Windsor, Ontario believes that it has become a magnet for homeless people because newspaper reports either accurately or inaccurately rate the city as one of the most affordable in Canada.
Whether Windsor is, or is not, affordable may be a subject for endless city council debate until some kind of definitive study is undertaken. But if desperate people imagine there is some opportunity to find housing in Windsor, it might indeed be a reasonable subject of concern. The city alone can hardly be expected to willingly attract, then manage, a flood of homelessness people from elsewhere in the country.
Windsor’s concerns are supported by at least one project in Portland, Oregon. It began as a generous, open-arms policy that attempted to accept not just anybody, but everybody into city shelters over the winter of 2017-2018.
Alas, the tide of homeless people eventually overwhelmed the city’s budget. Part of the problem was clearly due to in-coming shelter-seekers, attracted by news that warm beds were available to all for the entire winter. For more on Portland’s experience, try: Portland’s Local ‘Right To Shelter’ Couldn’t Drain A National Ocean Of Homelessness
The conclusion of a recent Windsor discussion of the local homelessness crisis? The city could borrow and build enough affordable housing to shelter nearly 5,000 on the city’s wait list, only to have that wait list stretch out to 5,000 again, thanks to eager homeless in-comers.
Windsor’s situation points out how difficult it is for a local government to end homelessness. The combination of mobility and media stories can make a community a magnet. The federal government’s approach, which relies on local leadership with financial support, will require dynamic coordination of allocations and amounts across the nation’s communities. That leadership function of coordination, which can only happened at the national level, would seem to be absent.
Read more about Windsor’s real and/or imagined problems in the Windsor Star: City’s Affordable Reputation May Be Attracting A Homeless Migration
