a couple in Vegas who'd lost their house due to both of them being laid off. They slept in a tent in an empty lot with a few hundred other people in an industrial area north of downtown, bothering no one. They both got work, but on the edges of town, so they had to get up before dawn to catch a bus to work.
So when the cops came at 7am to roust everyone out of this lot and slash up any tents left standing after the 15 minutes they gave everyone to gtfo (which I've seen happen with my own eyes), these folks weren't there... and came home to find all their possessions ripped to shreds and left in a Dumpster or to simply blow away on the street.
And that's not the exception: it's the norm for homeless folks. It's only getting worse due to the increasing cost of housing and living.
And maybe you don't give a rat's ass and you think life isn't fair. I agree with you. So let's tax the shit out of rich people and use the money to build houses for poor people who can then sit on their asses and do nothing if they want to.
Or is that the kind of injustice you actually do care about? Because of you think paying more taxes when you'll never want for a meal in your life is more unfair than sleeping in an empty lot because you lost some genetic lottery or don't have the Bank of Mommy and Daddy to cover you when you feel like starting a business, you might want to consider that you're not a rational decision maker but simply a bit of a prick.
> Most homeless people don't start out mentally ill or addicted to drugs, but people who are mentally ill or addicts often end up homeless because there's no support system for them, at least in the US.
> Many homeless people become dependent upon booze or drugs to either numb the suffering of their existence or to keep going under horrible conditions.
> There are serious logistical problems inherent in all the solutions that affluent people consider "obvious", because they haven't actually thought them through or lack the life experience to understand why they won't work.
You nailed it. Great post- I wish the folks arguing against actually helping people who are homeless would read this (especially the part about the couple in Las Vegas).
This isn't Phoenix or SF for that matter. The temperature drops to -7C in the winter.
Will the city take the blame when these people all freeze to death because the city officially allowed them to play camp as part of some sociological experiment?
Unfortunately, the responsible thing - building a shelter - is overlooked by cities because shelters have rules. Like no drug use - which in some confusing twist of logic is perceived as cruel.
It's also bothersome that these articles find the one or two people genuinely down on their luck - unable to find work and the like. It makes for biased reporting. The 80/20 rule applies here. I guess the ones pooping on the BART and babbling gibberish are hard to interview.
Because any homeless discussion instantly turns into an Ad Hominem attack on HN, let me preface this with please don't respond to my comments with that.
Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
Furthermore, as we've seen time and time again, this is a shortsighted, temporary alleviation that ultimately dooms a neighborhood. Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
Homelessness is a hard problem to solve because it requires individual attention. Measures like these make it worse, not better. If the city wants to help, the best thing they can do is listen to local charities, outreaches, churches, etc and clear the regulatory path for them.
Some lines that stand out:
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
> “One of the largest groups of homelessness we see growing is simply people who don't have enough money to pay rent, and that’s new,” [the director of housing and homelessness in Halifax] said, adding that includes seniors, students, and entire families.
> They note that multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax - none of which, they say, are affordable. “We would like to be treated like people,” said Samantha Nickerson, who lived with her fiance, Trent Smith, at the same encampment [...] “Some of us really are trying hard to get our lives back together and work.”
So, have we seen exactly this time and again? In this instance, if property values drop, would the encampment really move somewhere else - why? - or would it move into the now affordable properties?
Property values don't need to drop for there to be more affordable housing. And even if they were to drop, is that _really_ a bad thing in the medium to long term (e.g. should residential or other land be an investment in and of itself)?
> And even if they were to drop, is that _really_ a bad thing in the medium to long term (e.g. should residential or other land be an investment in and of itself)?
Given that for many people owning their house is the only way to preserve some sort of inheritance for their children...
It's doomed anyway because when their grandchildren get their turn of needing money, the population won't be growing and the value of land will be decreasing.
True that, and in isolation that is indeed the case. Yet, even more people than that across the world cannot even do that.
What I am (partly rhetorically) asking is: Is it really a workable long-term solution to guard this global land owning minority (which I am part of) if it means continued homelessness, inequality, societal and monetary costs associated with it will continue to plague everyone. To me it seems like yet another question of externalities whereby we externalise the effect and cost of guarding what we have while everyone pays, and those that pays the most are the ones with the least.
> Given that for many people owning their house is the only way to preserve some sort of inheritance for their children...
It shouldn't be, it sucks up valuable investment from productive business and (imo) condemned Canada to the economic malaise happening right now. The only way to beat inflation in a risk-adjusted manner should be to invest in some kind of productive business, and not land-squatting.
Not sure if you're in Canada, but all our national governments, and the current one explicitly, has made it far less attractive to try to build capital outside your home. The only thing protecting homes is the instant political death that would result from those who vote in volume. You could make real estate a far less attractive financial investment if you don't tax the stuffing out of every other type of wealth accumulation. It's just so much easier and more politically lucrative to increase the captial gains tax on those "fat-cat doctors" and give everyone else a "tax holiday" with their own money, suspending one of the fairest and most effective taxes.
