so it's a lot more noticeable.

I think as well is that it is being used a political weapon to savage whatever current political party or politician at whatever level of government for their failures so it is a constant source of debate everywhere. People like simple answers and it is easier to blame Trudeau, the carbon tax, international students, the new bypass, developers... On and on.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:07 AM on October 16 [5 favorites]

My dangerously violent and mentally ill father lives in an encampment in BC on Crown Land on the outskirts of Greater Vancouver. It's a good thing that he's no longer near people very much, but tragic and awful that's where he's ended up. In a better timeline, we would still have live-in mental health institutions, which would offer a real and lasting solution to so many who are currently in camps. According to the Canadian government, approximately 50% of people experiencing homelessness have or had a brain injury. Of course they're not going to easily find their way back into society without significant care and help. It's awful.
posted by foxtongue at 8:11 AM on October 16 [21 favorites]

I think as well is that it is being used a political weapon to savage whatever current political party or politician at whatever level of government for their failures so it is a constant source of debate everywhere. People like simple answers and it is easier to blame Trudeau, the carbon tax, international students, the new bypass, developers... On and on.

Oh, absolutely. Listen, I am indifferent to Trudeau, but the weird magical thinking that a new PM--even if it is PP--will make Canada great again is not just limited to Cons this time out. I'm encountering way too many people who would usually skew left that are contemplating voting Blue next election. (Their reasoning has the vibe of "I'm not x, but" statements you get from folks who are definitely x.) Also, I am encountering a very distinct misunderstanding of what municipal/provincial/federal governments are actually responsible for.
posted by Kitteh at 8:17 AM on October 16 [9 favorites]

I have read only half the article but I just have to post because it fills me with rage. Humans have failed! We fail every time! When I was growing up, I would have thought that if there were suddenly huge encampments of homeless people in every major city in North America, this would be seen as abnormal and an emergency and we would do something, but instead we've just sat back, normalized it and tried to crush both the homeless people and the people who try to help them. We are a dumb, bad, selfish, lazy species. Something bad happens to people? Sucks to be them! You're trying to help? We'll use the law and the police to stop you! Just shut up about problems, let the weak go to the wall, that's the human motto.

I am so sick of this. We have completely solvable problems all around the world and all we do is let people suffer and die.
posted by Frowner at 8:17 AM on October 16 [33 favorites]

The lack of compassion is what gets me. I have a warm safe bed to sleep in every night, food in my stomach, and a roof. I am incredibly lucky. I am grateful every day for where I am.

Folks want to lump the unhoused in with the addicts and the mentally unwell; there are Venn diagrams of how these three separate communities interact, but to assume all unhoused folks are on drugs (and fuck, if I were to become homeless, I'd want to escape from reality too) or have mental issues misses the forest for the trees. There is no "one size fits all" approach but we don't want to spend any taxpayer money to figure out multi-pronged solutions.
posted by Kitteh at 8:23 AM on October 16 [13 favorites]

The thought process: it's important to make sure people who fail at capitalism wind up hungry, hurt and sleeping in the snow without even a shred of dignity otherwise more people might think that capitalism is not the right answer.

Getting rid of the people who have and who enable and put into motion that thought process is how humanity pulls itself back from the brink of planetary humanitarian disaster that is capitalism.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:25 AM on October 16 [10 favorites]

Here in Australia we've got people living in tents because they used to own a house and their houses were destroyed in the 2019-2020 fires and the 2020 floods

and

a) the insurance companies dragged their heels doing payouts

b) the insurance companies tried to lowball the payouts

c) even when their payouts came through, there is far more demand for tradies (builders/carpenters/brick layers/electricians/plumbers) than there are tradies to go around, so people are waiting to be able to get skilled tradespeople to rebuild their old houses.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:29 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

On a more local level, the governance of the city itself, as the putative master of the cops, that matters a lot when it comes to encampements. Since Olivia Chow was elected Mayor of Toronto there's been quite a shift away from the bulldoze-and-forget approach, instead sending food, health, and shelter outreach teams sometimes daily, making some gestures towards sanitation (portapotties), and having Fire Services visit larger encampments with ideas on how to stay safer. So there's at least some way of making changes at a local level -- get city governance on board with keeping cops the fuck out and sending in people who can help and perhaps make things a little safer. I'm not saying it's great, I'm just saying it's a little less horrible.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:36 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

The thought process: it's important to make sure people who fail at capitalism wind up hungry, hurt and sleeping in the snow without even a shred of dignity otherwise more people might think that capitalism is not the right answer.

