How to solve homeless issue?

[evandyk]

On the Dufferin Grove list serve, which includes all of the neighbourhoods chief busybodies, people turned their attention from complaining about people camping in the park to getting everybody to show up to the public meeting tomorrow to campaign against the city permitting more housing to be built in the neighbourhood.

Shawn Micalleff weighed in (in support of the program), which was fun. I didn't know he lived in the neighbourhood.

Details on the meeting available here:

Avenues Policy Review: Enabling Mid-Rise Buildings Along Avenues

Your feedback is important to us! Please complete the survey to share your thoughts and insights on Phase Two. Complete the Survey The Avenues Policy Review Phase Two: Initial Study of Wards 9 and 11 was adopted by City Council on December 16 and 17. These Official Plan and Zoning By-law...

www.toronto.ca

 

[Towered]

"We want our beloved park back from the vagrant invasion...but we don't want to house them!"

 

[evandyk]

"We want our beloved park back from the vagrant invasion...but we don't want to house them!"

This may be interesting to folks here... the city distributed a spreadsheet to the list serve showing their staffing costs related to the Dufferin Grove encampment to be about $33,000 per week. There are about 11 people living in the park right now.

 

[Towered]

This may be interesting to folks here... the city distributed a spreadsheet to the list serve showing their staffing costs related to the Dufferin Grove encampment to be about $33,000 per week. There are about 11 people living in the park right now.

What entails this "staffing"? Security guards who have no authority pointlessly milling about? Outreach workers conversing with the homeless?

 

[Northern Light]

I disagree w/the tone of the post below.............but its newsworthy here just the same. The City is ousting encampees at Dufferin Grove today:

'

The Irony with a capital I that activist types are suggesting a tent is housing.

 

[evandyk]

It is:

• community development officer
• street outreach worker (2)
• street outreach councillor (2(
• community safety team (2)
• park ambassadors (2)
• lead hand
• parks handy worker (2)
• garda security (2)
• Fire services education (2)
• Municipal licensing and standards ((2)

For each, there's a number of hours/day and days/week identified, as well as an hourly rate. Total comes out to just over $33,000. The big ticket items were the 24 hour community safety team ($16,218) and Garda security ($10,825).

 

[Admiral Beez]

These articles always bring a phrase to my mind, that of provincial and municipal sympathetic/apathetic suicide. This is where a province or city has a reluctance, driven by both sympathy for the homeless and apathy that nothing can be done, to take hard measures (arrests and prison for criminals, forced institutionalization of mentally ill and addicts, along with curfews or street/park closures).

How fentanyl transformed Victoria’s Pandora Avenue from downtown hub to open-air drug market

One of B.C.’s premier tourist destinations has become another of Canada’s urban centres overtaken by the opioid crisis

www.theglobeandmail.com

Paywall free: https://archive.is/iTgsk

 

[SubHuman]

I disagree w/the tone of the post below.............but its newsworthy here just the same. The City is ousting encampees at Dufferin Grove today: ...

If some of those activists are angry at the current mayor and administration, then they'll never be satisfied, and are misguided in their attitude of fighting authority for the sake of it. They may think of themselves as being well-intentioned, but are the opposite, by failing to realize the intention is to help these people, regardless of the inability of many who need the help to understand and accept it. (Edit: If there actually are tent campers who are "away at work" during the day, I'm guessing they must also be lucid enough to understand and accept offers to help them improve their living situation.)

It is: ...

• street outreach worker (2)
• street outreach councillor (2)
• community safety team (2) ...
• Fire services education (2)

City of Toronto Interdivisional Protocol for Encampments in Toronto; May 2024
https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2024/ec/bgrd/backgroundfile-245821.pdf
https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/housing-shelter/homeless-help/encampment-outreach-response/

Should you see someone experiencing homelessness who may need outreach support, please contact 311. ...

Call 311 to request help for individuals experiencing homelessness who may need support.
If residents have concerns related to a new encampment, they can contact 311 to provide details and the location of the encampment.
The City will respond to new, established, or growing encampment locations ...

311 mobile app -
https://www.toronto.ca/home/311-toronto-at-your-service/311-mobile-apps/

-----------

... https://archive.is/iTgsk ...

Is anyone else finding those ".is" links to have stopped working recently? the ".ph" ones still seem to work.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

You'd have to wonder - for the sake of maintaining a roof over someone's head - whether it is more efficient to purchase an industrial facility and temporarily use it as housing/shelter. It is probably more stable than having someone live outdoors in tents.

AoD

 

[Towered]

These articles always bring a phrase to my mind, that of provincial and municipal sympathetic/apathetic suicide. This is where a province or city has a reluctance, driven by both sympathy for the homeless and apathy that nothing can be done, to take hard measures (arrests and prison for criminals, forced institutionalization of mentally ill and addicts, along with curfews or street/park closures).

How fentanyl transformed Victoria’s Pandora Avenue from downtown hub to open-air drug market

One of B.C.’s premier tourist destinations has become another of Canada’s urban centres overtaken by the opioid crisis

www.theglobeandmail.com

Paywall free: https://archive.is/iTgsk

Absolutely disgusting to read that and government's/society's willingness to tolerate it...

