City of Vancouver officials say they plan to deploy “quick response teams” if people try to set up tents again on East Hastings Street, even as scrutiny of their enforcement actions intensifies.
Canada’s federal housing advocate is calling for a moratorium on dismantling encampments, telling Postmedia she worries deaths could increase from the displacement of Downtown Eastside residents.
It will be interesting to see which side wins.
In Austin, Texas, in a 24-hour period in March less than a mile apart, a woman was punched several times and sexually assaulted, suffering a split lower jaw and bruises over her body; then a building was burned down, damaging adjacent buildings, causing about $1.5 million in damage. The common thread: Homeless men living on the street are the accused.
The homeless are on the streets because they don’t have homes — or so many of their so-called advocates claim. They see homelessness as a disease and prescribing housing as the first step to a cure — with housing seen as a right, like they believe health care should be.
An extreme fire risk and escalating crime have made a tent encampment in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside a deadly hazard and it must be closed, the city’s mayor, fire chief and police chief say.
City officials held a news conference Tuesday as Vancouver police officers and city staff were dispatched to dismantle the tent encampment along Hastings Street.
Mayor Ken Sim said the longer the street camp continues, the higher the odds more people will lose their lives and even more people will lose their homes to the fire hazard.
The dismantling of the #DTES encampment on E Hastings has begun. Vancouver police blocking access from Columbia to Gore. Folks down here not happy. More to come @CityNewsVAN pic.twitter.com/EqzOvpnlFJ
— Michael Williams (@MikeWillsTake) April 5, 2023
They did the right thing. Now will they stick with enforcement?
Officials must recognize that behavioral issues are the primary cause of homelessness.
Politicians, government officials, and academic “experts” from coast to coast have been insisting for years that homelessness is a “national crisis,” as California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass both claim. That is a misdiagnosis, deflecting responsibility away from cities that should fix their own problems.
Every case of homelessness is tragic and complicated. According to new data, however, homelessness has reached crisis proportions only in a limited number of areas across the country, especially in California.
Cities that allow the most destructive of human behavior to take over the public space are cities where civilized life as we know it is being marginalized and forced to give way to social fragmentation. Dignity yields to savagery.
Europe has a long tradition of fighting narcotic drugs, with varying results. In 1992, the city of Zürich, Switzerland, closed the infamous ‘Needle Park’ area, just behind the national museum and the central railway station. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
hundreds of dealers and addicts packed into the park, [with] many people desperately needing urgent medical care on a daily basis.
As a curious tourist, I visited the place about a year before it was closed. I was shocked at the complete and utter lack of dignity among those who basically spent their entire lives there. Human beings had turned into empty shells, consumed and hollowed out by their addiction to something that was certain to kill them.
Smoke bellows skyward near an overpass on the outskirts of this Pacific Northwest city.
Flames become evident as you get closer, as do the fire trucks and the firefighters putting out the blaze at the centre of a homeless encampment that is affixed, favela style, to the under-shoulder of the crossing.
A good article on Seattle, it bodes ill for Toronto and elsewhere in Canada as does the following Star report on the Homeless camp clear-outs, one of the things Tory got right.
Forces are at work to make Toronto’s homeless camps as big and ugly as they are in the US.
The goal? Millions of dollars will flow to the hucksters who promise to deal with the very “crisis” they perpetuate.
Process behind 2021 encampment clearings ‘unacceptable’, finds ombudsman report
The clearings of three large Toronto homeless encampments in the summer of 2021 prioritized speed over the well-being of homeless people, Toronto’s ombudsman has found.
In the report, which comes nearly two years after the city-led, police-and-security-enforced operations, ombudsman Kwame Addo found the process by which city hall displaced people from Trinity Bellwoods, Alexandra Park, and Lamport Stadium was “unacceptable” — pointing to “unclear, confusing” and insufficiently transparent communication. It noted the city’s operational plans made no mention of the mental health of displaced people.
The camps were cleared quickly and efficiently with a minimum of activist triggered violence. This is why Toronto can’t have nice things.
Because it’s better to have drug addicted mentally-ill people wandering your streets. They add colour!
Legal group in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside cautions B.C. against involuntary care
A legal group representing marginalized people on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has issued a stern rebuke of the provincial government’s plans to force mental-health and addictions treatment on people who present a danger to themselves and others.
Pivot Legal Society released a report Thursday calling on British Columbia to halt its proposed expansion of “involuntary care” beds, arguing such treatment is an outdated approach that is harmful, degrading and often discriminatory.
As homelessness overwhelms downtown Phoenix, a small business wonders how long it can hang on.
He had been coming into work at the same sandwich shop at the same exact time every weekday morning for the last four decades, but now Joe Faillace, 69, pulled up to Old Station Subs with no idea what to expect. He parked on a street lined with three dozen tents, grabbed his Mace and unlocked the door to his restaurant. The peace sign was still hanging above the entryway. Fake flowers remained undisturbed on every table. He picked up the phone and dialed his wife and business partner, Debbie Faillace, 60.
“All clear,” he said. “Everything looks good.”
It’s largely a drug and mental health issue, being homeless is a symptom.
… The city’s data shows that drug toxicity is by far the leading cause of death for people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, resulting in nearly half – or 47 per cent – of reported deaths in the population.
PORTLAND, Ore. – On a sidewalk littered with tarps, bicycles and discarded food containers, one tent sat farther away from the rest. It was clean, with the rain fly removed, showcasing the vacant interior.
“This is an empty tent erected by activists to encourage people to live in tents,” Kevin Dahlgren said.
It’s a business worth billions but the problem is never solved.
Homeless people are big business in cities like New York, San Francisco, and L.A.
Billions of dollars flow to nonprofits, bureaucrats, and contractors whose job it is to “solve” the homeless crisis.
The self-proclaimed “governor” of Los Angeles’ infamous Skid Row has lashed out after her tent mansion — complete with a hot tub and kitchen — was torn down by city officials.
Stephanie Arnold Williams’ encampment, known as the White House, was among a handful of tents demolished with a bulldozer earlier this month by the city’s sanitation department as part of a “routine cleanup,” LAMag reported.
Her pop-up home, which was located at 5th and San Pedro streets, had been tricked-out with windows and linoleum floors, two queen-size beds, portable toilets, an inflatable hot tub and gas stove.
The Office of the Federal Housing Advocate called the dismantlement of homeless encampments during winter a “serious violation of human rights.”
Jason Rondeau was asleep Wednesday when his girlfriend burst into their tent to wake him up.
“You gotta get up, the city’s here, they’re gonna throw away our shit,” he said she told him.
Gonna be a wild summer in TO.
The federal housing advocate is launching a review of homeless encampments in Canada, calling the situation a human rights crisis fuelled in part by the failure of all levels of government to provide adequate housing.
Marie-Josée Houle says the review will collect testimony from people living in encampments along with experts in housing and human rights.
San Francisco is stuck between a rock and a hard place: Progressive good intentions are running up against big government.
It’s no secret that it’s difficult to get new buildings approved in San Francisco, and if they are approved, they are expensive to build. It turns out that same principle applies to the latest progressive policy innovation to help the homeless.
The TTC has become a homeless encampment, just like Toronto’s parks during warmer months.
But this is a tent city without the tents. Vagrants don’t need tents when they have warm hallways, platforms, bathrooms, buses, trains and streetcars to camp out in.
This won’t get better, it will only get worse.
The left want visible homelessness and lots of it.
They use it to demand more and more tax payer money not to fix the problem but to fund endlessness homelessness.
And it works in liberal-left run cities all over North America.
