Stolen Bicycles and Property Recovered at Encampment - "Hamilton Police were made aware of a possible bike ‘Chop Shop’ operating out of an encampment located at the intersection of Main Street and King Street East, commonly referred to as the Delta. Citizens reported there were numerous bicycles believed to be stolen. Officers responded to the area and determined that the bicycles did not belong to encampment residents. While in the area, a citizen reported that someone had stolen the steel bicycle rack from a nearby McDonald's parking lot the night before. Officers went to McDonald's to return the bike rack and discovered that CCTV footage captured the theft. Police have identified the male responsible for the theft... Police seized eight bicycles from the location. Some of the bikes had been painted and/or dismantled, making identification of the bicycle owners difficult"
Virtue signalling about leaving people's tents alone is all fun and games until you find needles in the park and they steal your bikes
These landlords agreed to help with homelessness, but end up with trashed properties - "Mounds of mouldy garbage, cigarette butts, discarded needles, used tampons, vomit and rat feces litter what was once a clean, empty one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa's ByWard Market. The unit above looks similar, with broken windows and walls covered in bright red spray paint. In the building next door, kitchen tiles peel up following a flood, and the smell upon entering is overwhelming. Brian Dagenais owns the three properties on St. Patrick Street. He never imagined this would happen when he signed up to house supported clients through the city's housing first program. "I stepped on a needle about a week ago and I didn't prick myself, it was just flat. It's rather disgusting," he said. "I stepped in human crap also and I think that's what really set me off." The program, which began in Ottawa in 2014, works with 11 housing agencies to give people experiencing chronic homelessness a permanent place to live, with rental supplements and support from housing workers... Dagenais estimates the damage incurred by supported tenants and their guests could be $200,000 over the most recent four years. That's partly because the units that were once all occupied are now in such bad shape he can't rent them out anymore. Three supported tenants remain in one of the buildings and Dagenais said the damage keep coming. "I don't think there is anything the city or agencies could do to make me trust them again," he said, adding he's also concerned that by going public the city could deny any future requests for demolition... Dagenais said since 2021 he was able to access about $71,000 from the city's landlord damage fund to cover costs of some cleanup, however, he said he hasn't seen any money in months... Since 2018 the total amount of money paid to landlords through the damage fund has been increasing, with over $300,000 paid out last year alone... The damage fund does not include rental arrears... In Ottawa's Vanier neighbourhood, another landlord said he hasn't had any luck accessing the damage fund."
This is what happens when you provide free housing : r/TorontoRealEstate - "I think this demonstrates the need for compulsory medical intervention for some homeless people. I appreciate that is a controversial view."
"Why do people think jail is free or cheap? It costs like $50k a year to keep someone locked up."
"It cost hamilton 110k per tent person last year. Jail seems like a bargain!"
Of course, OP's "solution" is... even more government
Weird. I thought housing first works
This is what happens when you provide free housing : r/TorontoRealEstate - "I've done a lot of remediation work for housing first providers. All those photos are very similar to the things I've seen. Housing first keeps people off the streets, but only if there is an unending supply of money to fix the problems that come with zero consequences for those being housed."
Denver homeless hotel: 7 deaths since January - "Seven people have died at a hotel-turned-shelter for Denver’s homeless people since it opened in December, according to the city's medical examiner... Between Oct. 1 and Jan. 12, dispatchers fielded 1,212 calls from the hotel and within 1,000 meters, according to Department of Public Safety data obtained by The Denver Gazette. That number of emergency call far exceeded the number of calls from the other shelters. The city's campaign to get homeless people out of the city's streets has been expensive. Last year, it cost the city $45 million to move 1,135 individuals into shelters. Johnston's administration anticipates spending another $50 million to provide shelter to 1,000 more people this year."
Left wingers insist that the solution to homelessness is just to house people, and that policing them violates their basic human rights. But without addressing the reasons why people are homeless, you don't solve the root cause. Of course, the cope is going to be that they need even more money
Child pricked by used needle in Charlottetown park, police say
Mom says 6-year-old played with used needle in school playground, now faces blood tests for months
Ottawa paramedics say child brought to CHEO after contact with syringe at local park
Someone confidently proclaimed that this never happens
Meme - Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth: "The Supreme Court's conservative majority rejects science, history and reality itself. Editorial from Scientific American @sciam"
Alexander @datepsych: "When I read articles like this it becomes very clear that some people are unable to fully separate their own political and social opinions from what “science” is. The whole article is full of things like this, but decisions to ban homeless people from sleeping outside, or what weapons we let people own, are not scientific questions. To frame criminalizing sleeping outdoors as “criminalizing human biology” would be akin to say it is “criminalizing human biology” to defecate outdoors. We criminalize behaviors based on subjective values and objective goals - but the scientific method doesn’t tell us what those values or goals are."