 

[Admiral Beez]

You'd have to wonder - for the sake of maintaining a roof over someone's head - whether it is more efficient to purchase an industrial facility and temporarily use it as housing/shelter. It is probably more stable than having someone live outdoors in tents.

I think so too. We need to treat these homeless encampments or street takeovers as we would a natural disaster. Fort McMurray burned to the ground, and we found emergency shelter for everyone. I wonder if an issue for BC is that they do not have a provincial police force. Otherwise the premier could declare a state of emergency, order the closure of Pandora (and Vancouver's East Hastings), announce a curfew for the effected area, use the provincial police to collect everyone and anyone who does not have a permanent address and move them to an emergency shelter where they can be triaged and any addicts or mentally ill to be care for by healthcare staff. The soft approach, and these damn churches like the Baptists on Pandora that sustain the encampment culture needs to stop, it won't help the issue. Instead a hard, but kind approach is needed, like how the firefighters won't let you back into a burning house to save grandma's china.

 

[AnnetteMeetsJane]

You'd have to wonder - for the sake of maintaining a roof over someone's head - whether it is more efficient to purchase an industrial facility and temporarily use it as housing/shelter. It is probably more stable than having someone live outdoors in tents.

AoD

Many of those who sleep on the streets, and all of those in the parks, have refused housing. They simply don't want to be indoors.
Most need to be in a drug addiction facility, but they don't want that either.

On a brighter note, I would say that I have seen less fentanyl and meth being used openly on Spadina in the last few weeks, and more alcohol, so that gives me some hope.

 

[SubHuman]

These articles always bring a phrase to my mind, that of provincial and municipal sympathetic/apathetic suicide. This is where a province or city has a reluctance, driven by both sympathy for the homeless and apathy that nothing can be done, to take hard measures (arrests and prison for criminals, forced institutionalization of mentally ill and addicts, along with curfews or street/park closures)...

The supposed sympathy is at best very misguided and illogical, and perhaps a more deliberately disingenuous way to ignore the situation and justify the apathy.

In The Star article from just over two years ago pointing out the number of "disorderly patron" delays on the TTC had gone from 700 to "closer to 2000", and "unauthorized person on the tracks" delays to "closer to 600" (up from 110 in 2018), it is mentioned that data on these type of delays is kept so that "there is no evidence that links any one delay with a specific group of people". This sounds like something that is deliberately done to avoid acknowledging that the problem exists, likely with the excuse that they don't want to stigmatize the severely mentally ill and drug-addicted. (So this could all just be a huge increase in people who drop something that falls onto the tracks and are dumb enough to climb down to get it?) And I suppose letting the addicts and mentally unsound continually endanger themselves by repeatedly climbing onto the tracks is the more sympathetic and preferable option to having them institutionalized?

Our "culture of abandonment" is not sympathetic, and not morally defensible.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-budget-mental-health-reform-involuntary-commitment-law (bold added by me)

New York ... state law ... make it easier to commit people to psychiatric hospitals ..
authorize hospitals to provide involuntary treatment for people incapable of meeting basic living needs, not just those who are dangerous...
prioritized untreated serious mental illness and sought to move the city’s approach to it from a culture of abandonment to one of intervention.

 

[Admiral Beez]

Toronto wants to put homeless shelters in its suburbs. Neighbours say not so fast

A new process of selecting shelters was supposed to ease tensions with residents, but as the city quickly moves to open 20 locations — many outside the core — some residents are pushing back.

www.thestar.com

Paywall free: https://archive.is/kvMrW

I get it, no one wants a homeless shelter in their neighbourhood. There are at least a half dozen homeless shelters within a 2 km circle of my house. So I understand.

What I would like to see the city adopt is a policy of permanent rather than emergency housing. Close down the shelters and convert them into permanent, supportive houses. AIUI, that’s what happened to Seaton House. Imagine closing the Maxwell Meighen Centre at Sherbourne and Queen (and its 270 beds) and in its place building permanent units twice that number.

 

[Mr.Tang]

It is:

• community development officer
• street outreach worker (2)
• street outreach councillor (2(
• community safety team (2)
• park ambassadors (2)
• lead hand
• parks handy worker (2)
• garda security (2)
• Fire services education (2)
• Municipal licensing and standards ((2)

For each, there's a number of hours/day and days/week identified, as well as an hourly rate. Total comes out to just over $33,000. The big ticket items were the 24 hour community safety team ($16,218) and Garda security ($10,825).

For me, this is everything wrong with our city and our society more broadly as this is not unique to Toronto. All these salaries is just to manage a homeless tent encampment for which I think we all no none of which will have a tangible impact. Do you honestly think the tents will leave on their own? You could extrapolate the same response and failure to the TTC and all the high vis vest wearers milling about aimlessly. This is why we can't have a better city of infrastructure and beauty - because our taxes, development charges, and fees go to pay the public sector that soaks up all our resources for negligible output. Sorry to sound like a rant - but $33K A DAY could really exact change if applied properly. How many people could we provide better food, shelter, education, sport opportunities for with this money? We are sleep walking to another Rob Ford moment when the outrage breaks.