Homelessness isn’t just a housing problem - "Despite more than 200 social agencies and non-profits operating in in the Downtown East Side, the problem just keeps getting worse, Brodie said. And part of the problem may be that homelessness is viewed too much through the lens of housing stock shortages. “To our mind, the biggest problem is that we're calling it a homelessness problem,” she said. “But it's not it's not just about homelessness. This is mental illness and drug addiction.” While some people who are living in tents, on the streets and in temporary shelters are homeless because they simply can’t find affordable housing, it is estimated that half to two-thirds of the homeless population in the Greater Vancouver region have some form of mental health issue, drug addiction, or both. An estimated 7,655 individuals were identified as homeless in B.C., according to the 2018 Report on Homelessness. Fifty-six per cent of respondents reported an addiction, 40% reported having a mental illness and 33% had a physical disability. To address the drug addiction problem on the Downtown East Side, a four pillars approach was adopted. Those pillars included prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. But key pillars of that approach are missing, Brodie said – enforcement being one of them. “There's no enforcement because the police have been have been literally handcuffed from doing their jobs,” Brodie said. “What we're doing isn't working,” Krog said. “The numbers are not diminishing, the severity is worse. The social costs are horrendous.” With respect to mental illness, and how it has led to so many mentally ill and drug addicted people living on the streets, one nexus is the deinstitutionalization of mental health that occurred throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout North America, large mental hospitals like Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam were shut down. The idea was to build smaller, community based homes and support services where people with mental illness could live and receive the support they need in their own communities. But to a large extent, that second phase of deinstitutionalization was never followed through on... Julian Somers, a clinical psychologist at Simon Fraser University and director of SFU’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction, agrees with Trudeau that decriminalization is no silver bullet. “Nobody has been cured of addiction with a drug,” he said. “There’s no publication showing that…. increasing the supply of drugs to a population improves health. In fact, it’s the opposite. What people need is genuine care and material support.”"
Toronto MP Baber calls out Mayor Chow, 'outright crazy' shelter plan - "Baber said the Wilson site is “particularly ill-conceived,” sitting between Pierre Laporte Middle School and a daycare centre. He also worries it’s too close to a shelter near Jane St. — at 1677 Wilson Ave. — which was the scene of a stabbing murder last month . Pasternak told the Sun that operation is “a case study in how a shelter comes off the rails,” lacking in day programming and essential supports... “We now know, regretfully, that Toronto city shelters are handing out drug paraphernalia to their residents,” Baber added. “The Toronto homeless shelters are no longer just homeless shelters. They have turned into satellites for the so-called drug-injection sites.” (In a statement, the City of Toronto said the new shelters “will not be safe consumption sites or offer safe consumption services,” but will “provide health services” as defined in the city’s shelter standards, which includes giving out “safer drug use equipment.”)... At one point, committee members Jamaal Myers, Josh Matlow and Brad Bradford pressed Perks on why citizens weren’t allowed to discuss the six sites in question being used as homeless shelters. “The report mentions shelters multiple times … but the deputants are not allowed to talk about shelters,” Myers said. Bradford pushed harder. “I know you want to keep that in a very tight little box today, but that’s probably not why 80 people took their time to be here and provide feedback to this committee today,” Bradford said, to cheers from waiting speakers."
Allowing free and open debate is a Danger to Democracy
If you define euthanasia as "healthcare", you can also frame euthanasia opponents as being against providing "healthcare"
Attempt by Waterloo to clear a homeless encampment again blocked by a judge - "A judge has blocked the region of Waterloo from dismantling a homeless encampment located in an area that the region plans to use as a transit hub"
Damn car lobby making it hard to improve public transit!
Woman was living inside rooftop grocery store sign with computer and coffee maker for a year - "Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: A 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said. “She was homeless,” Officer Brennon Warren of the Midland Police Department said Thursday. “It’s a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign.” The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year... “There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer — things you’d have in your home.” The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an outlet on the roof, Warren said. There was no sign of a ladder. Warren said it’s possible the woman made her way to the roof by climbing up elsewhere behind the store or other retail businesses. “I honestly don’t know how she was getting up there. She didn’t indicate, either,” he said."
Why is Yonge St such a mess : r/toRANTo - "I dont care about "its always been this way", its such a stupid excuse. Yonge st from union to bloor is a complete disaster. It is FILLED with crackheads and crazy people at every block, who are a threat to everyone including themselves. So many of the parks are unusable!! I cant tell you how annoying it is that one of the best streets in Toronto, with such rich diversity, transit and stores is ruined by the normalization of drugs. No other major city puts these injection sites right on the main street of the city!!! The city needs to take itself seriously if it wants to be "world class", you dont let mess like this into your main streets, this is litearlly YONGE ST, how could you let it be filled with drugs and homelessness! Invest in mental health hospitals, or shelters, but dont let them on the street! As fucked up as it sounds, they need to help them somewhere thats not the main core of the city. This is so stupid. Its not even the entirety of downtown, fort york, king, bloor are not like this, only yonge is this extreme."
