- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
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We can’t just keep throwing money at help groups in hopes that will magically solve homelessness, we need to address the economic factors pushing people there, the high and ever increasing costs of living. From a ponzi scheme housing market to ever increasing groccery costs, people are being priced out of their apartments and homes.
We need to invest in affordable housing and transit, we need to break up the groccery cartels that keep getting away with price fixing, we need to slow immigration to ease the pressure on rental units, we need to rework the temporary foreign worker programs to be less exploitative which would open up more low skill jobs available to homeless populations.
But our governments don’t want to do any of that because it hurts their sweet sweet profits and the oligarch shareholders. Best they can offer is some cash for local outreach groups that often don’t have the resources to make meaningful change (at least compared to the reaources available to governments).
We can’t just keep throwing money at help groups
I mean, we could try. We certainly aren’t providing adequate funding.
Solving a problem at its root cause is usually better than trying to fix the consequences of those causes. Just helping the homeless without addressing what pushes people to homelessness would be a never ending cycle of providing aid to new people pushed into homelessness
The truth is, this isn’t an accident. This is both a necessary consequence of, and a necessary precondition for, the vast wealth disparity that has been engineered into our society. We don’t change things not because we can’t, but because we don’t want to.
Regardless of whether or not we are addressing the root causes (which is not simply flipping a switch and might likely still not be successful) we still need to address the consequences, and we need more funding to do that. You have to live below the poverty line just to work in a career where you get to help people. I know many people with master’s degrees who are themselves struggling with food and housing insecurity because they have chosen to spend their lives trying to help people. And it’s not as though it’s due to an over abundance of other people competing with them in that space… Like teachers buying their own teaching supplies, social workers have to pick up a lot of slack out of their own pockets. People who want to help and are trained to help simply cannot afford to help. It’s a very bad situation.
I would really like to see the government taking on the responsibilities they shed to NGOs over the last three decades. How has this improved anything??
Quick, let’s give more money to megacorps and business our way out of it! That’ll fix it!
Not surprised. I’ve never seen so much homeless people in Montreal in Québec either. This is a serious problem. The governments are just waiting for it to go away on its own. It’s completely inhumane.
I hate to say this, but at least you aren’t criminalizing it, against your own constitution, the way we are doing down here in the US. Waiting for it to go away is marginally better than creating slaves out of the most marginalized portion of society.
They live in worse conditions than concentration camps.
Eeehhhh… Maybe not. But their conditions are bad, yes
As an American, whose country literally invented concentration camps, no, they don’t. They live in appalling conditions, inhumane conditions even. They aren’t anything like what we did to the Native Americans, or the Japanese Americans.
Source: been homeless in the US, and been in jail in the US. I’d rather be homeless than a slave. I’ve also lived in 49/50 states. Hawaii isn’t possible to drive to.
My U.S. relatives: “But Canada is a Socialist country, right?”
Sure, sure it is.
It is unless you need medical care, housing, or food.
Lets spend $$$ on “the most ambitious study of homelessness conducted across Ontario” to show folks how much homeless people we have instead of how can we solve that problem without blaming the government for it…
Decisions are made on the basis of the numbers in studies, not on the basis of “it sure feels like there 27% more homeless people this year.” Accurate data are essential. It is very difficult to take a census of the homeless population. Recent efforts with new methodologies improved our view considerably, and though they still undercount, represent a meaningful step to improving the situation.
