Montreal City Weblog

Kate 21:07 on 2021-01-07 Permalink Reply  

• Michael Black 22:07 on 2021-01-07 Permalink

  Wasn’t a or maybe the reason for Montreal declaring a state of emergency all those months ago was to be in a position to help the homeless? And they keep renewing it every five days or whatever the length is.

• David256 03:23 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  I also heard that from someone, that the weird five day thing was related to the homeless somehow.

  On the question of that article, I’m still just really surprised at the conversation around the freedom and self-actualization of the homeless as a progressive goal to address the – I think quite dire – situation that homelessness is.

  You have ‘progressive’ people saying that we should accept the choice of the homeless to live in tents on a Rene Levesque median or an empty lot nearby, even come winter. We have set up stations where the government is now serving drink to alcoholics and drugs to junkies, and the police are not called when there’s violence or, if called, are on orders not to log it. We have this new thing where, during a global pandemic, pretty much anyone ambling around or known to police has been exempt from all the mask (and now curfew) instructions. And this is all seen as good somehow, with some even saying that it’s racist and violent to impose measures like a curfew.

  I think I must have megadosed on PCP or scopolamine along the way, but somewhere in the period between when I was paying pretty keen attention to these things and now, it seems like I missed a pretty radical shift in the entire philosophy of how to treat human misery.

  I perfectly get and support harm reduction. If it works. But are we even keeping data on some of the goofy stuff we’re doing now? How does having tent cities along Rene Levesque in winter advance anything but human misery?

• David256 03:40 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  And I know the pat answer is obviously – well, where else will they go? We don’t have the money to house them, so we should support them when they’re set up in tents. It’s good logic and I support it to a certain point. But it’s a crazy position for a group of progressive people to hold, just crazy.

• Myles 08:16 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  Well, where will they go? It’s not pat, nor is it an answer. It’s a concrete problem that needs to be solved. There aren’t enough places in shelters for all of our homeless people and many shelters have rules in place that exclude people anyway. There are people who have nowhere to go and punishing them for that is unconscionable.

• Ephraim 08:47 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  It’s a problem without an easy solution, for many different reasons. We need rooming house… it’s a type of housing that we have slowly moved away from and yet is specifically needed by a portion of the population. And that being said, the people who run rooming houses need more powers than you would normally give a landlord. But we have impacted the stock of rooming house by action and inaction.

  For example, allowing people to convert residential housing to commercial housing with little intervention. An apartment used for AirBnB purposes is a commercial housing unit but is taxed at a residential rate in a zoned residential area and we have done very little to actually rectify the situation tax wise. — In order for a place to be zoned residential, the owner/tenant should be required to be resident, if they aren’t, the tax rate should be commercial. Rooming house generally have the landlord or superintendent on premises. In fact, they don’t function well without a resident caretaker, so tax-wise, we need to define this type of housing and put lower tax rates on it.

  We also have the problem of allowing charities to decide and run shelters, with dubious purposes. Sure, we have some that are great, non-discriminatory. Some are using this to proselyte to people who are at their most vulnerable…. intent matters. And most of the charities want to do the most they can do with limited resources, so they want the easiest to deal with… so no wet shelters (for those who aren’t sober.)

  We also need to realize that not everyone wants our help. And that we don’t know how to help everyone. And maybe it’s time to recognize that we can’t do it all. For a long time I have said that I don’t really know if the city is really the right people to run apartment buildings. Their costs are high! It’s expensive to do upkeep if you have to hire unionized employees for everything and inefficient ones. Maybe it’s better if we subsidize rather than actual run low-cost housing. But again, not something that I have actual numbers or research (and even the research is sketchy.)

  The same solutions to a problem don’t work for everyone. Never mind the fact that even if we do find a solution, we still have Pareto’s principle in play… 80% of a problem can be solved easily, doesn’t mean it will be easy to solve the last 20% of the problem.

