What does DTK need?

[danbrotherston]

I've seen it all just in downtown Galt, let alone what I've seen in downtown Kitchener. I think it's important to acknowledge this as a forum of mostly men.

My wife doesn't want to go downtown and I know it's a combination of suburban upbringing with real, tangible fear/discomfort from the people hanging around. The people walking down my street screaming, falling over, passed out, going through garbage, breaking into my garage - the data is real and it's not just suburban paranoia.

The problem is that people want to reach for the enforcement hammer because it's quickest and easiest, and yet the fact that this shit is happening in every urban area across the continent is proof that local laws and cops didn't stop enforcing the law all at the same time. There's some serious society-wide shit going on with housing and drugs and hope/doom and I don't see anyone in government who's really serious about tackling it. It's so much easier to just rant and rave about the local shelter (hi, kneejerk-loving local councillor!) than it is to really think about what is generating all the people that need that shelter in the first place.

I think a lot of things can be true at the same time.

Some people, for various reasons, have different levels of fear about downtown, regardless of what the actual risks are (remember, real risk often has no impact at all on perception of risk).

Some people's fears are so detached from reality that the solution is not to improve reality, but to give them therapy/fix the bad actors causing this fear (media, etc.)

The perception of how many people are afraid to go downtown can be wildly incorrect for the same reason our fears are different, and frankly, they work together, people want to feel like part of the crowd even when it comes to things like fear, to the point that I think some people would mis-state their fears just to be a part of a certain group.

And of course, it is also the case that we should work to improve our cities so that people are not suffering on our streets, regardless of whether it rightly or wrongly makes people fearful.