Just pushing the problem out of your neighbourhood doesn’t solve the problem.
Unpopular opinion: too many levels of government are involved, and each points the finger at one another. Until the Feds decide housing is their problem (constitutional division of powers be damned), then provinces and municipalities will keep pointing fingers at one another and their neighbours. Provinces will kick and scream. Supreme Court constitutional challenges will be had, and often lost. But we’ve tried doing nothing and it isn’t working.
Kick you out of park A and you go settle in park B, then they kick you out of Park B and you go back to settle in Park A.
It’s a stupid cycle that solves nothing and wastes everyone’s time.
Seriously. Charging fines and fees to the homeless, arresting and displacing them, taking away their stuff is not going to get rid of the problem, it does nothing but make the situation worse for them and everyone in Vancouver.
So many bylaws and rules are getting in the way of proper solutions. If people don’t want to see unhoused people in sleeping bags on the street corner, we need to build something. We need to put up temporary structures in parks built with proper materials. Stopping the volunteer organizations that are trying to do just that will just leave people in disorganized, more hazardous tent arrangements.
Was with you until parks. We don’t have to choose between parks and shelter. We need both.
Where do you put them then? It doesn’t matter to me, put them on my front lawn or in the alleyway, the parks, parking lots, the beach, parking lots, some field in the suburbs for all I care. To me it’s an urgent emergency that the fact we’re not mounting a co-ordinated response and letting by-law particulars, blame-shifting and constant kicking the issue down the road and all over the place, we’re actively ignoring the problem.
Literally anywhere that isn’t a public space. Hell, take over some apartment buildings. Landlords are the reason the problem exists in the first place only fair that they pay for it.
The thing is bud, I agree with you here. Vacant condos, apartments and homes should allow squatters by law. That will solve the housing crisis and quickly drop rents and housing prices.
Problem is getting councillors, MPPs and MPs to agree with this is an uphill battle, as many of them more than one home, and there is astronomical amounts of money and interest in preventing this.
If we are to give the unhoused any help at all, using the public resources we have at our disposal to block community efforts at an interim solution seems like a wasteful exercise to me.
