Housing shortfall, costs and affordability

[danbrotherston]

Nobody, especially children should be living in an encampment...but breaking it up will only increase the harm involved.

Do you have evidence for this? I understand the dangers of evicting people from their only form of housing with no other place to go, but we all understand the dangers of surrounding yourself with negative influences, and the benefits and surrounding yourself with positive influences. I've personally seen and experienced this dynamic first hand with drug use, and I can tell you that not a single person I knew stopped damaging amounts of drug use without first removing themselves from being surrounded by drug users. The same dynamic also applies for various forms of crime, also concentrated in encampments.

Urbanists often argue for the benefits of communities that mix together the various classes, acknowledging the problems that concentrated poverty creates. Why is this different?

I don't have evidence and I am not an expert. And I should clarify, I'm not saying there aren't bad parents who shouldn't be allowed to raise their children. But merely being impoverished does not make someone a bad parent.

That being said, foster parents are also often problematic. And being bounced between many different facilities and foster situations is inherently harmful to children. Therefore, removing them is not harm free, so you need to demonstrate that the situation they are in is MORE harmful than the harm of removing them.

It's the same problem with evictions.

Honestly, this only makes the situation sadder and more desperate...the only good takes are to be furious at NIMBYs.

Really?

“They’re now using drugs, going to jail and getting charged because they are selling drugs. They are being human trafficked, molested,” said Trites, who has a caseload of five children in encampments.

“They’re in these situations where they’re surrounded by people who don’t have good intentions, who don’t care if they cause harm to children,” Trites said.

Is it a bad take to be furious about literally human traffickers and child molesters living in or being involved with these encampments? Did NIMBYs help create the environment that made this possible? Sure, but it's insane to blame them for the actual crimes, rather than the people committing them.

This is the quote I was very confused by. Is this person suggesting that the children in the camp are actively being trafficked or molested right now? If so, that's an entirely different story, the police should be arresting people, etc. etc. But that doesn't make sense to me. Is there the potential for that harm, yes, but if it was actually happening right now to these children, I feel like the quotes would be coming from WRPS. So it seems like that is not actually happening.

Honestly this perspective in the current situation has been bothering me for a very long time. We tend to get "two sides" the this argument: 1) The people in question (homeless, addicts, mentally ill) are victims and the debate stops there, or 2) the people in question are criminals, and the debate stops there. Debate around this issue tends to simplify and stratify into these two buckets, though I hope most on this forum can recognize the nuance and significant overlap between the two. I think I will probably disagree with the average user here by suggesting the current leniency towards criminal behaviour is creating more victims among the general public (including other encampment members, such as these children) than the victimhood that the encampment residents themselves represent.

In other words, I think people here are too hung up on the victimhood of encampment residents that they are missing the bigger picture and creating a much worse outcome than is possible. Don't just blame NIMBYs for the knock-on effects of their actions, look at the effects of what you are supporting too.

When it comes to questions of blame and fault and such, I tend to look at who has power and agency in a situation. NIMBYs have an immense amount of power, and they use that power to harm others.

The people in the encampment, you're right, there is tons of overlap. Many are victims, many are criminals, but the one unifying feature, is that they have almost no power or agency at all over their lives. Forget the war on cars, these people's shelter, access to food, and personal safety is subject to the whims of politicians, community members, and yes other encampment residents.

Being powerless like that changes how you feel about the world, about other people, about a community.

As an aside, why does the region not have to prove that breaking up the encampment will be safer than leaving the encampment.

Staff have ONLY talked about the risk of keeping it, not the risk of removing it.

This kind of oversight is obviously intentional, but who are they fooling...the public, sure, they're gullible...but I certainly hope they aren't fooling a judge or council.

I don't think it's that nefarious, to be honest. The sort of "natural state" of Canadian cities is to not have encampments... this is new and out of the ordinary for us, and of course no one talks about the risk of returning to the status quo. They are obviously missing the issues with that status quo that led to this situation, but as you suggested elsewhere with people like Chapman, they don't view this as a societal failure like having a housing shortage, and so their perspective on returning to the status quo is not surprising.

I mean, it's a fair point...maybe I'm more analytical in nature...or at least have seen this false isolation argument too many times already.

But I really think that we should demand better from people in power to make these decisions (judges, council, etc.). But AFAIK nobody in those positions have asked staff to perform a risk assessment of evictions. And it isn't even the first time staff have had nothing to say in that regard, when they bulldozed the encampment on Charles St. they were asked where those people went and they answered with a literal shrug.