While its true its still only worth a house. If more housing drives home prices down, its still worth one house. If prices go up, its still one house. When your kids need a home of their own in the area they need one house per kid. One house does not become multiple houses in any market unless you buy worse houses, throw in a loan, or move away where homes and job opportunities are less. In either case, whatever housing policy happens doesn’t change much about how this form of inheritance works. And if these kids never buy a house and merely rent and throw money in the stock market, their kids might inherit more than any equity gain would have given them I expect and doesn’t require lucking out being born early in a hot housing market either.
sucks to suck.
don't put 200% of your net worth into a depreciating asset.
It's not depreciating at the moment and hasn't been (aside from some brief dips) for many years. If you want to change the status quo, it has to be gradual.
Turning this into a discussion about "affordable housing" is missing the point altogether.
Most of these people have debilitating mental illnesses and/or drug addictions.
To assume all they need is a shiny subsidized apartment over a Starbucks and they'll put on a suit and go to work tomorrow is preposterous. In the HN utopia, they'll work remotely.
These people are chronically unemployable for a reason. Until you fix the reason, you won't solve this problem.
Instead of focusing on getting them the help they need, cities focus on things like how many tents can we allow in the public tennis courts or how many sheds can we build in the car park before we declare success.
> Most of these people have debilitating mental illnesses and/or drug addictions.
Do they, or don't they? If that's true, the article was misleading.
I mean that's the standard trope, sure, and it makes homelessness into an intractable problem about needing hordes of social workers and clinics, but there's a lot of implication here that these particular homeless are mostly people who can't afford the available rents.
> These people are chronically unemployable for a reason. Until you fix the reason, you won't solve this problem.
That might make you feel better about not caring or doing anything to fix the problem, but you have the causation flipped around. Once you are homeless, employers will no longer employ you.
This is a problem with our economy and is a societal problem. You can keep your head in the sand, but that means you are not helping to solve it and are helping to perpetuate it by remaining ignorant of the cause.
That used to be the case. However, the current government jacked the immigration numbers exponentially over the last few years. This seriously exacerbated an already growing problem with housing affordability. Also, the huge immigration (via temporary workers and student visas) has suppressed wages. These combined we now have a housing crisis that contends for worst in the developed world.
It isn't just mentally ill people who are homeless.
You're absolutely right. And the reason isn't because you have to be that bad to be homeless, but that if you're not that ill-equipped, you're usually in the category of the invisible homeless, couchsurfing or living in your car, etc.
Completely disagree. You're right that a lot of homeless people have mental health or drug addictions, but that's often caused by not having housing.
People start out well-meaning and lose their homes for financial reasons, then get unwell from years on the streets. Block off the top of that pipeline by building more homes for people.
Studies have shown this to be true.
> Studies have shown this to be true.
Please cite them.
Literally no one has become schizophrenic because they lost their apartment.
People become homeless because of their schizophrenia. Many such cases.
Use the tragic story of HN's very own Terry Davis as an example. Terry lost his home, and ultimately his life, because of untreated mental illness.
You’ve put the schitzophrenia thing into GP’s mouth. They didn’t say that.
A cynical observer might suspect that the reason there is a high regulatory burden leading to only unaffordable-for-poor-people buildings is that the voters no more want a really affordable apartment building next door than they want a homeless encampment
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
Just want to respond to that specific point. You are right in the absolute but in practice "we" indirectly allow companies/civil groups to use public space for different purposes. Some places are places for everyone to enjoy and having people privatize is a net loss for everyone like parks but a lot of public space is just unused space that nobody has ever stepped on because it's in a weird location or for some other reason and no one really cares to use it. I think it's reasonable to allow people temporarily (while it remains unused for the collective) in those spaces to remove a bit of the pressure of not having a home and having to constantly struggle for the bare minimum.
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right: Thats a fancy way of saying: parks are not campgrounds. These types of policies are plain wrong, and cities should know better by now.
How do you reconcile this with the existence of private property at all? The lands of the planet earth were not formed with deeds attached.
Public ownership does not mean nobody owns it.
I think it’s rightly and plainly frustrating for the sole reason that the e.g. parks, sidewalks, bridges, etc that the homeless live on (and, are now directly christened by the government to do so in Halifax) are quite literally funded by taxpayers for public (read: taxpayer) use. Rightly or wrongly (but let’s be real: often rightly) parents (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe bringing their children into these areas; young women (read: taxpayers) don’t feel safe walking in these areas. Crime is higher, drug use is higher, broken window theory, etc.
Here’s my unpopular opinion: I fully support making homelessness a jailable offense. A bed, meals, and heat in the winter; we’re not talking about the end of the world here, and I’m comfortable with my tax dollars funding that because I _do_ have some empathy for the homeless. But, not infinite empathy. We need better social programs, we need to work with the charities and churches as you say, I’m also very supportive of some kind of jail-adjacent jobs program that houses and feeds the homeless in exchange for employment.
the emotional part of my brain is aligned with you, but the pragmatic part knows this is an extremely expensive way to solve the need. Aside from the massive operating costs, what happens come spring - release them back into the wild?