Lol, remember when Doug Ford said recently that the homeless just need to get jobs?
posted by Kitteh at 8:47 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

> even when their payouts came through, there is far more demand for tradies (builders/carpenters/brick layers/electricians/plumbers) than there are tradies to go around, so people are waiting to be able to get skilled tradespeople to rebuild their old houses


The logic that leads to "you have to be unemployed and homeless because we can't hire enough people to build the homes" makes me feel like having an aneurysm.

Sure would be a shame if we made apprenticeships accessible enough.
posted by constraint at 8:56 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

I still remember the news article about a man who was living in a tent while working fulltime as an air traffic controller in Australia because there simply were no empty houses in that town available to rent, no matter how much money he was willing to spend.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:00 AM on October 16 [4 favorites]

An astonishingly good article about encampments in Toronto just released by The Local.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:04 AM on October 16 [5 favorites]

The part of this I find most disturbing is how many are using this as an opportunity to bring back involuntary commitment. Even the NDP in BC is talking about it.

Here is one example of many stories from a few days ago.
posted by bonehead at 9:23 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

bonehead, what's even more disturbing is that you have so many citizens going, "YES! YES! Bring back involuntary commitment! If they can't get straight, then COMMIT THEM!"

And y'all, again, it's not just conservative folks who championing this. You have Liberal voters who are also exasperated with the homeless so are like, "ugh fuck it whatever works."
posted by Kitteh at 9:32 AM on October 16 [8 favorites]

A big thing with homeless encampments is that they force cities to deal with the people who become homeless in surrounding suburbs/rural areas. If someone becomes homeless in a sprawling suburb/rural area they're likely to make their way somewhere that has services, stores and facilities in a reasonably dense area. Hence cities are where they end up. That in turn means that somewhere like Toronto isn't just dealing with people in Toronto but all the surrounding areas that are, by design, hostile to human beings on foot.

It works out great for the suburbs in that they aren't responsible for dealing with the problems they've created via unaffordable housing, they get to shift that issue to urban centers and not pay their fair share in resolving the issue.
posted by Ferreous at 9:35 AM on October 16 [18 favorites]

I have multiple family members, colleagues, and friends struggling with mental illness, and the discourse around mental health services as a solution for homelessness always rubs me the wrong way. We're discussing commitment as a solution mainly because we're lacking in all the other features of the social safety net that would keep this issue from happening in the first place. Mental health services, like libraries, are one of the few shreds we have left of a working society and so we're expecting them to act like prisons in the same way we're expecting libraries to act as administrative support and day programs. I work with a lot of community colleges, and locally we have a trend with these schools building student housing (not normal in the US) because without housing attached to their learning programs they will have homeless students.

My pessimistic opinion is that the people who are currently unhoused will be failed by our civilization because it's going to take a generation to build up enough robust support to treat all of our humans as worthy of life.
posted by q*ben at 9:42 AM on October 16 [7 favorites]

Back in the day more than a few families had, shall we say, unstable family members...cousins, uncles, etc. But often they were kept within the family, living with them.The more severe were housed in institutions, either not ideal, or perhaps satisfactory. Our homes housed several generations together. No need for child care...Those days are long gone. And the rise in drug use has certainly contributed to the homeless problem. A sad decline indeed.
posted by Czjewel at 9:46 AM on October 16 [1 favorite]

Back in the day more than a few families had, shall we say, unstable family members...cousins, uncles, etc. But often they were kept within the family

Be careful what you wish for.

The elderly couple that once were our neighbours had an adult daughter living with them, who we now believe was schizophrenic or similar. The daughter was fed and housed, there's that... but that was about the unhappiest household I've encountered. Screaming matches, frustration, tension, anger, unhappiness all round. I don't see that as an optimal situation.

That article from the Local was very good. Still kind of bleak, with not much optimism for improvements.