• Cadichon 09:26 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  @ Ephraim, the City doesn’t run apartment buildings. Some of the older social housing stock is run by paramunicipal agency (Office municipal, SHDM). Almost all of the newer stock (post 1996) is owned by coop or non-profit.

• Ephraim 12:08 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  That’s the name I’m looking for the SHDM. The problem with the words “non-profit” is that it doesn’t mean they run it at the best and lowest costs, it means that there is no money left at the end of the year. Which means that they make sure there is no money left over. But you still need to watch them like a hawk… and they can still use the most expensive people to do things. To do the best, you need to have people who are benevolent…. look at Tourisme Montreal, supposed to be non-profit… and they just pad their salaries to ensure that there is no money left at the end of the year and give out golden parachutes for doing SFA.

  But the point here is that there are commercial operators, like REITs who need to make a profit, who have entire teams dedicated to the maintenance of their buildings and running them efficiently for a profit. It may mean that in the long run that you can get more apartments, more efficiently by paying a subsidy.

• Bill Binns 13:08 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  @David256 – You have to remember that the rather large network of “community groups” that get money from the city, province and feds to provide various services to people who self identify as “homeless” is an industry. These groups have little interest in reducing actual homelessness and putting themselves out of business. The real money is in facilitating urban camping. Through relentless innovation the industry has invented a whole new line of business, creating shelters with open bars and inventing heroin lounges. The industry’s current marketing campaigns make the case that we need, many, many more of both types of facilities.

  Go back and read the articles regarding the so called “homeless census” done in previous years. The numbers were always around 3k but every advocate organization interviewed said or implied that there were many more that went uncounted. There were also numerous attempts to move the goalposts and change what the term “homeless” meant. Did you know that if you are sleeping on a buddie’s couch that you are homeless? Even if you are worried about paying your rent next month you may be counted as homeless. Using this definition, I have apparently been homeless for decades of my life.

• Cadichon 13:23 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  @ Ephraim, some non-profits are actually quite large, owning thousands of units. They too, like REITs, have entire teams dedicated to maintenance and management. I don’t see why they wouldn’t be cost effective. Them being non-profit means that even after subsidies stop, apartments stay affordable.

• Ephraim 14:59 on 2021-01-08 Permalink

  @Cadichon – As I said, IF they are benevolent. But there are a lot of corrupt not-for-profits as well… as I pointed out, Tourisme Montreal is the one that comes to mind. The top management gets big bonuses to make sure that they don’t make a profit. (They gave one CEO a golden parachute of over half a million dollars… from a non-profit, that collects 3.5% on every hotel room in Montreal.) And of course, you have to question who gets the contracts… kick-backs. We all know about the corruption levels in this province.

  I’m not saying that they are, I’m just saying that the possibility is there. It’s a lot harder with publicly traded for-profit corporations, since they have to have audited balance sheets. Again, they too can have corruption, but it’s a lot harder. Looking at CAPREIT at the moment, they have apartments available in different sizes. These companies could also afford to build larger… for example, build 100 apartments and make 20 available for social housing. And the added advantage of not creating a “ghetto”.

  But we also need to look at WHAT we build. As I have pointed out before, these buildings need to be LEED certified with minimum overhead for maintenance and upkeep. Geothermal for heating and cooling, etc. It’s one of the reasons that converting old buildings into social housing isn’t the best idea, because they often have a lot of costs associated with their upkeep, conversion, heating, etc.

• david266 01:16 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

  Myles raises a problem that Ephraim exactly answers. It’s not a quick solution, but we need to legalize and even incentivize private rooming or “flop” houses, which will be a crucial part of the solution. Rooms by the day, week or month, organized for people on the down side of advantage.

  Bill – the poverty industry is a big problem, but I don’t really think that’s what’s going on, per se. The homeless industry actually makes more money from “in-patient” solutions like, for instance, the drug use centers. There’s something else going on right now that’s much more ideological and strange on the tents and other things.

• Jack 12:58 on 2021-01-09 Permalink

  Christopher Curtis is a great writer.