"Science is dismissed and disdained in this war on reality. For example, a late June decision upholding bans on homeless people sleeping in public places criminalizes human biology, as the dissent noted. A frankly despicable decision this year to legalize bump stocks turned on gun fetishists’ scholastic argument that holding your finger taut while a rifle bucks around it—pumping bullets into men, women and children, with more than 400 (400!) people shot and 60 killed this way in Las Vegas in 2017—is not truly automatic weaponry. That’s despite"
Elias Acevedo @Lucidly_Elias: "Attempting to observe the world dispassionately - suspending (or at least pretending to suspend) value judgements for objectivity sake - is an increasingly discarded intellectual/scientific virtue."
This is similar to when TRAs claim that if you reject any element of their agenda, you are literally denying their existence and committing genocide
This left wing version of scientism says that if you object to any element of the left wing agenda, you are anti-science
Robby Slowik on X - "Person: I can’t afford a house
America: You are under arrest"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Literally every country in the world says that...
If you can't afford a house Or an apartment Or a room-mate Or a trailer Won't join the military
So...
Wind up technically homeless Don't live with friends Don't live with family Don't live in a car Don't live in a "camping" area" Don't live in a shelter
And...
Wind up living in a tent on Michigan Avenue and shitting outside, you can be sent to treatment or jail. A decision has been made: we will not wreck society to accommodate the most fringe failures available- Black criminals injured in police shoot-outs they started at their rape victim's house and so on. Good! About damn time!"
California ramps up removal of homeless encampments after US supreme court ruling - "Crackdowns on homeless encampments are ramping up in California following the US supreme court’s ruling that cities can fine and jail unhoused people sleeping outside even when there is no shelter available. In California, home to an estimated 123,000 unsheltered people living in tents, trailers, cars and makeshift shelters, the Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, last week issued an executive order calling for the removal of encampments across the state. His order directed state agencies to shutter tent sites on properties in their jurisdictions and urged local municipalities to adopt similar crackdowns. The city council of Fresno in the Central valley gave initial approval for an ordinance on Monday prohibiting “sitting, lying, sleeping or camping on a public place … at any time”, saying a violation would be a criminal misdemeanor subject to a maximum fine of $1,000 and up to one year in jail. The San Francisco mayor, London Breed, sent out a memo this week outlining a more aggressive approach to sweeps, saying teams of police officers and public works employees will target encampments on a daily basis and that workers will return to swept sites to force out people who have returned."
Weird. Why would he follow such an "unscientific" policy that makes it "illegal" to be homeless?
Friend of the Talking Bird on X - "My family friend is a Ukrainian war refugee whose occupation in Ukraine was a psychologist. I told her about Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, and said, "If Neely had been forcibly hospitalized, he would still be alive, and Penny would not be in jail to be tried for manslaughter.""
The New York Times: "Jordan Neely Was on New York’s ‘Top 50’ List of Homeless People at Risk"
Is New York going to wait until the remaining 49 attack people, as Neely threatened to do, or are killed, like Neely was, or is it going to do something proactively?"
ACLU on X - "BREAKING: The Supreme Court ruled today that cities can punish unhoused people for sleeping in public, even if they have nowhere else to go. We cannot arrest our way out of homelessness."
someonesalt on X - "The addendum that "we can't arrest our way out of homelessness" reveals the chasm in worldviews and values here. I don't want bums arrested because I think it will solve the problem of bums existing. I want bums arrested because I want to be on the streets of my town with my family without being assaulted by degenerate drug addicts and their accoutrements. To the 2020s prog, everything is about 'solving' the "root causes" of something, or otherwise pointless. What is the point of cleaning up one oil spill if it doesn't solve the problem of future oil spills?"
VB Knives on X - "I think "housing the homeless" is one of those things we deliberately pretend is hard or complicated. It's not. If you build and give them 200 sq ft apartments where they are left alone and allowed to drink they will use them. But they won't take "monitored" housing."
Mason on X - "San Francisco contracted about 70 SRO hotels to do this and the results have been... welp The reality is that we don't just want to *house* people, we want people to take care of themselves, their space and their neighbors, and many homeless people are in no condition to do that"
S.F. spent millions to shelter homeless in hotels. These are the disastrous results - "HSH says its goal is to provide some residents with enough stability to enter more independent housing. But of the 515 tenants tracked by the government after they left permanent supportive housing in 2020, a quarter died while in the program — exiting by passing away, city data shows. An additional 21% returned to homelessness, and 27% left for an “unknown destination.” Only about a quarter found stable homes, mostly by moving in with friends or family or into another taxpayer-subsidized building.