My general take is: Finding an empathic solution to the problem is surfacing increasingly end-to-end solutions; government subsidized/paid housing, subsidizing food banks, etc. Homelessness is a bigger problem in urban areas with high density, where all of these components to a solution (e.g. the land upon which a shelter can be built) are very expensive and difficult. The first step toward finding a better life for many of these people is actually to get them into areas where the cost of living is lower.
This angles into, any solution to this problem has to happen at the state level. It can't happen at the city level because cities are usually homogenous; they don't have the right levers to pull. It also can't happen at the federal level because homeless problems are definitely regional and local. This is, I think, actually the root of many of America's homeless problems: Cities are usually blue but states are usually red, so any suggestion that the rural areas need to help with city problems, despite the fact that cities are massive economic subsidies on rural areas, is rejected.
One angle around this is, I suggest, to leverage the prison system. Most large prisons are built in more rural areas; or at the very least, most cities have a rural prison nearby. All of the real costs should be lower than even partial-end-to-end costs of caring for the homeless inside the bounds of a city; housing is more dense and lower quality, meals are cheaper, land is cheaper, prison labor recoups some costs, etc. Rural populations will be more accepting of a migration of homeless through the prison system versus just bussing them out of the city and leaving them (an extremely untenable solution).
But, obviously beyond this, there needs to be support beyond just dropping them in a prison in a cornfield somewhere. This gets into: States should seriously think about a New Deal-ish jobs program utilizing outgoing prison labor. Many of these rural areas are short on hands for hard labor. Housing is cheap to build in these areas. We should have a paved path to tell people migrated like this: "We aren't going to stop you from going back to the city. But, if you stay here and commit to two years, here's an apartment, its free as long as you work this job, and you'll also make minimum wage."
For the red-leaning rural areas, this is a great opportunity for private-public partnership. Lots of private farms would love a source of labor like this (in fact, the idea mirrors a very real source of labor for many farms in the west historically; farms provide a bunk house and food, and recruiting happens when people walk out of prison, this is a very Americana solution).
I don't think a solution like this works for the major-major hyper-blue cities like NYC/SF/LA; their homeless problem is just too big. But, Halifax is a city of ~400,000 people. I've spent many years in American cities in the ~500k pop range; obviously something might be structurally different in Halifax that I'm not aware of, but the homeless problem in these cities is far more tractable. Most of these cities are in states which lean red; the biggest problem up to this point is usually just getting state government on-board; telling the red state government that they can jail the homeless? They love that. Then its just a matter of the second half, which becomes the new hard part.
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals is not right
Letting people freeze to death is not right either. This a matter of choosing "least bad" of the short term options. There are no correct options in the short term. There are long term correct options, but they are very expensive.
> Furthermore, as we've seen time and time again, this is a shortsighted, temporary alleviation that ultimately dooms a neighborhood. Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
As noted in the article, according to judicial precedence the city has to either 1) provide shelter or 2) allow encampments. Since they cannot do the former in the short term the best they can do is to set up a structure that allows them to choose where the encampments go that does the least harm and the harm that does occur can be mitigated.
> If the city wants to help, the best thing they can do is listen to local charities, outreaches, churches, etc and clear the regulatory path for them.
Knowing Maritimers, I'm fairly confident they're already doing this.
The governors mansion in Halifax has like 30 rooms and a giant garden. Maybe they should make that a homeless shelter instead of foisting it upon low income communities.
> Taking a public asset and reserving it for exclusive use by certain individuals
> parks are not campgrounds
In most US cities parks are dog toilets. Dog owners took over most public places, and attack anyone who opposed them!
> Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash
Violent crime, vandalism, trash... All of that applies to dog owners as well.
The best thing is making their own housing and easing the regulatory burden so that it's easier to make housing in general.
The housing that's affordable now, that people praise, was mostly made during a time in which the regulations to build were much less burdensome. A bit ironic, isn't it?
At the same time, taking a natural resource[land] and reserving it for exclusive whether it be private or public ownership is also not a right. It's a consequence of the myth of necessary order - that the garden is preferable to the wild, that boundaries and order are necessary to function, but like this, the comprehensive ownership of land is in fact the cause of this very issue. If there was a wild or commons, this problem would cease to exist.
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
I always viewed it as groups. Just homeless, homeless with mental health issues and homeless with addiction. Those last two often overlap. The first group is the easiest to address. The two last ones i personally think need to be treated with institutionalization and detox. Leaving them on the street to hurt themselves and others is in my mind horrendous.
No matter where you fall on the line between "seize all rental properties and give them to the homeless" and "if you can't buy a house you should go starve to death in the woods", I think most reasonable people would agree that giving open permission to set up a zone where laws barely apply and people who live there or happen to be don't get the same degree of protection and law enforcement as you could expect on the sidewalk in front of a Walmart to be a bad idea.
> Homelessness is a hard problem to solve because it requires individual attention.
No! It's precisely the other way around: it requires federal attention first and foremost. Homelessness is a societal challenge to solve, not one whose burden should fall on those communities that act charitable to fellow human beings and pick up the slack of those just busing the homeless off to the next Democrat governed town.