I was the only tourist at a seaside hotel – every other guest was homeless - "The problem arises due to councils having a legal duty to provide shelter to those at risk of homelessness. A lack of affordable rental properties and a dearth of council homes means that most turn to hotels as a stopgap solution... Given the vast sums of money going into private coffers, it seems reasonable to ask whether Whitehall has inadvertently created a “hotel-industrial complex”, in which certain less scrupulous operators prioritise government contracts over providing rooms to tourists and commuters. Unless things change dramatically, what started with a handful of emergency rooms in a Travelodge may prove much closer to the mythical Hotel California: easy enough to check in, but near impossible to leave."
Pictured: Homeless man who battered 'kind' woman, 36, to death with a mallet just days after taking him into her £1.3million flat - "A homeless man who battered a woman to death with a mallet just days after she took him into her £1.3million flat has been pictured for the first time. Apapale Adoum, 39, is facing a life sentence after he admitted murdering Victoria Adams, 36, at her home in Hammersmith, west London, on February 9... Adoum had met her just three days earlier on February 6 when he was living in a homeless shelter. She had invited him to stay with her but later wrote a note to ask him to leave."
Labour blasted for 'funding illegal immigrants' instead of 'supporting homeless' as city encampment grows in London's richest borough - "Nearly a dozen tents now line Edgware Road, once a clear and quiet bypass, as homelessness surges in London's wealthiest borough - prompting criticism of Labour for "funding illegal immigrants hotels" while neglecting rough sleepers.
The law protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair. I'm tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. : r/ilovebc - "More addicts on the street means more money given to the 250+ "aid" agencies throughout the area from all three levels of government plus their charitable statuses which means they don't pay taxes. SRO's and injection sites facilitate drug dealing and property fencing, the area around them becomes visibly worse off within weeks of one opening up, and the people in charge never seem to live anywhere near these places. If even 200 of the most prolific addicts were put in a facility and/or jail, the crime rate would drop by double digits overnight."
Law protects the rights of most vulnerable to live in filth, despair | Vancouver Sun - "In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote a weeklong series of stories identifying the government social welfare programs — and their cost to taxpayers — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The numbers were staggering: Over 100 programs existed just for housing. Thirty provided health care, 30 offered family services and a miscellany of another 100 services — including a food bank for pets — brought the total to 260 social welfare agencies operating solely within the eight square blocks of the DTES. Those 260 programs served just 6,500 clients. Five years earlier, in 2009, Province reporter David Carrigg also did a survey of the programs available in the DTES, and he identified 174 social welfare agencies offering services to about 5,000 clients... in the five years between Carrigg’s survey and Culbert’s and mine, not only had the number of people needing help grown but so had the number of agencies serving them. And the cost to taxpayers? Over $360 million annually. That astounding figure — almost a million dollars a day — did little to satisfy the DTES’s voracious appetite for tax dollars. More to the point, it did nothing to eradicate the misery and living conditions of the people who lived there. Quite the opposite. Rather than winning the war on poverty — and what a quaint phrase that seems now — governments engineered a truce, with the unstated understanding that if they couldn’t solve the problem or spend their way out of it, they could contain it. Those 260 social service bureaucracies weren’t solutions to an intractable problem; they were barricades. They ghettoized their impoverished clientele by concentrating the services on which they depended. And let’s be honest: The public was complicit in this, and content for it to continue as long as the misery stayed confined within the borders of the DTES. And yet here we are. The squalor spreads. It corrodes a once-vibrant downtown core. It infiltrates the suburbs. Daily acts of random violence and vandalism have become normalized, while a cornucopia of drugs — some decriminalized, some tolerated, many deadly — act as accelerants... Nothing, absolutely nothing, has worked. Over the decades, the problem has been studied to death — admittedly, a poor choice of words — with consultants and academics and the legions of poverty industry advocates offering up solutions that ultimately fail. They fail because they’re predicated on two simple criteria:
1. Give us more money.
2. Give us more of everything — housing, hospital beds, food banks, drugs, injection sites, counselling or — and this is always implicit — empathy, with a side order of collective guilt...
