What happened when a city started accepting - not evicting - homeless camps
bbc.com
bbc.com
> 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.
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)
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.
Why? People need to move, and a certain amount of transiently vacant units is necessary for migration to not disrupt local prices too much.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah lets go around accusing people of being segregationists because they worked hard to make a better life. Jerk.
> 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"?
Seeing how the GP escaped poverty I can understand their take - they put in the effort to escape while their peers did not. Their peers stay angry and frustrated which leads to taking it out on people around them creating a dangerous and unhealthy environment. So it's hard to look back and care about them when they seemingly don't care about themselves or worse, actively make things worse for others. So of course you're going to stay far away from them and prefer they stay far the hell away from you.
The biggest problem with this entire thread is that it paints a black and white picture of the situation. As though by building more housing the only possible outcome are poor people doing drugs next to my kids' school. Guess what, there's already people doing drugs next to my kids school, even in "nice" neighborhoods. This is not black and white. You don't have to pull someone down to raise others up. I'm sorry the GP (and it seems you, via defense) believe that their escape means they are better than those who could not "care about themselves" enough to better themselves. What a sad state of mind.
Yes, that is pretty much the only outcome of putting "affordable housing" in higher class neighborhoods. Also, if there's people doing drugs next to your kid's school, you aren't in a nice neighborhood. The SF Bay Area, almost entirely, is a shit hole, and it has colored the view of a lot of people to have a defeatist attitude about what you can afford in this country and what is expected and acceptable to expose your family to. I don't live in the Bay Area and I never will, in part exactly because I refuse to expose my family to what it means to live there.
> This is not black and white.
It's pretty binary. "Affordable housing" automatically means bringing social ills, and if you are positioning it in higher class neighborhoods, you are necessarily bringing that neighborhood down, intentionally.
> You don't have to pull someone down to raise others up.
That's exactly my point, unfortunately you seem not to understand your own statement because your are advocating a position that drags down anyone who managed to make it into a decent neighborhood, in order to raise up those in "affordable housing".
I'm not saying we shouldn't build more housing, or that it shouldn't be affordable, but it definitely does not need to be in the high end neighborhoods. This entire sub-thread is a response to someone saying the only reason that people who live in high end neighborhoods don't want "affordable housing" is because it will make their property values go down in an abstract sense. Well, of course it makes abstract property values go down, because the concrete is that you go from a neighborhood where you can let your kids play in the park and walk to school to a situation where you need a bodyguard to go to the gas station.
Just be honest about your position. The drive to put "affordable housing" in nice neighborhoods is not about making more housing or making it affordable, it's about trying to punish people you see as undeserving of their wealth by forcing them to "face reality" and live in the same circumstances as poor people. It's an intentional attempt to drag people down, for the sake of dragging them down.
I think most of the people replying to me have never been truly poor and they have no concept of what that actually means. They've never been woken up at 2AM by a blood curdling scream and a thunk as their neighbor beats their wife to death in a drunken rage. They've never seen a dead body bloated in the sun at the bus stop they have to stand at to get home from school. They've never watched the lights go out in someone's eyes as the OD on the sidewalk. The prettiest girl at their high school didn't start stripping before graduation to pay for the drug habit her mom got her started on. 3 out of the 5 people in their school friends group didn't end up dead before they were 22 years old.
My family will never experience any of these things, because I busted my ass to make sure they never experience any of those things. Imposing the horrors (some self-inflicted, some not) of the lower class on my family to position "affordable housing" in my neighborhood is a violent act, and one which any decent person will contest. If that makes me a NIMBY, then so be it, but I don't want "affordable housing" anywhere near me. I've been in "affordable housing", I know what happens there, and it's not what some ivory tower academic thinks happens there. You don't learn about this stuff in a whitepaper, you learn about it from experience, and those are experiences I won't let my family have.
