SCOTT ANDERSON -- “We're all being asked to care about them,” said one distraught merchant ... “But when will City Council start caring about us?”
A recent town hall in Vernon highlighted the
two solitudes of opinion surrounding the so-called “homeless” problem happening
across BC, and to a lesser extent across Canada right now. One body of opinion
focuses on the well-being of the “homeless” while the other focuses on the harm
the so-called “homeless” are creating.
Perhaps the first thing to recognize is that
the problem has been misnamed. It is not a homeless problem.
A mass homelessness problem, as the term is
commonly understood, is a product of an economic and / or climactic catastrophe. One example would be the dustbowl years of
the 1930s, in which economic and climactic collapse brought destitute families
from the prairies to settle in makeshift camps across BC, then the land of
promise just as California was the promised land in Steinbeck's “Grapes of
Wrath.”
We had squatter camps here in Vernon in the
30s too, but they were families striving to live, and maybe even get ahead, in
circumstances entirely beyond their control. More importantly, those families
were here in BC in an effort to better their lot, because behind them was
disaster and here was the best they could hope to find.
Our “homeless” problem is not that.
While there are certainly homeless couch
surfers and RV dwellers, sometimes because rent is too high, or housing too
hard to find, those folks are not at issue in the clash of solitudes.
Homelessness of that sort can be fairly easily dealt with through subsidized
housing for those who wish to utilize it, and it doesn't give rise to the sort
of anger and emotion surrounding the issue we face.
The problem we have is addiction and / or
mental illness problem. More particularly, the relatively small number of that
population who feed their habits through crime. Many choose to live in
makeshift shelters in and around our urban areas, and the garbage generated
alongside our waterways, the constant annoyance of panhandling, open drug use,
the threatening behaviour of some, and most of all the crime – the ever-present
crime – makes taxpaying citizens see red.
It's not just the visuals or the anecdotal
impacts of citizens having everything, not nailed down, stolen that hurts civil
society. There is a whole economic underlay that most folks don't even know
about, because stores don't want to talk about it for a number of reasons, both
for image reasons and fear of retribution.
Take the time to talk to store managers near
trouble spots, and you'll soon learn that store theft, and even a threat of
armed robbery (through used needles), is relatively commonplace. The costs from
theft, robbery, clean up, and an inability to retain employees is astronomical
in problem areas, and often exacerbated in large chain stores by a corporate
policy of non-intervention; employees simply have to sit and watch vagrants
walk away with merchandise.
In one such store it's common practice for a
vagrant to walk in, take a small but expensive piece of merchandise, walk out,
and bring it back for a non-receipt refund a few minutes later. Even if the
store had a choice, enacting a receipt-only refund would make its regular
customers angry and potentially drive away repeat customers, so it simply takes
the loss. It's the least bad solution to a problem it shouldn't have in the
first place.
As above, the response to this problem has
developed into two opposing camps.
The first, which I'll call the “systemic”
camp, consists mainly of service providers and so-called “social justice
warriors” and favours a root-cause approach, pinpointing a number of factors
including poverty, trauma, addiction, and mental health, and believes the
answer is to address the root causes first and foremost, while in the meantime
making their subjects safe and comfortable.
According to this approach, if the root
causes are addressed, the negative behaviours that arise from them will be
similarly resolved. The approach has
theoretical benefits to be sure since once an individual is treated and re-socialized.
one can assume they will no longer be living in makeshift camps and stealing
for a living.
The weaknesses to the approach are twofold:
it is a years-long, perhaps even multi-generational, project; and it tends to
generate demands for “empathy,” loosely translated as special treatment and a
suspension of law enforcement. To paraphrase a frequent query on social media
goes like this: “instead of arresting them, why not try to help them?”
Indeed, it has evolved to the point that
possession of stolen shopping carts has become something of a human right in
the minds of the followers of this school of thought. At Vernon's recent town
hall, a man broke down in tears demanding that street dwellers be treated like
human beings rather than “the people we're all shitting on here.”
The second, which I'll call the “we've had
enough” camp, are those who don't necessarily disagree with addressing root
causes as a long-term solution, but want more immediate solutions to the
disproportionate impacts caused by this small and troublesome population.
Many in this camp are suffering the direct
effects of theft, garbage and defecation on their property, threatening
behaviour and so on, and are concerned about the general degradation of the
city. They've had enough and are simply not willing to wait several years in hopes
that the root causes can be fixed. They were epitomized at the town hall by
folks pointing out that a small number of miscreants are running roughshod over
the city, and by a merchant in the downtown area who argued that the people
we're supposedly shitting on are the ones shitting on us.