At least 166 people fatally overdosed in city-funded hotels in 2020 and 2021 — 14% of all confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco, though the buildings housed less than 1% of the city’s population. The Chronicle compiled its own database of fatal overdoses, cross-referencing records from the medical examiner’s office with supportive housing SRO addresses, because HSH said it did not comprehensively track overdoses in its buildings...
Residents have threatened to kill staff members, chased them with metal pipes and lit fires inside rooms, incident reports show. At the Henry Hotel on Sixth Street, a tenant was hospitalized after a neighbor, for a second time, streamed bug spray into their eyes, public records show. Last May, less than a mile away at the Winton Hotel, a resident slashed another tenant’s face with a knife, leaving a trail of blood out of the building. Much of the instability stems from a small group of tenants who do not receive the support they need...
Mission Hotel resident Anthony Alexander said a cat jumped into his window, knowing there would be mice to catch in his room"
So much for it being simple - just giving people housing
GUNTER: Not sure Sohi will learn anything about homelessness in Paris - "Sohi said, “Access to affordable, accessible and appropriate housing is essential to ending houselessness and building socially and economically thriving cities.” And that’s exactly what I mean about the Paris conference and the “progressive” approach to homelessness. Homeless people aren’t homeless because they can’t afford homes. So building them homes, which is Sohi’s favoured approach, will not end homelessness. They’re homeless because mental illness and addiction makes it impossible for them to train for and hold jobs, or even to live “normal” lives. Even if there were thousands more affordable units, most homeless people would be unable to routinize their lives enough to benefit from living in them. Until we consider solutions such as mandatory addiction treatments, we are going to make little progress toward ending homelessness. It’s not a lack of public funds, yet the Paris conference will hear expert after expert pitch ideas such as more social programs, safe-injection sites and guaranteed annual incomes, as well as (of course) more social housing. This is a typical UN conference. Set up in an exotic location, listen to endless speeches on trendy leftist themes and pat one another on the back about caring enough to battle the forces of colonialism, white privilege and settler mentality. Make sure to complain that miserly governments and taxpayers aren’t spending nearly enough. And be sure to emphasize “intersectionality,” the overlapping of all the fashionable causes such as transgender care, reconciliation, Palestinian rights and the refugee crisis. Equally interesting, the mayor says he is going to Paris to teach the rest of the world what we in Edmonton are doing right. What is he going to teach them? Don’t go away to Hawaii while you have an encampment crisis because while you’re gone your city manager and police chief might just roust the vagrants against your wishes?"
PBO finds homelessness rose 20 per cent under Liberals' plan - "Despite $443 million in new annual spending aimed to reduce homelessness the number of people without a roof over their head has grown by 20 per cent in Canada, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The new $443 million was a 374 per cent increase compared to prior spending, but it doesn’t appear to be having the desired effect... “We estimate that achieving a 50 per cent reduction in chronic homelessness would require an additional $3.5 billion per year, approximately a seven-fold increase in funding,” the PBO report... Most of the money spent on reducing homelessness was spent by provincial and municipal governments... “Housing placements do not reduce future homelessness on a one-for-one basis because some of the homeless people placed in stable housing would have found housing anyways and some people placed in stable housing return to homelessness,” reads the report."
Obviously, the problem was they didn't spend enough!
Meme - Logan Hall: "friend visiting NYC sent this. intersection surrounded by trash and homelessness with a street sign asking "who was the first indian american woman to fly in outer space?" the absolute state of liberalism"
Meme - The Sacramento Bee @sa...: "A San Francisco billionaire is donating $30 million to the University of California, San Francisco, to research root causes of homelessness and potential solutions."
jordan @JordanUhl: "that's an expensive mirror"
Nuance Bro @NuanceBro: "Really? You think billionaire Bennioff is responsible for homelessness? What a shit take. Guarantee the dude has improved more lives and helped more homeless people than you could ever imagine doing. Also pretty sure he isn't responsible for their drug addiction and mental probs"
Left wingers think of the world in zero sum terms. So someone being a billionaire must be actively causing other people to be homeless
Naturally, this reporter got upset and claimed that people were defending billionaires, and tried to cancel Nuance Bro
He can find it in lobbies!!! : r/clevercomebacks (response to the above) - "He could have also used $30 million to built houses to fight homelessness."
"30 million to study the causes of homelessness bruh we already know that. The govt has already done a lot of research what a fuckin waste. Straight into the UCSF coffers, how humanitarian. Not to mention that many schools have programs for disadvantaged students, the money would have helped much more there."
"He doing it right now with his "donation". That he can write of on his taxes."
"I swear redditors say the dumbest shit. What exactly do you mean write it off his taxes? Do you even know what that means? In either case, he is wasting more money making this donation than if he would not."
