“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

The headline at the Daily Mail was eye-catching: “Squatters take over Wyoming city: Vagrants leave millions of dollars worth of damage to motel and 500lbs of human feces in downtown area – as Casper fights off a homeless invasion.” It was an image at odds with how we think of Wyoming; that is, a clean, naturally beautifully conservative state. But the homeless plague is everywhere, and the situation in Casper reminds us that most of today’s homeless are not just ordinary people down on their luck; they are dysfunctional drug addicts who are the inevitable result of 60 years of leftist drug policies.

Housing is an emotional issue. The concept of home evokes security, well-being and belonging. So it’s no surprise that housing debates have become politically charged as housing affordability has eroded. This can also evoke radical proposals for change.

Some people argue that we can’t rely on the private sector to make housing affordable again for the middle class. They argue that adding more “luxury apartments” doesn’t move the needle on affordability. In their eyes we need more public housing — a lot more.

What’s behind Canada’s housing crisis? Decades of policy failures, says former deputy PM

Canada’s housing crunch is the result of decades of poor policy stemming from the federal government leaving the issue to the provinces in the 1980s, according to one former deputy prime minister.

Former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg that when Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) was involved in building housing, there was a significant amount of national investment in housing as well as housing policy and strategy.

Acres of decrepit crime and drug ridden high rise eyesores. That’s what I think of when I hear the words government housing.

MISSOULA, Mont.—This city boasts more than 400 acres of parks, many of which line the roaring Clark Fork River. Recently, they have become full of homeless people.

Some 600 people without homes live in the Northern Rockies college town, triple the number of a decade ago, many of them in tents in city parks. Their presence has sown growing anger among residents who say the parks have become dirty and unsafe.

Shannone Hart said a group of teens she works with saw homeless people fighting in a park and that she moved in June from a house near an encampment along the Clark Fork.

You ever hear of a guy named Daryl Bem? Bem is a social psychologist from Cornell University, now retired at age 85. In the ‘90s, after a long conventional career as an experimenter, he took up the cause of establishing evidence for human extrasensory precognition, and did some studies that seemed to confirm it exists. This set off a war in psychology as critics descended on Bem to nitpick the flaws in his studies and citations of psychic phenomena.

Wow even crappier than first thought.

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… The study did not include people who are street-entrenched or who have serious addictions or mental health issues, Zhao noted, adding people who fit that criteria do not make up the majority of homeless people.

I think the Doctors estimate of the numbers of homeless affected by mental health, substance and or alcohol abuse issues is a bit on the optimistic side. But the face of the homeless is likely changing due to the housing crisis forcing victims without addictions or mental illness onto the streets.

This advocacy group posts higher incidence rates than he suggests: “Let’s start by looking at how many people who are currently experiencing homelessness actually have a mental illness or a substance use disorder. Based off of the 2019 Point in Time Count that was conducted this past January, only 33 percent of the people who were unsheltered reported substance use disorders, and only 26 percent reported mental health issues.”

This UK site has a study with much higher numbers.

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Why an Ontario city is now permitting homeless encampments and tiny homes in parks

Canada’s homelessness crisis went from bad to worse during the pandemic years, as encampments popped up in municipalities across the country. In the past, these tent cities were forcibly removed by local law enforcement. (For example: the now infamous operation to remove encampments in various Toronto parks.) But this month the city of Hamilton approved a fresh approach—one that acknowledges encampments as an interim reality of the housing crisis and attempts to balance the needs of all community members.