Homelessness: an inquiry
La Presse’s Mario Girard has a longish piece Saturday on rising homelessness in Montreal. A lot of things are touched on, but toward the end of the piece, Serge Lareault mentions the huge difference between offering someone a free hotel room for the night (and chucking him out first thing in the morning), and giving someone a home they can stay in, like most human beings, 24/7. The first is something you do in an emergency situation to keep a person from freezing on the street overnight. The second is harder, but it’s the real solution.
david211 14:29 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
There’s another solution, which Montreal had for basically its entire existence but which has declined massively due to a variety of city policies: flop houses. Used to be that a person could get him- or herself into a flophouse for a few bucks a night, without any real problem. If we’ve collectively decided that keeping “neighborhood character” is more important than affordable housing, we could at least suspend our little rules so that people aren’t actually sleeping in the streets.
You look at the variety of regulatory measures taken by the city (and in some cases, the province), such as minimum unit sizes, occupancy limits, identification requirements, payment options, hotel taxes, and zoning (the fundamental driver of the artificial land shortage which has just launched the cost of housing into the stratosphere) . . . and it’s hard not to conclude that we’re actually legislating homelessness.
(And the mode for bringing back flophouses would be the sort of conversion of old hotels we’ve already seen, with incentives/disincentives.)
david211 14:43 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
Then again, the activist position now seems to be that the homeless should be living in tents traffic medians and grown over lots – which is perfectly and somewhat elegantly consistent with the ‘don’t build more housing’ line of “progressive” politics.
Kate 15:05 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
Lareault doesn’t give a solution, he simply describes a need. And it’s not a flophouse either – it’s the need for someone to have continuity.
david211 15:52 on 2020-11-28 Permalink
A person who’s living on the streets doesn’t need to stay in a giant video-surveyed room at the old Vic where highly paid social workers babysit them, and they don’t need a tent and a nice patch of grass in the media on Rene-Levesque, they need a lockable room with a bed and a sink, with daily, weekly, or monthly rates. And that has been made, de facto, illegal in this town at any price-point that makes sense to a homeless person.
Tim 21:55 on 2020-11-29 Permalink
David*: what does a “highly paid” social worker make? I’m curious what you think amounts to high pay.
I don’t know anyone who gets into that field for pay.
david224 20:39 on 2020-12-04 Permalink
Highly paid vs. a flophouse manager.