Unaffordable housing is, for an increasing many, an inconvenience. A major home life and work disruption, quite possibly. A temporary upheaval that may affect lifelong happiness, no question.
But when unaffordable housing results in homelessness, the result for individuals is a disaster. Multiplied, the result is a community emergency — slow-rolling to be sure, but carrying many of the characteristics of sudden, unexpected emergencies which gain far more attention and response.
So why don’t we plan better for slow-rolling emergencies such as mass homelessness?
This past season’s wildfires in California, such as the one that wiped out the town of Paradise, have resulted in a new awareness of housing practices that make entire communities vulnerable. We are told that individuals and communities are now not only planning, but acting on plans to make homes and neighbourhoods more resistant to brush and forest fire emergencies.
But a slow-rolling homelessness emergency? In these cases, communities and governments seem to be sleepwalking. In the face of an entirely predictable emergency, which presents so much potential for management, North American society would seem to behave too often like comfortable frogs in warm water, oblivious to the gradual change in temperature as the pot slowly boils.
A case in point: City Councillors in Ottawa, Ontario were caught by surprise when one of the three family shelters in the city closed its doors without opportunity for discussion or debate.
Read more at the CBC: Closure of family homeless shelter worries advocates
A clear warning that some slow-rolling emergency planning was needed? Apparently not, even though it was a shelter for homeless families.
A recent outcry in the U.S. of the death by dehydration of a homeless child in Border Patrol custody would seem to define the limits of human indifference. Where children are involved, we become less tolerant of inhumanity to others.
Family homelessness involves children. Communities don’t tolerate the indifference and inhumanity they may accept at the sight of a homeless person sleeping in a bus shelter. When families are at risk of homelessness, does this not cry out for some forward-looking emergency planning?
Apparently not in Ottawa, nor in many communities like it. In spite of knowing that family shelter capacity had been abruptly cut, the city sleepwalks onwards, with an inevitable predictable, expensive, stopgap result. Read more at the CBC: No vacancy: More families placed in hotels as demand for shelter surges
The Canadian federal government, resident in the same city of Ottawa, is currently full of itself for its shiny new National Affordable Housing Initiative. It includes a Canada Housing Benefit, which will provide financial assistance directly to low income households to help pay rent. Averaging $208 per month, it will help sitting tenants with rent and homeless households to access units. It is scheduled to start in 2020. That’s a long time off for households who are homeless now.