Can anyone point to "western" countries that are doing a better job with homelessness, untreated addictions and mental health needs? Something that we in N America could emulate?
posted by Artful Codger at 10:05 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

This is enraging, and thanks for posting this.
Massive cuts in corporate taxes ramped up by Paul Martin, the deficit slayer when he was Chretien's finance minister, following on the heels of Mulroney's whole sale gutting of federal services and the endless mantra of private public partnerships and supply side economics and here we are.
I live in Vancouver and I have seen homelessness explode over the last 20-30 years. Our current Premier, David Eby, said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard from a politician; that we can't have vacancy control because then developers won't build rental housing. The rental housing being built is exorbitant in cost, you have to been such an extraordinarily fucked piece of ignorant shit to think the private sector is going to be the solution for the rental housing crisis but here we are.
We actually had vacancy control at one point in the '70s but Social Credit, who later morphed into the BC Liberal party, ended that in the early '80s.
The most maddening thing about all of this is how preventable it was, but the extremely short term thinking, focused on a set of economic ideas that are better understood as magic realism, put us here, and the same vile elements keep screeching that somehow more of the same will fix everything.
Also, fuck Ken Sim and his puppet master Chip Wilson to the ends of the earth, and fucking fuck them there as well.
It's upsetting as hell and I just feel like screaming. If I lose my place, which I am grandfathered into and can still afford, I will quite literally be living in my car because of what the dyspeptic shit gibbons who run everything have created here.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:17 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

ugh. I know Canada has never been the utopia it's deemed to be in American minds, but it was pretty decent, and it's sad to see so many things sliding into a more USian model. I live in a city with a vast and terrible homelessness crisis, about which we do nothing but push them into the worst neighborhoods so we can ignore them.
posted by supermedusa at 10:23 AM on October 16 [2 favorites]

Can anyone point to "western" countries that are doing a better job with homelessness

Finland [worldhabitat.org]
posted by HearHere at 10:38 AM on October 16 [9 favorites]

One important difference between the Canadian context and the American:

In Ontario, courts have ruled that it is illegal (counter to the charter of rights and freedoms) for cities to clear homeless encampments if there aren't enough shelter beds to house residents. (Not having enough shelter beds is a long term problem that has all layers of government pointing fingers at each other.)

In the US, the Supreme court recently ruled that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.
posted by Popular Ethics at 11:59 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

"The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, over-armament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths. "Masses" of the population are abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy), and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption. It is to the credit of thinkers like Antonio Negri to have formulated, on the basis of the exemplary case of Italy, the theory of this internal margin, which tends increasingly to merge the students with the emarginati." - D&G, ATP p469

I've been engaged with encampments here in Philly for the better part of a decade and live right in the middle of it. I've witnessed a procession of mayors, each promising to end the crisis but none ultimately effecting more than an increase to the police budget. Our current one, emboldened by the Supreme Court, has gone all-in on incarceration and compulsory treatment, despite ample evidence that it's ineffective and deadly. There's been some pushback, but the outlook is bleak.

While a bureaucratic 'fix' to the problem would be simple enough-- ~$250 million per year would be more than enough to expand a Housing First program to cover nearly every person experiencing homelessness in the city-- the political will is not there. Will it ever be? The above passage from ATP suggests that rather than being lamentable social ills, economic precarity and destitution are the pillars of our modern social structure. End homelessness and hunger and who would bike your $25 cheeseburger to your doorstep at 3am? Fail to punish homelessness violently and who would pay $2350/mo for an 826 sqft 2br to live down the block from someone sleeping for free?

Of course, it doesn't have to be like this. Cuba abolished landlordism and created a strong enough safety net and civil society that healing and re-integration into the community are taken as serious endpoints. The chasm between here and there is vast, however, and the path leads through a major restructuring of our society. As a starting point, we might dispense with the handwringing and Dickensian framing of those who live in these encampments as powerless victims and start considering them as a power base. The choice to live in an encampment is a powerful refusal of the violent machine that masquerades as 'social service,' and all the fascists who would just as soon have us die and decrease the surplus population if we can't populate their prisons and workhouses. This refusal is known as destituent power:

Destitution asks how do we rob the power structures that exist of their power over us? Certainly there are times that violence does this. I’m not making a pacifist argument in any way. Riots and looting are often destituent. The police lose their ability to enforce the law. People play with the materials of the city. A liquor store becomes a communal free bar, a limousine becomes a barricade and a source of heat. A supermarket becomes a kitchen. But,riots are temporary and they can just as easily turn into a legitimizing factor for a security force, or become so focused on an antagonism with the police that the forms of life created within them are lost. This is the danger of fetishizing militancy, of delinking the war-machine from the care-machine[...] Destitution asks us to consider in each moment what action will give us the most power and minimize the power of the police or the economy or whatever apparatus we’re trying to escape. Destitution has an affinity for fleeing, but it also has an affinity for mockery. As some friends said “The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn’t even mount a frontal fight. It neutralizes it. Empties it of substance. And then steps to the side and watches it expire.” - Revolution & Destituent Power

