Sometimes a quick look is all it takes to convince me that a particular government initiative has gone off the rails. The federal government’s recent decision to shut down their electric vehicle subsidy program does feel like a vindication of my previous claim that subsidies don’t actually increase EV sales.
But no matter how hard I look at some other programs - and no matter how awful I think they are - coming up with better alternatives of my own isn’t at all straightforward. A case in point is contemporary strategies for managing urban homeless shelters. The problem is obvious: people suffering from mental illnesses, addictions, and poverty desperately need assistance with shelter and immediate care.
Ideally, shelters should provide integration with local healthcare, social, and employment infrastructure to make it easier for clients to get back on their feet. But integration isn’t cost-free. Because many shelters serve people suffering from serious mental illnesses, neighbors have to worry about being subjected to dangerous and criminal behavior.
Apparently, City of Toronto policy now requires their staff to obscure from public view the purchase and preparation of new shelter locations. The obvious logic driving the policy is the desire to avoid push back from neighbors worried about the impact such a facility could have.
As much as we might regret the not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) attitude the city is trying to circumvent, the neighbors do have a point. Would I want to raise my children on a block littered with used syringes and regularly visited by high-as-a-kite - and often violent - substance abusers? Would I be excited about an overnight 25 percent drop in the value of my home? To be honest, I could easily see myself fighting fiercely to prevent such a facility opening anywhere near where I live.
On the other hand, we can’t very well abandon the homeless. They need a warm place to go along with access to resources necessary for moving ahead with their lives.
One alternative to dorm-like shelters where client concentration can amplify the negative impacts of disturbed behavior is “housing first” models. The goal is to provide clients with immediate and unconditional access to their own apartments regardless of health or behaviour warnings. The thinking is that other issues can only be properly addressed from the foundation of stable housing.
Such models have been tried in many places around the world over the years. Canada’s federal government, for example, ran their Housing First program between 2009 and 2013. That was replaced in 2014 with the Homelessness Partnering Strategy which, in 2019 was followed by Reaching Home.
There have been some successes, particularly in small communities. But one look at the disaster that is San Francisco will demonstrate that the model doesn’t scale well. The sad fact is that Canada’s emergency shelters are still as common as ever: serving as many as 11,000 people a night just in Toronto. Some individuals might have benefited from the Home First-type programs, but they haven’t had a measurable impact on the problem itself.
Where does the money to cover those programs come from? According to their 2023 Financial Report, the City of Toronto spent $1.1 billion on social housing, of which $504 million came in funding transfers from other levels of government. Now we probably have to be careful to distinguish between a range of programs that could be included in those “social housing” figures. But it’s probably safe to assume that they included an awful lot of funding directed at the homeless.
So money is available, but is there another way to spend it that doesn’t involve harming residential neighborhoods?
To ask the question is to answer it. Why not create homeless shelters in non-residential areas?
Right off the top I’ll acknowledge that there’s no guarantee these ideas would work and they’re certainly not perfect. But we already know that the current system isn’t ideal and there’s no indication that it’s bringing us any closer to solving the underlying problems. So why not take a step back and at least talk about alternatives?
Good government is about finding a smart balance between bad options.
Put bluntly, by “non-residential neighborhood shelters” I mean “client warehouses”. That is, constructing or converting facilities in commercial, industrial, or rural areas for dorm-like housing. Naturally, there would be medical, social, and guidance resources available on-site, and frequent shuttle services back and forth to urban hubs.
If some of this sounds suspiciously like the forced institutionalization of people suffering from dangerous mental health conditions that existing until the 1970s, that’s not an accident. The terrible abuses that existed in some of those institutions were replaced by different kinds of suffering, not to mention growing street crime. But shutting down the institutions themselves didn’t solve anything. Involuntary confinement is currently enjoying serious reconsideration.
