by Klaus Rohrich
august 12, 2004
Nearly a decade ago I moved out of Toronto into an idyllic small town that has a historic downtown and a beautiful harbour. I don’t often visit downtown Toronto, but every time I do, I am shocked by the number of people that are lying about on the streets, sleeping on the sidewalk, or aggressively looking for handouts from passing strangers. I suppose it’s a sight to which those living and working in the city have grown accustomed, but from where I sit it’s truly shocking.
While Toronto spends millions of dollars each year in an effort to draw tourists and declaring itself a world-class city, finding the city’s streets paved with homeless people doesn’t exactly make a good first impression. Toronto appears to be powerless in dealing with the human flotsam and jetsam drifting around the downtown core. Please, don’t misunderstand me, I am not condemning the poor souls that find themselves in these straits. I am condemning the limp-wristed, impotent bureaucracy that has turned homelessness into an industry, and a growing one at that.
The generally accepted wisdom, among those working in the homeless industry, is that if only there were more low income housing, homelessness would disappear. The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee (TDRC) claims to have a "simple solution" to homelessness. If the federal and provincial governments allocated an additional one percent of their total budgets to poverty relief then homelessness would disappear, as there would be enough money to build sufficient low income housing to accommodate the homeless.
That’s assuming that homeless people have the emotional and intellectual wherewithal to accept social housing. It sounds like the TDRC likens the homeless to eggs that can be neatly packed into flats of a dozen or so and then forgotten about.
It’s admirable for the TDRC to be concerned enough about homelessness to declare it a "national disaster". But, with all due respect, their "simple solution" is not going to solve the problems of mental illness, drug addiction and alcoholism, of which most street people today suffer. Currently Toronto spends in excess of $100 million per year on the homeless. That amounts to about $1,500 per shelter bed per month. Yet that doesn’t seem enough and now governments should cough up an additional $4 billion nationally in an effort to eliminate the problems once and for all.
I’m sure that $4 billion would create a lot of new jobs for social workers and drug counselors, as well as build a lot of new shelters. I doubt that spending that much would put a dent into homelessness.
I do not for one minute believe that the solution to homelessness can be found in economics. To listen to those working in the poverty industry, one might think that if only "the rich" earned a little less or paid a little more in taxes, then poverty would disappear. This didn’t work in the Soviet Union, why would it work in present-day North america?
I believe that homelessness is more of a public health and law-enforcement issue than one of economics. Let’s face it, the same type of people that want the homeless to move into public housing, put them out on the street 40 years ago, when they railed against the rights of individuals being held in mental institutions. They are also the people clamoring for legalized drugs. at least mental institutions kept people safe, free of illicit drugs and alcohol and off the streets.
a recent book by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall takes a hard look at homelessness in the sober light of day. The book, entitled Down to This: Squalor and splendour in a Big-city Shantytown, is an account of life in Toronto’s Tent City, which occupied some unused industrial lands in the city’s east end. Bishop-Stall lived there for close to a year. His account of the people with whom he shared the community paints a much different picture than one painted by the poverty industry. In his estimation, the chief cause of homelessness is mental illness and substance abuse, which isn’t something that the poverty mavens want to hear.
On the contrary. Kathy Hardill, a so-called street nurse and member of TDRC, claimed in a recent article in NOW Magazine that Bishop-Hall "divulged highly personal information [about the homeless] given only to people they trust." She says that he broke the prime rule of the street, namely "Thou shalt not rat." It’s not like the people he talked about needed to protect their identity; in fact, I think the opposite is true. By outing them and their problems we are getting a clearer picture of their plight.
I think it’s more a case of him blowing holes into the accepted mantra chanted by the left that poverty is the root of homelessness. If it turns out that the precursor to a lot of poverty and homelessness really is mental illness and drug addiction, then Kathy Hardill and her ilk can longer blame the problem on the rich.
In her article Hardill writes "It's unfortunate that homelessness is so often addressed by people who claim they want to avoid ‘being political,’ as if this sullies the story they want to tell." I hate to be the one to break this to Hardill, but the reason this problem plagues us year after year and decade after decade, is precisely because the left handles it as a "political" issue.
Imagine if there were no poverty or homelessness. What would the left do for a living?