> Both petty and violent crime increase overnight, vandalism on surrounding properties skyrocket, the places are littered with trash that ends up in the ocean, property values drop, and are ultimately boarded up until the encampment moves somewhere else and the cycle repeats.
They gotta go somewhere, they're humans, not stray dogs, and 99% of the homeless aren't homeless by choice but because society failed to provide for them. I agree an encampment might not be the most desirable thing to have next to a residential area, but on the outskirts adjacent to some commercial zoning it makes sense. Add a bus line, provide basic sanitation and social services on-site... and start building fucking housing.
Blair Fix has an interesting analysis of this that suggests on a national scale we need primarily higher incomes at the bottom end. I'm fairly sure there are areas that also have insufficient houses, but I hadn't really considered the problem might just be people are too poor: https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/08/22/from-commodit...
If the analysis is accurate it needs more than just affordable housing to be built.
Of course people are too poor, but any kind of wage increase will be immediately snatched up by the landlord caste.
I remember the days when Covid stimulus checks came 'round in the US, half of Reddit was up in arms over messages from landlords all but demanding they'd get their share (or the entirety of it).
Landlords should not exist for long term housing, period.
> I hadn't really considered the problem might just be people are too poor
I'm a little surprised by that- I thought that this was common knowledge? (But then again, there has been heavy propaganda against homeless people, and diverting attention that this has anything to do with an unfair economy, a la "homeless people are all crazy", "homeless people are all addicts", "homelessness is a choice")
I think it's less that than I thought that primary problem was just insufficient housing. Of course, both things can be true, particularly on a local scale.
> and start building fucking housing.
From the article: "multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax"
For a small city, that's a significant amount of new housing. 50 years from now that will be affordable housing. The problem is that virtually all high density housing in Halifax is >100 years old and either has been gentrified or is already affordable. Approximately no high density housing was built 50 years ago that would naturally become affordable today.
> and 99% of the homeless aren't homeless by choice but because society failed to provide for them.
I'd like a citation for that claim.
> but on the outskirts adjacent to some commercial zoning it makes sense.
This only makes sense if you want to ensure they don't break the poverty cycle by isolating them to blighted industrial land cut off from society. This is the same issue plaguing many poor and low income communities which have been placed in undesirable parts of municipalities.
> and start building fucking housing.
Where's the money coming from?
> I'd like a citation for that claim.
Well... the most recent stats I have for Canada [1] show: 41.8% financial issues (aka, housing becomes unaffordable thanks to exploding rents, wage stagnation and general inflation), relationship issues (36.9%) and domestic violence (13.3%) coupled with a lack of shelters, the remaining 10% are attributed mostly to (mental) health issues.
The US population will likely be skewed more towards mental health issues being the root cause, particularly combined with the opioid crisis (it's always hard to tell - do the drugs themselves cause the issue or are a ton of drug users just self-medicating because they have no access to healthcare or other ways to cope with stressors?).
From personal experience (aka anecdata) working in dodgy bars in Germany and hanging around with punks in my youth, the only people I know who "voluntarily" lived on the streets admitted to having mental health issues, mostly varieties of what I'd judge to be claustrophobia today.
> Where's the money coming from?
Reverse tax cuts for the rich, ban foreign investment into housing unless it's adding capacity to the rental market or it's used for primary residences. At least banning foreign investment is being tackled by Canada [2], but other countries should follow suit - the sooner the better.
[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/5170-homelessness-how-d...
[2] https://jingdaily.com/posts/what-canadas-ban-on-foreign-home...
> Where's the money coming from?
It should come from taxes on the folks doing obscenely well from our unfair economic system
> Where's the money coming from?
The Canadian Housing Infrastructure Fund announced in April, presumably.
Of course, it's pretty much guaranteed that we'll get a Conservative government next summer and that money will disappear.
You must not have children
> Mr Chauvin said the designated encampments are born out of a realisation that the city has run out of options to immediately address its housing crisis.
> The city is waiting for the provincial government to ramp up affordable housing construction. Nova Scotia has not built any new public housing units since 1995.
"Has run out of options" = "We've tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"
Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing.
The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far. If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong. And yes, it would be great if governments could get off their asses and make housing themselves too.
> Western governments have just become NIMBY-entrenched. The whole culture and bureaucracy is designed to make building things expensive, painful, and time-consuming, and then we look around and wonder why we can't seem to build enough housing.
Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money. Much regulation exists to prevent people from being injured or killed, or for other legitimate reasons. Let's at least start by acknowledging that. (Of course petty bureaucrats and regulation do exist.)
> The various regulations were mostly well intentioned, but we've obviously gone too far.
How is this obvious? By the fact there is not enough housing where people want to live, and too much housing in other less desirable places? In the Western world in general? In Canada? In the US? In specific areas of the US/Canada?
> If private companies are unable to provide more of a product even when demand is obvious and prices are high, something is very wrong.
Unable... or unwilling? There's a difference between affordable housing and available housing. And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too. For example, allowing developers to pay a one-time fine if they don't provide any affordable options in a new huge apartment block is probably a poor strategy.
I'm all for making things better. The "too much regulation" thing is just a bit too facile of an argument. In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.
> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance.
