Housing ultimately solves homelessness. Outreach doesn’t. Particularly when the outreach is accidentally or deliberately punitive. Next City has published an article that explores cities where the official intention is to work towards housing for all. Instead, they regularly wind up acting on angry citizen demands that often criminalize homeless people, reducing towards zero their opportunity as convicted felons to ever find housing in their lifetimes.
Reports that form the backbone of this Next City article identify police as problems rather than solutions for managing homelessness. Yet the police are very often involved as arbiters of city policies and laws that may well define aspects of homelessness as a lawbreaking activity. Indeed, Housing Outreach Teams, charged with moving the homeless people into housing are often situated within police management frameworks.
While there may be disagreement as to the role of police in addressing homelessness, the foundation of ending homelessness is the existence of available housing. If none is available, then interaction with outreach teams and/or police go nowhere, leaving people who are homeless bitter and cynical, inclined to avoid activities supposedly for their own good and that simply disintegrate around them.
The article identifies the angry groups of citizens, which pressure councils into immediate action, as the most toxic influence in cities’ attempts to move forward to resolve homelessness issues. Those citizen demands are often reinforced by pressure to criminalize homeless people who are non-compliant.
The Next City article largely tackles the subject in communities in the United States. A further article extends these issues across North America. The remote Labrador town of Happy Valley Goose Bay is located on the edge of the arctic. It can stand in for a typical confrontation between homeless people and a housed population. The number of people who are homeless in Happy Valley Goose Bay is increasing and stands currently at less than 100 people. Nevertheless, there are demands for action from an angry population that is bent on harassment, much to the dismay of well-meaning charities. The police are active participants in the unfolding events.
And is essential affordable housing anywhere on the horizon? Sort of, well, maybe no, not right away. Funding for such housing has now fallen afoul of criticism. In the meantime, the police are trained and capable of moving quickly to appease the local population with . . . housing? Hardly. Try arrests.
Read more about the state of affairs in the United States in Next City1: Why Are So Many Cities’ Homeless Policies Punitive?
And for a deadly tempest in an arctic teapot (two people froze to death last year while they were homeless) that in some ways expresses the difficult battle to create more affordable housing across the continent, read more in Western Wheel: In Labrador, those caring for a town’s homeless population face backlash, criticism
