We were alarmed when it became apparent people were spending cold, winter nights in doorways, garden sheds and makeshift encampments in parks – in our community.
Homelessness is not new – there have always been people living on the streets in cities like Toronto. They have been here, too, only less visible.
In small, rural communities, people couch-surf, staying with friends and relatives a few days here, a week there, and when that fails, there is always an abandoned shed or a vacant cottage.
The encampments – new millennium versions of the hobo jungles of the Great Depression – started appearing during COVID, when stress escalated, social services became well nigh impossible to access, and housing prices started climbing sky high.
As time goes on, the similarities to hobo jungles are growing.
Encampments are starting to look a whole lot less temporary than they used to, and more like the photos from the Dirty Thirties – clusters of tumbledown shacks, and ragged folks standing around fires.
Garbage tends to accumulate quickly in places where no one removes it on a regular basis, and where there are no public washrooms. Someone drags in a couple of old wooden pallets, and a broken-down bicycle or two, and the place soon becomes a tangled minefield of bicycle parts, garbage and used drug paraphernalia.
Encampments are not pretty, nor are they clean and safe. What they are, are places where people who have little or nothing try to survive. Some help each other, and some prey on others. Open fires and piles of flammables mean a high risk of fires. The total lack of sanitation, combined with crowding and bad weather, create a breeding ground for disease. Substance abuse is a given. A blister on someone’s toe can easily become infected and end up costing the person their foot.
Some people in the encampments prefer sleeping on a park bench to the crowds and noise of a shelter, and some get thrown out of every rooming house or shelter they find themselves in.
Social services do their best to help but they are fighting a losing battle. The issue is not people without homes, it is homeless people who are suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues, with little effective assistance from government.
Governments keep coming up with long-term programs – build more regular and high-end housing in the expectation it will lead to more housing for everyone – when we are in the midst of a housing crisis. There is an immediate, desperate need for affordable housing, as well as supportive housing for those with mental health and substance abuse issues. The people huddled in tents in those encampments are not thinking long-term, they are thinking tonight, and so are the people who are trying to help them.
The answer is not telling those in modern-day hobo jungles to go get jobs. The last thing on the minds of folks who are exhausted, cold, hungry and unwell is showering, putting on decent clothes and going out to apply for jobs. They are in survival mode – thoughts focus on where to get something to eat, a dry pair of socks, and maybe a warm place to spend an hour or two.
A more sensible – and compassionate – approach would be to get them a safe, warm place to sleep, with access to decent food, hot showers and medical care if needed, and once they have regained their health and confidence, then discuss job possibilities.
Someone who has been living on the streets for a while is not so much unemployed, but unemployable. This point seems to be lost on privileged individuals who can look at a starving, frostbitten individual curled up in a cardboard box – an individual they, personally, would never hire in a million years – and burble, “Get a job!.”
Some folks need a reality check. Canada’s climate makes decent shelter a necessity of life, not a luxury.
A government will be judged not on how it caters to the wealthy, but on how it provides for all citizens – especially those in need.
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Pauline Kerr is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter with Midwestern Newspapers. She can be reached at pkerr@midwesternnewspapers.com.