"Too much housing"? What does that even mean?
Having a lot of housing is good, it means lower prices, and tenants have more power than landlords. Plus, realistically, developers will stop building if there's a total flood, since a flood will lower prices and thus profits.
> In the US at least, there usually exist places where there is less regulation. Weirdly, people don't automatically move there.
Okay, two things:
1. There's actually very few places with non-strict housing regulation overall. Most places will at least have strict zoning around mandatory detached single family homes on large lots for most of their residential land.
2. People want to move where there are jobs. So even if some random rural counties actually do have almost no housing regulations, no one's gonna move there because surprise surprise, people need income. If you look at places with strong economies, it's rare to find a place with minimal regulation; even Houston isn't quite as unregulated as its reputation suggests.
> "Too much housing"? What does that even mean?
It means recession, like 2008 in the US and today in China.
Or at least that was the common wisdom post-2008. Today's problems are at least partially because we implicitly discouraged building to prevent 2008 from recurring.
It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.
That was caused by financial malfeasance underlying the mortgages that propped up demand beyond the underlying economic strength, not because it was too easy to build things.
The idea I'm proposing isn't building behind what demand truly is or should be, but just matching demand. Right now, prices and vacancy rates tell us that demand eclipses supply.
And the massive price drops of 2008 signaled that supply exceeded demand and that builders should stop building.
And they did.
Price signals were wrong, we should have kept building.
P.S. Canada did not have massive price drops in 2008, and did not stop building. Canada builds a lot more housing per capita than the US, but Canada also has substantially more immigration per capita than the US so Canada's problems are primarily demand side rather than the primarily supply side problems the US sees.
It's definitely harder to analyze building for people actually buying homes vs renting, simply because buying property is susceptible to bubbles in a way that doesn't happen for people renting. People don't go irrationally beyond their means for rentals in the hope that the rental will appreciate in value in the long run and they'll be able to "hold onto it", because it's a rental.
Something similar happened to Spain recently, where there was a huge building bubble before (real estate was an insane % of the economy IIRC) and now they're not building enough.
> And ways to fix that other than flooding the market with so much housing to force an overabundance. That's kind of wasteful, too.
Why? People need to move, and a certain amount of transiently vacant units is necessary for migration to not disrupt local prices too much.
Sure, absolutely. But we've also seen that landlords/owners are sometimes happy to keep units vacant. Or just use RealPage. How many vacant units are required? And where?
For what it's worth, I agree housing is nutty. But few desirable places have solved it. Not in the US, not in Canada, not in Europe. The "just build more" argument seems a bit simplistic. In an ideal world, it works. But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
> How many vacant units are required?
7% vacancy rate is about the historical average for the US I think. Around there or a bit higher would probably be healthy.
> And where?
Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.
But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.
> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
???
I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
> Supply needs to meet demand: we most need new housing where the economy is booming and jobs are being added.
> But you act like we need some federal authority to say, "okay guys, put housing HERE". That's totally unnecessary: if regulations are streamlined sufficiently, developers will build where demand exists. No central authority required.
Relax. I said no such thing.
>> But we also wouldn't have villages dying in the country-side, and extremely expensive cities/metro-areas.
> ???
> I'm sorry, are you unaware that most jobs aren't remote or something? This is a very strange and simple thing to misunderstand.
I'm just going to quote this for posterity, noting that you cut off "In an ideal world, it works." on purpose. Let's keep things civil, and not try to misrepresent.
I'm not misrepresenting anything. That you're apparently confused as to why rural villages are dying while major cities are very expensive is just baffling.
It's not even really related to it being hard to build, since even if it was easy and there was abundant housing, you'd still expect major cities to be at least somewhat more expensive than rural villages, and it being hard to build housing somewhere isn't why the rural villages are dying.
> Relax. I said no such thing.
Then what was the point of asking "and where?" Especially since "where demand is high" was already explained. What further answer were you looking for?
> Time and time again, companies have shown they will cut corners to make money.
Building codes that keep buildings safe and lovable are almost never the type of regulation that's a problem here. You'll virtually never find the dispute to be centered around a developer that wants to make a new building that's just kinda shitty and/or unsafe.
Rather, the problems tend to be:
* Livability concerns from neighbors around parking, views, shadows, traffic, "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).
* Environmental reviews, and especially people from the above group using fake environmental concerns to shut down or stall projects that they have a livability problem with.
* Overall process just taking a really long time. San Francisco, for example, has basically been chided by the state government repeatedly for taking too long to process new building permits.
There's an implicit strawman in your argument, because almost nobody is arguing against basic building codes around safety, or saying we should get rid of zoning that keeps factories or away from schools or whatever. The problem is that initially well intentioned regulations went overboard and have strangled development that we actually want.
Imagine if farmers had to attend neighborhood meetings from "concerned individuals" and alleviate their concerns (with attendant delays) every time they planted new crops. That's kind of the situation housing development is in.
> How is this obvious?
It's obvious at both a macro and micro level.
At a macro level, you can just looking at housing prices nationwide, or look at how in a given metro area with a booming economy, housing stock only crawls upwards, despite obvious demand.