the author laments that it has been the public’s and governments’ norm “to daily bypass our downtrodden, our homeless, our addicted or mentally ill on the street as though they are either invisible or merely equivalent to lampposts” — to which I have to reply: ‘Are you f—ng kidding me?’ The public and its governments have done exactly the opposite and, short of bathing their feet with Christ-like piety, have directed billions of tax dollars not only to ease the suffering of the homeless, the addicted and the mentally ill, but also to make them completely dependent upon those dollars. Another Sun story — this one again by Culbert — examined the merits of involuntary care through the experiences of three addicts who underwent the process, and while two saw it as beneficial and helped them get clean, the third condemned it as “dehumanizing” and a cause of her PTSD. Though she no longer does drugs, she said that if she relapses she would prefer to take her chances with street drugs that could possibly kill her rather than be readmitted to hospital against her will. Well, OK, I thought, ‘You’re an adult. Good for you for having the honesty to express that choice, however idiotic I may find it.’ But what I thought was missing in her testimonial was (a) any appreciation of the monumentally expensive efforts governments and the public had tried to make on her behalf, however ill-informed she may have believed those attempts to be, and (b) her failure to recognize the destructive effects that a relapse would have not just on her own health and family, but, more importantly, also on the collective health of the public, who would be asked to offer up yet more money, and deal yet again with her relapse — providing she survives it... I’m tired of the endless, self-regenerating calls for more studies and more funding when all I see is a colossal waste of money and effort leading to no improvement. I’m tired of how homelessness and addiction take up so much oxygen in the social discourse. I’m tired of civil rights that supersede my own, and treat the right to defecate in the streets with greater regard than my right to be offended by it. Finally, I’m tired of a social welfare system that not only encourages dependency, but refuses, out of moral timidity, to also admit its complicity in it, and which shies away from asking hard questions about personal responsibility and the consideration of measures more draconian than safe injection sites — measures like a return to complete drug criminalization, a higher threshold of minimum sentences for trafficking, the establishment of rehabilitation centres or work camps exclusively in wilderness areas far from the temptations of cities, the discontinuation of any efforts that facilitate drug use, and yes, the robust expansion of an involuntary care system. It’s also my opinion that none of these measures, given the current legal climate, will become reality, at least for the foreseeable future. Under our Constitution and the Criminal Code, the law, in its majestic equality, protects the rights of the most vulnerable among us to live in filth and despair, and, as so often happens, bring about their own deaths. How enlightened we have become! What progress we have made! We’ve reached that point when now sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing one’s daily bread are no longer evidence of a system’s failure. They are the system."
Clearly, the problem is they don't spend enough money
BC NDP finally admits to problems in supportive housing - "The New Democrats finally acknowledged this week that B.C.’s supportive housing projects have become havens for violence, weapons, fires, and drug use, confirming what critics have been saying for months and, in some cases, years. They also conceded that the government had made the problems worse by amending the Residential Tenancy Act to make it harder to evict the worst-case abusers from supportive housing. But they continued to delay fixing the problems they themselves had compounded. Rather they appointed a working group to come up with remedies, perhaps including repeal of the NDP-authored changes to the Act. As recently as May, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon had rebuffed pleas for regulatory and legislative relief from the mostly non-profit providers of supportive housing for homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction. “I believe people are safe,” Kahlon said at the time. “And I believe they are much safer than if they were in encampments or sleeping in parks. It is safer not only for the public, but it is also safer for individuals.” Yet there was Kahlon on Monday, presiding over a news conference where he pretty much conceded that the critics were right all along. Yes, there was a growing problem of drug-taking in supportive housing. “We’re seeing a greater shift toward smoking fentanyl instead of injecting, many of our supportive housing sites — in fact, most — have policies in place saying no smoking in your room. We also have concerns that we had supportive housing projects that had higher levels of fentanyl in the air.” Yes, there were chronic rule breakers. “When you have individuals that consistently break the rules, that have a difficult time functioning in our supportive housing sites. … We have some individuals that have been offered housing, but they can’t find a way to stay in that housing because they can’t follow simple rules.” Yes, there were some genuinely bad actors. “What I also see is some people trying to prey on vulnerable people at supportive housing, and that’s unacceptable. And we are open to whatever measures are needed to keep everyone safe — workers, people living there in the community.” Yes, the government’s legislative changes had made it harder to catch the worst offenders and harder still to evict them. “We have heard from providers that they need more authority to take action and keep people safe, and we will be working with our partners to find a path forward that ensures people can live in a safe, inclusive and supportive environment.” And there was growing evidence of trouble, ranging from the death of one person in a project in Victoria to the chaos surrounding three hotels turned into rooming houses on Granville Street in Vancouver... as Kahlon now concedes, the main victims of predatory rule breakers are the very people that the New Democrats sought to protect... Amazing it took him and his colleagues this long to figure it out... Still, this is not exactly a rush job — the alarm bells began ringing a long time ago on the problems with supportive housing. The grudging response is entirely in keeping with the NDP’s response to earlier criticism of its policies regarding decriminalization, open drug use, safer supply and repeat violent offenders. First came the claim that all was well. Then the attacks on anyone daring to challenge the NDP narrative. Kahlon last year accused supportive housing critics of “punching down to score political points” on drug addicts, homelessness, the mentally ill and other vulnerable people. Then, after all the denials and recriminations, they concede the critics have a point and announce a plan to fix things. It’s the Eby government method: It starts doing the right thing only after it has exhausted all the other options."