I'm not blind to the suffering that occurs here, and I can hardly be an idealist after ten years here in Kensington. But I've also witnessed communities figure out water, electricity, and sanitation in these spaces. I've seen them build caring networks caring to protect themselves from overdose better than any EMS system could. So I choose to see the encampment as a front line of our struggle against fascism, one worth our time and solidarity.
posted by Richard Saunders at 12:08 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

As if you could "solve" homelessness now and not how you'd usually solve a complicated, multicausal, entrenched and systemic problem - ie. starting at least twenty years ago.

Criminalizing it now is really the rational response, tbf.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:18 PM on October 16

In Ontario, courts have ruled that it is illegal (counter to the charter of rights and freedoms) for cities to clear homeless encampments if there aren't enough shelter beds to house residents. (Not having enough shelter beds is a long term problem that has all layers of government pointing fingers at each other.)

While this is true, nothing stopped Kingston from using a crime to get what the city wanted: which was to shut down the encampment around the city's only safe injection site. Kingston Community Law Clinic--will be filing a Charter challenge (which is how they stopped the city last year because of this ruling). I hope they win again.

It's hella demoralizing to witness/overhear/read how people just feel free to talk so much shit about homeless folks, not realizing they too could be a job loss or eviction away from joining their ranks.
posted by Kitteh at 12:22 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

the current crisis is not just a product of post-COVID economic strain, but decades of chronic underinvestment in housing and social supports. “We have to understand that our economy is producing homelessness,” she says. As long as that’s the case, Canadian society owes something to those left out.

Well put
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:41 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

A big thing with homeless encampments is that they force cities to deal with the people who become homeless in surrounding suburbs/rural areas. If someone becomes homeless in a sprawling suburb/rural area they're likely to make their way somewhere that has services, stores and facilities in a reasonably dense area. Hence cities are where they end up. That in turn means that somewhere like Toronto isn't just dealing with people in Toronto but all the surrounding areas that are, by design, hostile to human beings on foot.

I know this has been the common wisdom for a while, but it’s not the experience of my Canadian province. We have homeless people and encampments in towns large and small. And there have always been those who scrabbled together a shack in the woods eg. on Crown Land. People move to cities in hopes of employment or services, yes, but rarely move directly into an encampment - usually that’s an endpoint after other options and attempts at making it have failed. And cities are just populous, so the majority of homeless folks are from that area. Sure, they might get forced into a given neighborhood from a different neighborhood or part of the general metropolitan area. But we don’t tend to talk about such local migration the same way for housed people. There’s an othering that unhoused people are commonly subject to, where people don’t want to think of their unhoused neighbors as neighbors and as co-community members.
posted by eviemath at 4:13 PM on October 16 [3 favorites]

I think it’s also important to remember that homelessness includes people living in their vehicles, or people who are couch surfing with family or friends because they can’t afford their own place. Sure, the fewer community connections or knowledge someone has, the more visible they will be if they become homeless. Likewise, the more someone is unable to conform to social expectations due to mental illness, the more visible they will be if they become homeless. Making generalizations or assumptions based on visibility runs the significant risk of confirmation bias.
posted by eviemath at 4:24 PM on October 16 [3 favorites]

It's hella demoralizing to witness/overhear/read how people just feel free to talk so much shit about homeless folks, not realizing they too could be a job loss or eviction away from joining their ranks

Also, when you consider how many average, housed people in the US and Canada are dealing with mild to moderate mental illness, it’s worth considering how and how quickly that would be massively exacerbated by homelessness.

One thing I have learned being exposed to unhoused people every single day in my library job that I did not think about much before is the degree to which the degradations, discomforts and dangers of homelessness are actually a significant cause or accelerator of a lot of the mental illness being used to stigmatize and dismiss them.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:03 PM on October 16 [2 favorites]

There’s an othering that unhoused people are commonly subject to, where people don’t want to think of their unhoused neighbors as neighbors and as co-community members.

As someone who has sat in on city council meetings regarding the low-income or affordable housing in the heart of the downtown Kingston neighbourhood I reside in, this is 100% correct. It was fucking vile to hear some of the shit my neighbours said.
posted by Kitteh at 5:09 PM on October 16 [1 favorite]

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