Tent dwellers want to camp through winter
Some of the inhabitants of the tent city say they want to camp through winter. CTV says 100 people live there.
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Kate
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JS 17:39 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
Is letting them pitch their tents in covid-empty municipal hockey arenas a bad idea? Don’t these places have bathrooms, showers, and kitchen facilities? And wouldn’t staffing them be cheaper than putting the tent dwellers up in a hotel?
Kate 19:31 on 2020-11-25 Permalink
JS, I don’t know what all the rationales are for the choices the city has made. I imagine the hotel allows for better distancing than an arena, although I know they’re using those as well.
Does the hotel deliver room service so people can stay distanced, I wonder.
david44 14:38 on 2020-11-26 Permalink
The homeless in hotels things is an interesting dilemma and I don’t think the authorities see the political peril.
Dump a bunch of homeless in empty hotels, it’s win-win from one perspective – you get the homeless off the streets (goal of activists), you possibly slow the spread of covid (goal of health officers), and you get some money into the pockets of hotels (goal of important constituency that’s greatly suffering).
But from an electoral perspective, this is dicey. It’s not just the risk that the neighbors get active and noisy about the antics of the hotel denizens, you just sort of do a mix of writing off their votes and/or do the standard bit of shaming them as hating the poor or being racists. The big risk is how people think about the money.
Potentially massive budget cuts are coming, and unemployment will be elevated for some time to come, while the cost of housing and lots of other stuff continues to increase at a pace far higher than inflation. At the same time, the cost of housing these people is just huge, relative to their relatively small numbers. Tell me that’s not something a politician could weaponize.
If these people are dead set on shoveling this money out the door, the smartest strategy would be to do it completely in secret, swear everyone involved to secrecy, obscure the budget line, refuse to answer questions about it, etc.