At a micro level, if you zoom in on an area, you'll quickly discover the issues I've talked about. Zoning makes much potential housing illegal or more expensive to build, and the processes make it much more difficult and more expensive and time consuming.
California has a legislative analyst office that's produced various reports about this IIRC, because coastal California has had such an awful housing crisis for so long: https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/housing
> A lack of home building, particularly in coastal urban areas, is the fundamental cause of California’s housing crisis. Many factors contribute to this lack of building, chief among them local community resistance to new housing. The high cost and limited availability of housing in California forces many households to make serious tradeoffs in order to live here.
> ...
> Housing element law requires cities and counties to develop a plan that demonstrates how their planning and zoning rules will accommodate future home building. Our review of available evidence suggests that housing elements fall well short of their goal. Communities’ zoning rules often are out of sync with the types of projects developers desire to build and households desire to live in. There are no easy solutions to this problem. Any major changes in how communities plan for housing will require their active participation and a shift in how local residents view new housing.
They've done some great work here, and statewide there's been some progress on the state forcing local governments to stop being such enormous shitheads, standing in the way of new housing. But it's an uphill battle, because of all the cultural momentum against serious new development.
> Unable... or unwilling?
Unable. Obviously not 100% unable, there's some new housing each year, it's just not enough.
And the fact that even local government themselves are uninterested in even trying themselves kind of gives it away. Even the people setting the rules don't want to play the game, they know exactly how painful they've made it.
I'm a bay area native so this topic is near and dear to my heart. Bay Area is basically NIMBY central for the whole country, but you can find similar issues almost everywhere, albeit not quite as extreme.
> "neighborhood character" (read: keep out them poors).
As somebody who has spent a lot of money to live in a high-value area, not because of an investment in the property, but to avoid having my family exposed to inappropriate behaviors, yes let's keep out of the poors.
Affordable housing doesn't mean it needs to be in the same gated community as expensive housing, or in the same condo building. Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.
My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is. I don't want my children exposed to public drug usage, petty crime, violence, and other ills that perpetuate any place where the people reside who lack the mental stability, intelligence, or self-control to hold down a professional job. I don't want them seeing this behavior, and I don't want them being pulled into dangerous situations because of the people who are in the community around them. I pay a lot to ensure that doesn't happen, including the choice of school and where we live.
I say all this as someone who grew up in a poor family in a bad area and spent my entire life escaping and staying out so I can raise a family in a better circumstance.
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill, in fact it's the primary driver for many people to increase their fortunes (myself included) so they can escape the crime and blight that comes from lower class people.
Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.
And let's be clear, calling it economic segregation isn't an exaggeration. The zoning that the US typically has is a form of gated community living enforced by the government. It's designed to separate where people live by class, and people like this poster are entirely for it.
Also:
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill
It is, actually, because it tends to limit social mobility.
People having enormous advantages or disadvantages because of their starting social class is less than great for society. Obviously we can't really eliminate all of that sort of thing, but we definitely don't want the government explicitly pursuing policies to encourage social stratification.
Let's be clear, many folks in this country are perfectly happy to make the world more equal by dragging others down rather than lifting others up. If there's no way to escape the ills of humanity, it means you're stuck in a situation where the next generation cannot be assured of a better life. The aspiration of the American Dream is very much about escaping all the antisocial behaviors which dominate the lower class and having a prosperous life where you can raise a family that has a better life than you yourself had.
It's segregation by dollars, not by any immutable characteristic, and I do not see that as morally wrong in any way.
I will not sacrifice my children on the altar of economic mobility. I dragged myself out of poverty to make a better life for my family, and others can do the same. The US has some of the highest economic mobility of any society in the world, partly because we segregate based on dollars rather than on immutable characteristics.
If that makes me a NIMBY, so be it.
> Thank you for admitting what so many NIMBYs won't: that they're pro-segregation.
Yeah lets go around accusing people of being segregationists because they worked hard to make a better life. Jerk.
You seem to be very confused. The person I responded to literally called their own position segregation:
> Economic segregation is not a net societal ill
They also said their position was classist:
> My reply might seem incredibly classist, because it is.
Maybe the real jerk is the person who didn't read the replies and threw out insults anyway?
In any case, it is literally segregation, just by economics instead of by race. Why am I a jerk for accurately labeling something? If you call people in favor of separate schools by race pro-segregation, does that make you a jerk for "accusing people of being segregationists"?
It's not just regulations to prevent new housing, it is corporate driven inflation on all goods as well as housing
It's mostly not the corporations in this case. I mean, there's the algorithmic price fixing that's a problem for sure, but if we had enough housing that would only be a minor issue. Price fixing is simply a much bigger problem any time regulations make it harder to get new entrants, new "disruptors".
Plus, there's an avenue that avoids corporations entirely: public housing. But our local and state governments can't get off their asses long enough to actually address the problem directly, it's so much easier to either let people suffer or blame dastardly 'greedy landlords'. (Landlords are greedy of course, but that's not new, and they can only make their greed manifest to the extent that competition is limited)
Bizarre article, it makes it sound like this is some new experiment and a contrast to the US?