Clients would face some isolation and inconvenience, and the risk of institutional abuses can’t be ignored. But those could be outweighed by the positives. For one thing, a larger client population makes it possible to properly separate families and healthy individuals facing short-term poverty from the mentally ill or abusive. It would also allow for more resource concentration than community-based models. That might mean dedicated law enforcement and medical staff rather than reliance on the 9-1-1 system.
It would also be possible to build positive pathways into the system, so making good progress in the rural facility could earn clients the right to move to in-town transition locations.
This won’t be the last word spoken on this topic. But we’re living with a system that’s clearly failing to properly serve both the homeless and people living around them. It would be hard to justify ignoring alternatives.
After having spent just about 20 years in the non profit sector serving the intersecting populations of homelessness, poverty, mental health and substance use I can say your attempt here is admirable.
Here’s my two cents… why is homelessness on the increase no matter how much money is thrown at it? Firstly, the political environment and contemporary policy focused on humans rights has changed the way homelessness is viewed and addressed systemically. Second, accessible housing stock across the spectrum has not grown in relation the population needing housing. Housing first models only work in markets where there is a wealth low cost housing and amiable landlords. But, the housing first experiment is at its end: the market doesn’t bare the necessary stock, the market is inaccessible and landlords are done with offering there assets to non profits in search of housing for clients who destroy their space.
Shipping people off to non urban areas to be warehoused will never happen. It’s too anti human rights and our political system is committed to propping up the ‘rights’ of the marginalized over just about everything else. However, I agree, too am not keen to have under managed housing sites serving this population anywhere near my home, and why should we? It’s not nimbyism, it’s common sense… and nimbyism is just another jargon term advocates use to offload responsibility to communities, I don’t buy it anymore
The drugs are worse, fentanyl has destroyed swaths of lives over the past decade. Meth has generally replaced cocaine crack. The intensity of addiction grows.
And the myth that all this investment helps people become productive members of society is just untrue. For the majority of people housing, mental health and substance use supports, if lucky, achieve a level of stabilization, which is great, but not much more, so people are then stuck on the dole for life.
Therapeutic recovery communities are an answer for some, but not all.
The ideology of Harm reduction has changed our approach from increasing health outcomes to accepting an individual’s right to live at risk, while magically funding them to do so.
Involuntary care will only work for a select few and is costly.
More housing across the spectrum, away from neighborhoods , with policy that crack down on social disorder and camps, Opportunities for therapeutic recovery centers.
Regarding mental health, change our system, create upstream solutions for more youth and families.
The current medical approach is supposed to be compassionate and respectful of the individual’s rights to make their own choices about their health care problems. Unfortunately, people with addictions and mental health problems struggle to make informed, rational, long range decisions about their treatment options, because their brains have been hijacked by their conditions. So, we are expecting irrational people who can’t think straight to make rational decisions. Leaving them to wallow in misery because they can’t think straight isn’t really compassionate, but the advocates and activists want you to think it is. The Alberta approach has drifted back toward giving the mentally ill and addicted a “nudge” in the right direction.
The logic that stabilizing the housing would take one problem off the plate so they could focus on the other problems really doesn’t work all that well. I’ve researched fairly extensively, and the only large scale example where it might have worked was Denmark, but even there the details are hard to parse out, and they are still chasing their tail, trying to have enough housing to meet the demand.
The other part of the “homeless” problem is that there seems to be a subset of anarchists in the mix. These seem like people who don’t have huge issues with mental illness or drugs, but they figure they have a right to set up camp somewhere, not pay rent, avoid taxes, and generally flout social and societal conventions. They are often interviewed in the media, and have all the right words to say about the poor down and outs they live among, but they can tell stories of their own fairly stable life on the streets over a span of months to years. Some even have jobs, but have landed in situations where the income is less than the outgo (poor decisions, family support obligations, gambling, general inability to get along with others at work and at home, criminality, possible antisocial or psychopathic tendencies) They aren’t the same as the others. They’ve chosen to live on the streets. They resist efforts to move them off the streets. I’m not sure they would accept Housing First options, because there are rules. They should be subject to the same laws as the rest of us.