Weird. We're told that Housing First is the way to go
After repeated denials, B.C. NDP admits to problems inside supportive housing. But despite a rising tide of concerns, the NDP is taking a go-slow approach to making changes. : r/ilovebc - "Half of them should be in a mental institution and half of them should be in prison. Give them free money and housing, this is the result."
"Yeah many of these people simply cannot be integrated in to modern society. It’s pointless trying anymore. It would be great if it could happen, like turning water into gold. But that doesn’t mean we should continue to try failed methods."
"And taxpayer funded narcotics."
Meme - Man to park bench with bars in the middle: "WHERE CAN THE HOMELESS SLEEP WITH THIS HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE?"
Homeless person on floor with bumps: "I TRIED YOUR APARTMENT BUT SOME JERK LOCKED THE FRONT DOOR."
Homeless man kills Good Samaritan after she asks him to move out - "A homeless man, invited into a Good Samaritan’s home, bludgeoned her to death with a mallet days later after she had asked him to move out. Victoria Adams, 37, met Apapale Adoum, 39, at a homeless shelter on Feb 6 and invited him to stay at her flat in Hammersmith, west London. Adoum attacked the mother of four with severe force on Feb 9. Prosecutors told the Old Bailey that the homeless man “attacked and killed her because she asked him to move out of her home”... the defendant had a history of violence and was carrying two knives and a screwdriver when he was arrested at the scene... doum had a history of violence against women and had been released from prison in July 2024. In 2018, he broke a woman’s jaw and gave her a black eye, and in 2024 he attacked two female prison officers, punching one of them in the face, knocking her out. In an outburst in the dock, Adoum denied being a woman beater, saying: “I’m just violent. That’s my problem. I’m a bad man for that, don’t make me out to be a coward.”"
Why are animals allowed at RBC? : r/rbc - "Banker here. It’s most definitely drugged out homeless people. I’ve had to walk around them, passed out covered in needles, just to get to my office in the morning."
"How about you lazy pricks just clean up your spaces?"
The homeless lobby think the whole of society has a duty to serve the homeless, who can do no wrong, because they have been wronged by society
Unconditional cash transfers reduce homelessness - "These findings are based on exploratory analyses in a modestly sized sample that represents a high-functioning subset (e.g., 31% screen-in rate) of the total homeless population in Vancouver. Thus, our results may not extend to people who are chronically homeless or experience higher severity of substance use, alcohol use, or psychiatric symptoms"
This doesn't stop left wingers sharing memes misrepresenting the experiment to try to expand the homeless-industrial complex
Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic - "A hotel repurposed to house homeless people in the Cowichan Valley during the COVID-19 pandemic is suing BC Housing, alleging its unhoused tenants left behind ‘extensive’ damages when they moved out. Funded by the province through the Rapid Relief Fund and BC Housing, in 2020 the Ramada in Duncan began to offer a stable place to live for nearly half of the Cowichan Valley’s homeless population. Two years later, as tenants moved out in the spring of 2022, a fight over who should coordinate and pay for repairs as a result of the unhoused tenants ensued. “Effectively, the hotel had been trashed,” Nick Both, the Ramada Duncan manager testified in court Tuesday. Both says the hotel needed “a full gut” before it was operable and fit for human habitation."
Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Have you seen the mess they leave around their tents? Who would have thought they would damage their free rooms."
Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Who could imagine the homeless wouldn't take care of their free housing?"
"I frequently have to do visits to these units in my town. They're full of garbage, rotting food, fire hazards, and stolen property. One of the complexes had 3 units permanently condemned within the first year."
Duncan Ramada sues BC Housing for 'extensive' damages allegedly caused by unhoused tenants over pandemic : r/ilovebc - "Fun fact: BC Housing used a lot of hotels across the lower mainland during the pandemic and many of those hotels still took regular guests. You can look-up reviews and it's absolutely hilarious. It's best when they include photos. For example, check the lowest ratings for "Travelodge by Wyndham Langley":
"Would rate 0 if I could, clear signs of drug use in my room. 7 separate occasions the RCMP were called to the premises. Constant racket, would not ever stay here again."
&
"The room was really smelly we couldn’t stand the smell the beds where very weak very uncomfortable we couldn’t sleep the whole night worst experience of our life I wouldn’t recommend this place to anyone there where drug addictis smoking outside our room horrible"
&
"Warning do not stay at this Travelodge location, hotel is full of drug addicts and low lives. Discusting place. Not a place for family's or single professionals, only drug addicts. They will also not refund your money if you cut your stay shorter. Super scam! I Will be contacting Travelodge main office. Travelodge is a good well respected hotel but not this location!""
