Ending Chronic Homelessness

[danbrotherston]

Here's the key though...you can't kick them out for this. If they want to sit in their homes and get high or whatever, then that's what they do. We can provide supports, but making housing conditional means it isn't being treated as a right.

[…]

There is literally no downside to giving homes to these people, not a single one will be worse off in that situation.

If they want to get high, that’s OK. But if they start fires or leave needles around the common areas (for example) then they have to go. This isn’t a matter of management being uptight or whatever, it’s just not possible to accommodate certain behaviours.

Whether those behaviours would actually be a problem once they’re in proper accommodation, I don’t really know; but I don’t think you know either.

And there is a downside: providing housing is obviously going to be expensive, and will be paid for by taking resources from everybody else. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, but pretending there is no downside is no way to proceed.

Settings fires and littering are crimes that you and I would both be prosecuted for. But neither of us would lose our homes as a result. The same should apply to homeless people.

Homeless people are people, they should suffer the same consequences for their behaviour that you and I do.

I'm not suggesting that we accommodate bad behaviour, just as I wouldn't tolerate a neighbour acting in that way either.

As for the expense, that I couldn't care less about. We waste oodles of money, even if providing housing was more expensive than the current system (there's a lot of evidence that it isn't, just look at how much of our police budget wasted bullying these people) then we should still do it.

I was quite specific, there is no downside for homeless folks. There are of course "downsides" for other people, and frankly, I don't care much about those. The most common "downside" is the people who WANT these people to be homeless, because they don't feel they deserve homes, will be upset and to me, that's an upside.