Also, the word "segregation" is not inherently a bad word, and it doesn't automatically mean anything about anyone's immutable characteristics. Economics are not immutable. I'm a dropout from a town that had documentaries made about it due to how bad its drug problem is and I am in the top 2% of Americans economically now. Economic mobility in the US far exceeds that in the rest of the world, which does not in any way excuse our problems or say that we shouldn't fix them, but dragging down those who struggle and succeed is not how we get there.
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.
Yes, we can see that here. It's unfortunate that you've taken that position.
> It's segregation by dollars
The government intentionally separating people by socioeconomic class for something as fundamental as where you live -- which also controls which school your kids go to -- is fundamentally wrong.
And the biggest reason why some schools are so shit is precisely because of economic segregation. Concentrating the most impoverished means concentrating people with the most social problems too.
I am not taking that position at all. I don't know what your position is, but you've implied in your replies to me that you /do/ take this position, however.
Forcing my kids to go to school with lower class children is not going to make the world a better place, it's going to force my children to be exposed to violence, drug use, promiscuity, and reduce their relative aspirations. When I was growing up, the school I went to had almost nobody from its graduating class that made it out and built a decent living. Many folks scrape by working menial retail and service jobs well into their 40s, and consider that a win because they weren't part of the much larger cohort that ended up dead, in jail, or in other dire circumstances which was the expected outcome in the community I came from. Those folks who scrape by considered themselves successful because they're alive, without any felony convictions or addictions to hard drugs, the bar of their relative aspirations is significantly lowered by the circumstances they grew up around.
I didn't drag myself out of that situation in order to see my children put back into it, because you think that averaging out the results of the students is an improvement by dragging down my kids to make up for the difference. I struggled to ensure I could build a family that had a better life than I did, and I don't see anything problematic about that at all. Taking that away on some spurious beliefs that this will enrich the lives of the very same people who are actively engaging in antisocial behaviors is ludicrous, and it's exactly the type of authoritarian leftist nonsense that Americans by-and-large reject wholesale that has helped make this the country with the greatest social and economic mobility and the highest levels of overall prosperity.
"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.
It seems that the 2008 common wisdom was wrong.
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 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.
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.
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.
In Massachusetts, (which still can have some nasty winters,) some homeless will turn to stupid petty crime to get arrested for the winter. IE, they'll look for a cop, pretend not to notice, and then commit the least harmful crime they can.
Look no further than Portland, OR. We have built temporary shelters as "warming facilities" and we spend a lot of money in our budget to get them new tents, sleeping bags, and other materials every year.
The motto here from the citizenry is largely, "Just build tiny home villages" but Multnomah County requires multiple committees and processes that drag on for years to do such things. Until you come up with a permanent solution you will have a recurring, burning hole in your budget that will grow with the homeless population. Additionally, many of these folks rampantly damage the environment and city landscape which will also cause more budget shortfalls even after you get them into housing.
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.
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?
Given that for many people owning their house is the only way to preserve some sort of inheritance for their children...
don't put 200% of your net worth into a depreciating asset.
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.
- when people have to rent their homes, all too often it is some investment vehicle for the uber rich that gets the rent. US pension funds are the worst vultures here in Europe - all the wealth generated here disappears to the US instead of staying where it belongs: in our economies.
- when people own their home, it removes a lot of stress, especially in times of economic crisis. Not being afraid to make rent each month is a lifechanger (at least once it's paid off - but even falling behind with payments to the bank doesn't get you yeeted out all but immediately).
- when people own their homes, they don't need as much money in pensions and wages. That's how Eastern Europe can get away with CoL (except for housing) on Western European levels - they have ownership rates >> 90%, so their economies are far more competitive.
This is solvable with a greater mix of affordable housing. It is also solvable by increasing the portion of community-owned (e.g. county-owned/operated housing) which is already at about 20% here. It is also solvable by legislating that a certain amount of rent paid has to be used for upkeep, upgrades, and such. (Where I live already have laws to that effect for other near-monopolies such as water and communications, where the state effectively dictates a maximum reasonable revenue).
> when people own their home, it removes a lot of stress, especially in times of economic crisis.
