How could 6,000 shelter beds be unoccupied?
How could 6,000 shelter beds be unoccupied in Los Angeles County? It’s a number, reported in LAist in July, that makes no sense given the miles of homeless encampments that occupy area streets and sidewalks.
Looking for an answer, I talked to Dave — a formerly homeless man who asked me not to reveal his last name. Dave told me how he ended up unhoused in the 1990s and then worked his way into a good job and a steady roof over this head.
For two decades, from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, through Liberal and Conservative governments, Ottawa was largely absent from housing.
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in 2015 promised to change that, with major federal investments in affordable rental housing. As of March, Ottawa had committed more than $30-billion (much of it low-cost loans for rental housing), and the result is 107,519 new homes.
It is at once a success and failure. It’s more than Ottawa has done in a long time – and it’s far, far too little. The Trudeau government has been overtaken by events: an out-of-control housing market where the cost to buy or rent is extreme.
Canada’s housing shortfall could widen by another 500,000 units within just two years if immigration continues at its current pace, according to a recent report from TD Economics.
In the report, economists Beata Caranci, James Orlando and Rishi Sondhi note that Canada’s population grew by 1.2 million over the past year, as of the second quarter of 2023 — more than double the pace of population growth in 2019 and years prior.
For two months, Amanda Lease and her four-year-old dog Krue have been living in her pickup truck — sleeping in underground parkades and in front of friends’ houses in Calgary.
Lease can’t find a rental she can afford, let alone one that accepts pets, she says.
“The housing crisis in this city has put us in this position,” she said.
“Even if you find something in your price range that will allow an animal, they hold bidding wars and take whoever’s got the highest budget.”
Mayor Eric Adams is finally throwing in the towel.
He admits that the current (non) policy on illegal immigration is a disaster. He doesn’t go far enough, but his capitulation on the issue reveals a more profound truth: “sanctuary” policies were always a fraud.
I live in Toronto which coincedentally is also a sanctuary city facing its own imposed “homeless migrant crisis” and I have no empathy at all for the self-destructive fools who voted for Chow.
Americans have lost patience with homeless advocates’ arguments that letting vulnerable people sleep on sidewalks and in parks is an acceptable part of urban life.
Homelessness activists have lectured Americans about how they should learn to live with the large tent encampments of their “unhoused neighbors” on sidewalks and in parks. They have derided as bigotry observations that these encampments spawn violence. They have argued that the camps would disappear only when every unsheltered person receives permanent, subsidized housing, which even the most optimistic admitted would take years or decades.
Americans have stopped listening to the activists. Citizens and politicians of all stripes have recently taken steps to pass or enforce laws against public encampments, often in the same locales that once embraced a housing-only approach. They have begun to realize that the activists’ promises that encampments would be abandoned once the government provided enough handouts and housing were a mirage.
Canada is typically behind the US by a couple of years. Our urban encampments can expect a spectacular period of growth especially in Chow’s Toronto. The same “solutions” that have failed in the US will be tried and will fail here. It’s what progressives do. Always.
The city has long grappled with street homelessness and a shortage of housing. Now fentanyl has turned a perennial problem into a deadly crisis and a challenge to the city’s progressive identity.
Come to Portland, his sister said. It’s green and beautiful, people are friendly and there are plenty of jobs.
In 2018, Anthony Saldana took his sister’s advice. He left Las Vegas, where he was working in a casino, and moved to a Portland suburb.
He rented an apartment and got a job at Home Depot. Mr. Saldana, though, never quite found his footing. By early 2021, he was living in a tent, under a tree on the edge of a highway in Portland.
Yoo Hoo NYTimes! Homelessness and fentanyl are what mark Portland as a progressive paradise.
Toronto is asking residents to open up their homes and offer available rental units to asylum seekers as more than 200 people remain temporarily sheltered at two North York churches.
The city added 250 additional shelter spaces within the last week, through hotels and an existing emergency shelter, but these spaces are already full.
One of the first things predicted to happen after Chow was elected was the escalation of the homeless crisis and the commencement of unending demands for more and more funding that somehow never solves the “crisis.”
Here’s a short list of things that Ottawa spends money on but has no constitutional responsibility for: health care, child care, new fridges for big grocery companies, and Gen Y tech consultants for small businesses.
Not on that list, however, is full-fledged support to pay for the rapidly mounting costs of immigration – borders and immigration being, when last we checked, within the ambit of the federal government.
Canada’s new housing and infrastructure minister says closing the door to newcomers is not the solution to the country’s housing woes, and has instead endorsed building more homes to accommodate higher immigration flows.
Sean Fraser, who previously served as immigration minister, was sworn in Wednesday morning as part of a Liberal government cabinet shuffle aimed at showcasing a fresh team ahead of the next federal election.
Strong population growth through immigration is adding pressure to housing demand at a time when the country is struggling with an affordability crisis.
Canada’s home building capacity is at it’s limit and no you aren’t going to find enough carpenters to import.
There is no way enough new homes can be built to ward off the coming catastrophe.
The crisis in housing affordabily will have severe and lasting consequences for many families and singles not to mention seniors on fixed incomes.
This assault on our economic security will only get worse and tragically none of it had to happen.
Was there no one in Ottawa able to point out to the idiots that mass immigration is a primary cause of the housing shortage?
That mass immigration is not a magic pill able to solve all problems?
I am convinced they want the homeless crisis.
After decades of helping low-income Canadians get into homes, Habitat for Humanity is witnessing a profound change in who it is assisting.
The charity is increasingly backstopping mortgage loans for higher-income households, including those earning about $100,000 a year, in yet another sign of how unaffordable Canada has become.
Allowing chaos and criminality is not compassion, no matter what the governing class pretends
Even the dwindling number of partisans who still bristle at the claim that Canada is broken must admit that it sure looks and feels that way. Life in Canadian cities is noticeably coarser, uglier, and more violent than it was just a few years ago. Places once known for their civic beauty like Victoria, where I grew up, are now defaced by parks and city blocks that would be considered embarrassing in the third world. It doesn’t help that this street-level squalor has spread incongruously in the shadow of gleaming new glass and steel apartment towers, which contribute in their own way to a growing feel of social division and alienation in what was, until very recently, still mostly a city of wood, stone, and brick built on a human scale.
h/t CK
Andrew Truelove needs a belt and a pair of socks.
He takes his time getting up from the mattress he slept on the night before in the parking lot behind a Torrance shopping center. He smokes his first Lucky Strike of the day, then takes a Lyft to San Pedro, where he’s heard he may be able to get into a tiny house community.
It’s May 17, Truelove’s 32nd day in California. Shortly after he arrived at LAX from his native Virginia, he hitched a ride to Slab City, an eccentric off-grid community in the Sonoran desert. Then he spent a few weeks in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, pursuing his dream of starting a new social media platform.
Slab City
Seattle vagrants have now constructed a homeless encampment in the trees above the crime-ridden city, prompting one stunned local to liken it to the Ewok Village from Star Wars.
Local journalist Jonathan Choe stumbled across the ramshackle treehouse high in the city’s trees on Friday, and deployed a drone to get a closer look.
The Ewok encampment has a wooden stepladder to let its residents reach the ground below it. Its floor appears to be comprised of foam blocks, with a net supporting the soft material, which likely gives the shelter’s residents a comfortable sleeping experience.
I thought federal Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen’s “just trust the mayors” and “housing isn’t political” screed was a shoe-in for worst housing take of the summer, but it only took one week for NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to outdo even him.