“We're all being asked to care about them,”
said one distraught merchant, who has suffered significant economic loss and an
existential loss of clientele in her location near the local shelter. “But
when will [City Council] start caring about us?”
There is no meeting of minds between these
two groups. They may both be concerned over the same base issue, but their
perspectives and solutions are polar opposites.
But what if there's a middle way?
If the problem (addiction/mental health) is
separated from the behaviour (crime/antisocial shenanigans) and dealt with as
two separate issues, both camps should be satisfied, if not completely, at
least sufficiently. After all, addiction and mental health issues may explain
bad behaviours, but should they be used as an excuse?
Should folks with mental health and/or
addiction issues be given a free pass when it comes to the rules? If service
providers are left to battle away at root causes with whatever treatment theory
is current in academic circles, while truly recognizing that the very real
concerns of the “we've had enough” group requires more immediate answers, it
seems to me that we can come closer to a solution.
Far from treating addicts like sub-humans,
what if we treated them like everyone else is treated, including, and perhaps
mostly notably, facing the consequences of bad behaviour?
If I steal property, I can expect to be
arrested and charged. Why then do we give the so-called “homeless” a free pass
on possession of stolen property?
If I decided to camp on the privately or
publicly-owned outskirts of a city, I can be expected to be moved away, and
quite rapidly. Why then do we allow the same activity to go on for months just
because someone can claim an underlying condition?
Is it truly compassionate to treat these
folks as a separate case while ironically arguing that they deserve to be
treated the same way as everyone else? What if one part of the answer is a
sustained crackdown on crime, vagrancy and anti-social behaviour?
What if, instead of ignoring vagrant camps in
our urban areas and along our waterways, we shut them down as rapidly as
possible, and keep shutting them down each time they pop up?
What if, instead of handing change to
panhandling addicts to help them score their next fix, we said no, and told
them where to find help instead?
What if, instead of thinking of stolen
shopping carts as a human right, we started treating them like the stolen
property they are? What if we started treating all of us the same way and
enforcing the same laws for all of us? What might happen?
One thing that would happen is a dramatic
drop in nuisance crime and nuisance vagrancy, and quite likely a change in
urban tone. But just suppose for a minute that in addition to that, making the street
entrenched lifestyle harder instead of easier actually helped them.
Many former addicts suggest that the
cessation of addiction ultimately boils down to a cost benefit analysis ... that
when an addict finds his/her lifestyle too hard to live with, they seek help or
in some cases simply walk away from the lifestyle.
In Alcoholics Anonymous this is referred to
as “hitting rock bottom” and in another intriguing thesis it's
called “Aging Out,” but whatever one calls it, it amounts to a personal
decision. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a voluntary decision either.
Portugal's successful drug strategy has
garnered media attention mainly because of decriminalization, but most experts
recognize that its actual success is attributable to mandated treatment
extended to hundreds of thousands of patients. In Portugal's drug treatment
strategy, anyone caught with a “personal” amount of drugs — up to 10 days’
worth of a substance — is ordered to appear before a health department official
through the agency of a “discussion commission” and usually forced into
treatment of some kind.
And all of these approaches agree that treatment
and recovery doesn't need to be voluntary in order to be effective.
BC Housing recently opened a housing facility
in Vernon with a “peer-monitored” room set aside for drug use, costing around
$30,000 per resident. For that kind of money, a patient could be sent to high
end treatment for six months with enough left over for several more months in a
sober living facility like Bill's Place.
Why is the province spending that money on
what amounts to enabling palliative care when it could be spent on treatment
instead?
Marshall Smith, Executive Director of the
Cedars Society and a recovering addict, explains
this idea in some depth here. So, if a vagrant lifestyle can be made as
difficult as possible, if pressure from as many angles as possible can be exerted
on the lifestyle, if rock bottom can be imposed so it's easier to hit, might it
help? We need a major shift in thinking, from palliative care to treatment and
recovery.
The only caveat, of course, is that the
provincial health ministry will have to be there to step in with real treatment
measures when folks ask for or are forced into the help they need. The health
authorities will have to refocus their main efforts on treatment and recovery
instead of the much cheaper, shorter term “harm reduction” strategies they are
currently enamoured of.
What we're doing now isn't working.
— Scott Anderson comments and
analysis from a bluntly conservative point of view.
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