"That a stupid argument with a very shallow understanding what causes homelessness. You very well know that there are homeless people that would turn that brand new housing project in to a crack den. Who pays for the utilities ? Something brakes in the house , who pays for that? What makes you think that’s all they need and they would be 100% after that. Work would just fond them."
He can find it in lobbies!!! : r/clevercomebacks - "The thought that you could solve any problem by just throwing more money at it, is a massive issue with many social programs. The core issue of homelessness isn‘t the lack of housing or poverty, but substance abuse and mental illness. While alleviating some of the financial burden can be beneficial to mental health and in turn to substance abuse issues it won‘t solve the problem."
"My sister in law once went into a help project in Africa and she came back totally disillusioned because was a waste of time and money. She changed her field of studies afterwards."
He can find it in lobbies!!! : r/clevercomebacks - "Great point! Interestingly, I live in a city with a significant homeless population. Factually, many of the organizations that operate homeless shelters report empty beds daily. Also, many food pantries report an abundance of food. The problem is deeper than just giving free stuff."
"Here most shelters have a „no drugs“ policy, which is the reason many beds are empty."
He can find it in lobbies!!! : r/clevercomebacks - "Actually a lot of it is just mental illness, drugs, and an unwillingness to conform to societal standards. $30m won’t fix that."
"Recently had a talk with a security person whose company has a division dedicated to outreach for the homeless in my city. Last year that division approached 5000 homeless people to get into a program that would eventually get them a place and training for work. Only 50 took them up on it. So yeah, what you said sounds about right."
He can find it in lobbies!!! : r/clevercomebacks - "As someone who has worked closely with the homeless, they are not homeless because of a lack of housing availability."
Kevin Kiley on X - "The audit of homelessness spending in California is finally out, and the results are infuriating: "California spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over the past five years but didn’t consistently track whether the huge outlay of public money actually improved the situation." I first asked for the audit in 2020, but Newsom intervened to kill it. Now we know why he didn't want his spending examined. Last year, Assemblyman Josh Hoover got the audit approved, and the findings released today are even worse than I expected. The audit found that the California Interagency Council on Homelessness "stopped tracking spending on programs and whether programs were working in 2021. It also failed to collect and evaluate outcome data for these programs." Even a Democrat State Senator decried the "lack of transparency at every level." Meanwhile, homelessness has increased by 32 percent in California over the last five years. It has increased 67 percent in Sacramento. And half the nation's unsheltered homeless now live in our state. In short: California is spending more and more on homelessness and the problem continues to get worse worse and worse. Far worse than anywhere else in America. It's yet another example of how our citizens sacrifice the most and get the least in return."
The homeless-industrial complex marches on. Spending more without achieving results and without trying to achieve results is a feature, not a bug. But to the left, declared intentions and spending matter more than outcomes
Quote by Natalie J Case - "In conversation with some coworkers today, one of them said that homeless people should have to work for their meals just like the rest of us. I said, "Okay, I know a man who is homeless. He'd be happy to work. He's got a business degree. He would be happy to come clean your house, do your yard work, or help you with your filing, walk your dogs, babysit your kids, or just about any office job. What time tomorrow should he come see you?" They all just looked at me. I said, "Mind you, he's homeless, so he hasn't showered in a while and the only clothes he has are the ones on his back because he lost all his stuff last week when he got picked up for vagrancy and they wouldn't let him go back for his bag. It would be a few weeks before what you are paying him is enough to get shelter and such." And still they stared at me. I finished, "See? It isn't that easy. He can't get a job because he 's homeless with no access to hot water or clean clothes. He can't get access to shelter, hot water or clean clothes without a job. You want him to work for his meals? Give him a hand out of the vicious circle. Stop pretending that all he has to do is get a job"
Even ignoring substance use, ironically, in other instances, women are supported when they say they have concerns about strange men going to their houses
Eight deaths reported at former North Vancouver motel, says operator - "Eight people have died at a temporary North Vancouver supportive housing facility since March 2022, according to the BC Housing contractor. That is four times the number that the Ministry of Housing originally told a reporter. During Monday’s Question Period, BC United housing critic Karin Kirkpatrick (West Vancouver-Capilano) challenged Premier David Eby to investigate living conditions at the former Travelodge Lions Gate motel on Marine Drive."
Weird. I thought the solution to homelessness was to house them
Homelessness in Washington, D.C., looks different from L.A - Los Angeles Times - "While both cities have removed some of the most visible tents, Washington looks and feels less saturated with homeless people than Los Angeles, especially in the tourist areas around the White House, Capitol Hill and the national monuments."
Basically it boils down to political will
Meme - Cosmin Dzsurdzsa @cosminDZS: "CANADIAN POVERTY CRISIS: This is not a refugee camp somewhere in the developing world. This is Kelowna, British Columbia where hundreds of homeless people have encamped for the winter. These are the fruits of socialist policies in BC and beyond."