Demonstrable compassion for people who are experiencing homelessness and trapped outdoors has in North America lasted only about a year, if that, in many cities and regions. As it happens, well meaning attempts to safeguard the community did not entirely suit the circumstances.
Finding indoor accommodation preoccupied civic authorities, and resulted in expanded shelter capacity, often thanks to the availability of hotels and motels with empty rooms as business and recreational travel shrank dramatically.
With a growing awareness that indoor transmission of the COVID virus was the real problem, the advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made plenty of sense: leave the homeless encampments in place. It is safer for both the people in the encampments and the surrounding community. In 2021 in the midst of a 4th wave of pandemic, that CDC advice still holds1.
The premature celebration of COVID’s decline has meant many homeless have now been chased out of temporary hotel accommodation. Social distancing still applies in emergency shelters, so they continue to accept fewer than normal numbers of homeless clients. During the spring, it has been common for neighbourhood frustration to grow over inevitably rising numbers of homelessness in their messy encampments.
The result has been a new wave of tent encampment sweeps justified by a mealy-mouthed health and safety insincerity, if the CDC’s own health and safety advice is to be acknowledged.
There has also been considerable gaslighting by politicians and bureaucrats as the conventional shelter system is touted as the “route to permanent housing.” Civic dignitaries should be well aware that, with the rarest of exceptions, no miraculous affordable housing for hundreds or thousands of people who experience homelessness lies somewhere over the civic shelter rainbow2.
But beyond this thick-skinned civic indifference that simply “clears” people from here to there and back again, a hint of vindictive — even criminal — ugliness may well bubble beneath the surface of high-handed homeless “clearances.” The U.S. Department of Justice is certainly concerned about the possibility, which is why they have begun an investigation of homeless encampment sweeps in Phoenix, Arizona. Read more3 at 12news: ‘Like kicking a dog when it’s down’: DOJ investigates Phoenix homeless cleanups
Footnotes
- You can access the CDC’s current advice here: Interim Guidance on People Experiencing Unsheltered Homelessness
- Try this followup story of Toronto’s homeless tent clearance efforts over the spring and early summer. From the CBC: Only 8% of encampment residents have made it into permanent housing since April 2020, city data shows
- Increasingly, media outlets are restricting the number of free reads allowed to occasional viewers. That number is often based upon a viewing time frame (for example, so many views per week or month). This restriction is growing in popularity for smaller, often local, publications. If you are able to successfully view a particular article, bear in mind that it may be “here today, gone tomorrow.”