Lots of crises over the past decades has seen a significant degree of stress among home-owners over the interest they have to pay. Over the past two years I have not been able to go more than a few days between hearing on national news about homeowners being stressed about interest payments on their homes. Among renters there is significantly less so as there already is a safety net available. So in my world it is the other way around from the picture you paint. (Let me also add a side note about the 2008 mortgage crisis if fewer people had less loans and less risky loans here).
> Not being afraid to make rent each month is a lifechanger.
Not being able to pay interest each moth is almost all I ever hear about the economy over the past year or so. Cost of interest has been one of the major factors in why the inflation has been so high. See above again. Never about rent.
> when people own their homes, they don't need as much money in pensions and wages.
This is again a question of social safety net more than anything else. If you have affordable housing you also don't need as much money in pensions and wages to live somewhere good.
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.
canadian passport, did K->BSc. in canada, live in nyc now
> 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
we could've also bit the bullet and let housing collapse in '08 like the US, I think that was the moment when we chose to hitch our wagon to real estate going up indefinitely propped up by the government. somebody has to pay taxes though, because CAD is not a reserve currency and we can't print our way like the USD can; I would prefer landsquatters pay the most, but still more equitable for capital gains to be taxed than income.
> give everyone else a "tax holiday" with their own money, suspending one of the fairest and most effective taxes.
this was short sighted populism, i agree
Why have now problems when you can have then problems? /s
This is why the housing crisis will never be solved. Homeowners vote. Homeowners don't want to solve the housing shortage as it will hurt their values. No democratically elected government will ever work to actually fix the housing shortage. Of course there will be token actions and platitudes, but nothing of consequence will be done.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It isn't just mentally ill people who are homeless.
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?
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.
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?
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.
It should come from taxes on the folks doing obscenely well from our unfair economic system
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...
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.
If the analysis is accurate it needs more than just affordable housing to be built.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Prison being too expensive is, to be fair, true, but a problem local to only some states, and a different problem that we should be motived to solve independent of whether its a tool in the solution of this problem.
But, beyond that, maybe my point is more generally (and contentiously) stated as: I believe homelessness should be a crime whose punishment involves the forfeiture of the person's freedom of movement and work. That's a general way of saying "prison" and that's fine, but I'm comfortable stating that governments need to think about building a (undesirable, forced) path toward finding a home for these people, and making them work to earn it.
If a homeless person walks this path, gets to their freedom, and reverts back to being homeless again; well, its a revolving door, but at least its one which rotates over a span of years instead of days, and its one that makes a good faith attempt toward rehabilitation.
They were introduced in the Deep Space Nine two-parter Past Tense, aired at the beginning of 1995 and was set just a couple of months ago in 2024 (it was a time travel episode, stuck in their past). The episode was also about how they were a total failure in what they were intended for (out of sight, out of mind, and the people in them never got the assistance they needed), and that they had to be gotten rid of.
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.
What specifically will a conservative government do differently/better?
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.
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?
Isn't a park curfew restricting free movement on public land?
The quebec covid curfew for example was found to be unconstitutional and the government decided to give itself 'exceptional circumstances raised by public health' just so they dont have to pay $ to each person who ever received one of the fines.
This will almost certainly be wiped out on appeal. Quebec will likely have to pay close to a billion ultimately in the next decade.
Though in the meantime, the CAQ have essentially committed political suicide having done this. PQ leader simply challenging the effectiveness of the curfew and opposing. The CAQ are going to lose the next election because of this and other issues.
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
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...
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.
> 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).
> They note that multiple high-rise condominiums are under development in Halifax - none of which, they say, are affordable.
Remember, part of the cause of unaffordable housing is simply not building enough housing. When there isn't enough housing, the rich displace the poor, as this article shows.
Perhaps part of the solution is encouraging the rich to move to the nicer condos, so the more affordable housing is freed up for those who need it?
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.
[0] https://capolicylab.org/health-conditions-among-unsheltered-...