Homeless camps were effectively legalized by a 2018 court ruling in the US, as long as there isn’t shelter space. Sounds simple enough, build more shelter space.
However in the west coast cities that was interpreted by local zealots as “shelter space that allows heavy drug and alcohol use”. A bed is not enough for this scenario, you need a separate structure per person.
West coast cities have been supporting camps like this (tiny) one in Halifax for decades.
Very recently the 2018 ruling was overturned, there are still thousands of camps supported by billions in government funding.
I wonder how poor people in tents will fair in Canadian winter. I'm imagining many people freezing to death. But maybe homeless encampments are better prepared than I'm imagining.
In any case I think it's a step in the right direction it's at least better than arresting homeless people for being homeless. What kind of dystopian nightmare city outlaws being homeless? Talk about kicking someone when they're down.
All that is left is to have law-enforcement round up homeless/unhoused person move them into those camps and we will officially be in the Star Trek timeline.
No no, that would put responsibility for humane living conditions on the local government.
If you force people into camps, human rights organisations will start expecting you feed them and generally keep them alive.
If you just allow them to camp somewhere without getting bulldozed, you have less liability
I would support this in my neighborhood given some kind of recourse for problematic repeat offenders in the community the same way we have for our housed neighbors.
Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms is an ingenious legal innovation. Section 7 guarantees that everyone, “has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
Lawyers and advocates have used this mechanism to advance many notable improvements in human rights in Canada since the Charter came into force in the early-1980s. The camping example cited in this article is just one of many s.7 success stories:
1. In the last 20 years, s.7 forced the most conservative government of the last 50 years to permit safe injection sites, which have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives in the years since. In the immediate area surrounding “Insite,” the first such safe injection facility, overdose deaths decreased by 35%. This compared to only a 9% decrease in the rest of Vancouver. [1] At the facility itself, there were zero overdose deaths, because medical staff were able to administer naloxone in every case. While the approach remains controversial, in Canada there is no debating that addicts have a right to “life, liberty, and security of the person,” even in the context of using illegal drugs.
2. The Supreme Court used Section 7 to strike down Quebec's ban on private health insurance, ruling that excessive delays in the public system could threaten security of the person when patients face serious physical pain or death [2]. While this challenge perhaps puts the single-payer public provision of healthcare at risk, ultimately it forced the provinces to take public healthcare more seriously and to invest more despite the financial challenges of doing so.
3. The courts established that Section 7 protects psychological integrity, particularly in child protection cases. This led to guaranteeing fair hearings for parents in custody matters and ensuring legal representation for indigent parents when necessary for a fair hearing [3]. The history of the Canadian state in relation to aboriginal children is awful and continues to be awful, but this ruling cracked the door open on making important changes to the system.
4. The Supreme Court determined that imposing imprisonment without requiring mens rea (guilty mind) violates fundamental justice, establishing that Section 7 prohibits both substantive and procedural injustice [4]. This prevents the justice system from throwing people in jail whose mental capacity made it impossible for them to understand that what they were doing was wrong. Ultimately, it guides the justice system to ensuring that people with mental challenges are funneled appropriately into treatment rather than being put in jail. The police are also restrained from fishing expeditions where they bait low-IQ people into becoming terrorists only to be caught in the act (yes, that actually happened).
And more… The right to make reasonable medical choices without fear of criminal prosecution, the ability to choose where to live, parental decision-making rights regarding children's education and health, and more.
Sources
[1] Does evidence support supervised injection sites? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5685449/?t&utm_sour...
[2] Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_7_of_the_Canadian_Char...
[3] Guide to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - Canada.ca: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...
[4] Life, liberty and security of the person under the Charter (91-6E): https://publications.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/CIR/916-e.htm
[4] [PDF] The Brilliant Career of Section 7 of the Charter https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?...
[5] Charterpedia - Section 7 – Life, liberty and security of the person https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
You have the right to free movement on public land. You may bring belongings with you. The government has essentially no power to evict or prevent homelessness.
This is a nationwide problem caused by the federal government.
I very much disbelieve that Halifax only has 200 homeless. Completely impossible, implying someone is murdering the homeless or the city falsified this number. The latter being where im going.
It's very sad to me that we allow our federal government to do this to our fellow citizens. We imminently need an election.
>It's very sad to me that we allow our federal government to do this to our fellow citizens. We imminently need an election.
What specifically will a conservative government do differently/better?
there were some homeless issues during the financial crisis during Harper. Lets not politicize needlessly.
We know homelessness is a crisis now and not from many decades of low to no homeless issues. Exception being above.
So whats the supply demand if it were a free market?
World war level immigration numbers attempting to blitz the 2030 worker shortage problem. Leading to a large increase to demand. Smart long term, but short term we now have significant consequences.
https://www.blogto.com/city/2024/01/25-international-student...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/death-to-can...
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/failed-to-protect-...
But the federal government also intentionally and heavily decreased supply.
Carbon tax greatly impacts mining, concrete operations, lumberjacks, etc. A regressive tax that's in each cycle doing increasing damage to the economy. We are getting uncharacteristic tax breaks and shameless $250, not because of any attempt to buy votes, but because the economy is collapsing. Major productivity crisis.
