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As an ardent and voracious supporter of the poor and unhoused, and someone who has experienced homelessness, I need to admit I understand why these encampments get torn down. I have seen it. It makes sense in a very surface way.
Be it the six-foot-tall garbage piles, the human waste, the fires, the noise, the drug use and the general sense of danger or possible health risk to not only the homeless but those living nearby, it is 100 per cent understandable. I don’t think I would want some of these camps near where I live, in the state they are in.
I am not black and white on these things. There is nuance. And I get the concerns and even feel some of them myself. There are encampments that seem to be one bad week away from a cholera epidemic, a fire that is uncontrollable, or an outright violent event, and they can make a place of pride look terrible. People want to love their neighbourhoods and homes.
But tearing them down is not the answer. It does nothing but create hardship, resentment and police state conditions. What we must be doing is working with them.
Instead of shovelling funds into cleanups every six months from police and city services, we must be providing them with basic human needs — garbage bins (that have a regular pick-up schedule), toilet facilities, protection and care, as they are still human and still part of our communities.
This could include clean water supplies, safe heating options, regular health-care visits by nurses and mental health professionals, sharps and hazardous material pickups without fear of punishment or judgment, access to medications and followup visits, and a central location where tents are permitted and monitored, where housing counsellors and life skills teachers are accessible, to allow an improvement of life quality for those who live in them, be it transitioning out of tents to more permanent homes or just becoming more socially aware that we all share this place, and respect works both ways.
They are not going to stop the tents because you send in the cops and city workers in hazmat suits. They will rebuild elsewhere and then it will happen all over again, in a never-ending cycle of angry people on both sides.
And the truth is that the cost of providing ongoing humane services in the long run has been shown to be more cost effective and inexpensive to municipalities than all of the teardowns and cleanups and policing.
The cost output of those days and weeks far exceeds the day-to-day cost of compassion and pragmatic logic. It is fiscally more responsible to be kind than to be destructive, always, in all of human history.
Jeff Romanovitch
Barrie
