Thank you: I love that movie, so learning something new about it is a good thing.
Iām confused at all the examples given of public parks being rendered unusable by others if a few recalcitrant homeless people go there regularly. It seems like cause and effect has been reversed.
Iāve seen so many parks on the south side of Chicago cleaned up by locals in a matter of hours and then used daily by families and others from that point forward. The thing is, the parks became littered with needles, etc. because the locals had stopped using them, not the other way around. If middle class locals want to use a public park, they always get first dibs, and the homeless, drug addicts, etc. have to find another location. Theyāre not moving families out of public spacesā¦theyāre simply moving into spaces no longer being used as originally intended.
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Iād argue Iāve been both a nomad, and homeless, and the definition is conscious choice, rather than necessity.
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Iām inclined to agree. I lived a bit of a nomadic life in my youth as well - it went with being a boilermaker. (You go where the boilers are being erected.) There was not only the element of choice, I had the means to exercise that choice, and I was not at the mercy of the shelters for food and shelter. Homelessness isā¦ quite different.
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But I agree with @popobawa4uās point that there is something fishy about our use of the word āhomelessā to define a group of people, as if the overwhelming trait that defined their existence was the lack of a fixed address. There are all kinds of problems even defining who is homeless and who is not (and people do spend a lot of time on definitions).
A lot of people seem to think, āWhy canāt we just help them get homes?ā but thatās not really a solution.
For a lot of them, it is. Look up āhousing first.ā
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If you have been in those circumstances, the lack of a fixed abode is, more often than not, the overwhelming trait. That this is an effect, not a cause, and that there are many different causes (or combinations thereof) doesnāt change that fact. A whole bunch of things that are easy enough for someone with a fixed domicile to manage become exceedingly difficult to achieve: bank accounts, permanent employment, actually obtaining a permanent residence.
The definition of homelessness is pretty simple: you donāt have a home. A very large number of the problems associated with homelessness stem directly from that one fact.
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Sounds to me like you just wanted to tell us your story, irrespective of how relevant it is to this one.
As part of itās commitment to end homelessness, my provincial government announced a plan to create an expert panel to, among other things, define homelessness and how we can measure it so that weāll know if weāve succeeded. Iām not sure the definition is quite that easy when government need to impanel experts to figure out what it is.
Yes, for a lot of them it is.
###FTFY (according to a dominant political paradigm)
Your province is mine - I moved out of Quebec about a quarter century ago (although Iām definitely not far from the border 
). You know, however, that convening expert panels is what governments do.
It is especially something they do when they donāt want to look at the real elephants in the room: a lack of affordable housing; a lack of suitable programmes for those with addiction problems (which, in part, comes down to housing as well - getting them off the streets and into group homes is probably wise in many cases); a distinct lack of suitable care for the mentally ill.
The first and last of these are the really big elephants, because theyād require that we look at the way we run our society.
The first, because the cost of housing has skyrocketed in the last 40-odd years, and that mainly has to do with the rising cost of land, and the rise in the cost of land has had a lot to do with the rise of land as a vehicle of speculation within that period. The knock-on effect of that increase in cost is that developers get more bang for their buck by producing condos rather than affordable rental housing. I donāt know how Toronto handles it, but Ottawa uses subsidised housing. However, the demand far outstrips whatās available (which is to be expected). Note that incomes have stagnated, or have actually moved backwards, relative to inflation for the lower deciles of the population in that time.
No doubt the pricing reflects the demand, but whose demand? The renters or the rentiers?
The last is probably the biggest contributor to homelessness, and I daresay that homelessness took off when they started chopping beds in the hospitals and moving most of the mentally ill to out-patient programmes - it was very noticeable to someone who lived through the period in which the policies changed. Part of the rationale was cost, part of it was to prune back some of the abuses of the committal process, and part was to treat people in a less institutional setting. Unfortunately, it didnāt entirely work as planned, and a lot of people fell through the cracks.
So, yeah, homelessness isnāt difficult to define - the definition is built into the word itself. The causes arenāt simple (I never claimed they were), and are very much systemic, as far as I can tell. If our blessĆØd government is wrangling over definitions, Iām pretty sure that we wonāt see much more than bandaid solutions (if we see anything at all).
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Well, Iām not convinced we are going to have a good solutions because no one is willing to actually spend money on anything these days (even things that we know will save more money than they cost in just a year or two). But thatās a different gripe and one Iād wager we agree on.
I donāt think the definitional issue is as simple as you make it out to be, though. Itās sort of like unemployment. Unemployment is a huge problem, but governments are always playing with numbers to pretend they are solving it when they arenāt. If we take everyone who graduated with a Masterās degree in the last three years and get them all working at Tim Hortonās then weāll solve a big part of the unemployment without solving the problem that is represented by unemployment at all.
In university I lived with 11 other students in a two bedroom bungalow with a basement converted into lots of tiny rooms. There were 8 of us on the lease, one guy who had a cot in the living room, on girl who was living there with her boyfriend, one guy who slept on the couch, and a friend of mine who slept in my bed at night because I was working night shifts and slept during the day. The guy on the cot was chipping in $200 a month towards rent, divided evenly between the rent-payers, I have no idea if the girlfriend was paying part of the rent, my friend was not paying me anything and in fact I was paying for a good portion of his food. The guy who slept on the couch was just around, not paying anything. Rental occupancy at the time was 103% (I remember scoffing at this number when I heard it and then suddenly realizing that my own situation was evidence that 100% could be easily exceeded).
Thatās a lot of people who had roofs over their heads but some of them were in pretty tenuous situations. Couch guy was eventually asked to leave and to be honest Iām not entirely sure where he went. Cot guy stayed in everyoneās good graces. Girlfriend did not have a place of her own and may have been an argument away from having nowhere to go. My friend who shared my bed was pretty secure but only because of my relationship to him. I think the Residential Tenancies Act probably protected cot guy because he was paying us, but I donāt think girlfriend had any protection because theyād only been living together for a few months. I donāt know how many of these people were homeless. And what about those people, mentioned above, just living in camper vans that are parked wherever they wonāt get towed?
With very high youth unemployment there is a real concern that thereās a significant population of couch-surfers with no fixed address who have roofs over their heads and donāt access any services intended for the homeless or for those in need of affordable housing.
Iād rather that we spent less time thinking about definitions, but definitions decide who can get services and who canāt a lot of the time, especially when the services involve receiving money. I donāt doubt that weāre doing things very wrong, and even that searching for a definition might be a waste of time, but I think when we speak of homeless people we donāt clearly know who we mean.
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For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
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