But worse yet... 5% interest rates on mortgages?
The entire real estate market, which is highly manipulated by the federal government has some extreme consequences that need to be addressed.
The winner of the next election can simply stop doing the above and it should solve the problem.
I don't think park curfews have ever been found to be unconstitutional
If you curfew all the parks, which government can do. It means all the homeless will be on the steps of city hall or any sidewalk anywhere.
Steps of city hall will be the one place you can never ever curfew or otherwise hinder access to. Short of emergencies act, but Canadian taxpayers will now foot the bill of $2million for each ottawa protestor.
So hows those park curfews working out? Not many implemented eh?
How can a park have a curfew, based on the first sentence of your previous post: "You have the right to free movement on public land".
Isn't a park curfew restricting free movement on public land?
I have decades of experience with homelessness, as a journalist, a direct outreach activist and for brief periods as a homeless person myself, many years ago.
Most homeless people don't start out mentally ill or addicted to drugs, but people who are mentally ill or addicts often end up homeless because there's no support system for them, at least in the US. Your local mental health system is a lot more poorly funded and overstressed than you almost certainly realize, and the same is true of drug treatment programs. It's easy to say people shouldn't have started doing drugs; as easy as it is to say that nerds who can't just get laid should learn not to be creepy dorks, and just as ignorant of reality.
Many homeless people become dependent upon booze or drugs to either numb the suffering of their existence or to keep going under horrible conditions. If you weren't allowed to sleep anywhere for fear of arrest or assault, you'd probably take speed too, despite what you might believe about yourself from the comfort of having a roof over your head.
There are serious logistical problems inherent in all the solutions that affluent people consider "obvious", because they haven't actually thought them through or lack the life experience to understand why they won't work. Building housing out of the way where you don't have to see it is a nonstarter, and if you can't logically deduce why you have no business expressing a firm opinion about the situation... but I'll spell it out for the slow folks.
If you're homeless, and you get a room, what's the next step? You might think it's getting work but in fact, due to America's idiotic state/federal system, it's usually getting ID. Where do you get ID? Government buildings. Where are those usually located? Downtown. Where can a person with limited skills get work? Day labor. Where do you go for day labor work? Usually downtown. But where is the actual work done? Usually in the suburbs or industrial districts, which means you're commuting on a bus from wherever you got warehoused away so people don't have to look at you to downtown, and then off to the suburbs, often back downtown to get your pay, and then back out to Human Warehouse Land.
I met a couple in Vegas who'd lost their house due to both of them being laid off. They slept in a tent in an empty lot with a few hundred other people in an industrial area north of downtown, bothering no one. They both got work, but on the edges of town, so they had to get up before dawn to catch a bus to work.
So when the cops came at 7am to roust everyone out of this lot and slash up any tents left standing after the 15 minutes they gave everyone to gtfo (which I've seen happen with my own eyes), these folks weren't there... and came home to find all their possessions ripped to shreds and left in a Dumpster or to simply blow away on the street.
And that's not the exception: it's the norm for homeless folks. It's only getting worse due to the increasing cost of housing and living.
And maybe you don't give a rat's ass and you think life isn't fair. I agree with you. So let's tax the shit out of rich people and use the money to build houses for poor people who can then sit on their asses and do nothing if they want to.
Or is that the kind of injustice you actually do care about? Because of you think paying more taxes when you'll never want for a meal in your life is more unfair than sleeping in an empty lot because you lost some genetic lottery or don't have the Bank of Mommy and Daddy to cover you when you feel like starting a business, you might want to consider that you're not a rational decision maker but simply a bit of a prick.
> Most homeless people don't start out mentally ill or addicted to drugs, but people who are mentally ill or addicts often end up homeless because there's no support system for them, at least in the US.
> Many homeless people become dependent upon booze or drugs to either numb the suffering of their existence or to keep going under horrible conditions.
> There are serious logistical problems inherent in all the solutions that affluent people consider "obvious", because they haven't actually thought them through or lack the life experience to understand why they won't work.
You nailed it. Great post- I wish the folks arguing against actually helping people who are homeless would read this (especially the part about the couple in Las Vegas).
[dead]
Halifax?
This isn't Phoenix or SF for that matter. The temperature drops to -7C in the winter.
Will the city take the blame when these people all freeze to death because the city officially allowed them to play camp as part of some sociological experiment?
Unfortunately, the responsible thing - building a shelter - is overlooked by cities because shelters have rules. Like no drug use - which in some confusing twist of logic is perceived as cruel.
It's also bothersome that these articles find the one or two people genuinely down on their luck - unable to find work and the like. It makes for biased reporting. The 80/20 rule applies here. I guess the ones pooping on the BART and babbling gibberish are hard to interview.
A UCLA study 'found that a mental health “concern” affected 78% of the unsheltered population and a substance abuse “concern,” 75%.' [0]
[0] https://capolicylab.org/health-conditions-among-unsheltered-...
78% and 75% are pretty close to 80%, it may not be an exact Pareto distribution, but it's "close enough for government work".