This issue comes up daily, and in many forms. People ask:
- How can we better care for the people on Pandora? (By the way I’m using “Pandora” to also cover Rock Bay, Princess, Queens, parks, etc.)
- How can we stop the suffering of people with untreated addiction and mental illness?
- How can we protect downtown businesses and residents from street disorder?
- How can we reduce the volume of litter, discarded items and biohazards on boulevards and sidewalks?
- Etc, etc.
Here’s the crux of it. The people on Pandora need better places to go.
Just forcing them to “move along” doesn’t work. We’ve already seen what displacement accomplishes: it moves the people and the issues from one street to another, from one park to another. Displacement is a game of whack-a-mole, and everyone involved knows it.
People need better places to go, not just “anywhere else.” So what’s the better place?
It depends on the person. There isn’t one place. Everyone is different, and we need different places for them, e.g.
- For some, a better place means affordable housing.
- For others, it’s deeply affordable / shelter rate housing.
- For others, it’s supportive housing, some of it dry, some for women, some for seniors, etc.
- For others, it’s complex care housing.
- For others it’s detox and treatment.
- For others, who will need to adjust before they can succeed indoors, it’s temporary, well-managed sheltering sites.
- For the few who have suffered massive loss of capacity, it’s mental health care hospitals.
- For the few predators who repeatedly victimize the vulnerable, assault people, and cause the majority of crimes, it’s prison.
The better places need to be spread out rather than being concentrated in city cores. For people trying to escape addiction to harmful drugs, housing them in close proximity to the street drug scene is harmful to them and to others.
The better places are being built now, to try to undo the damage caused by foolish, ideologically driven provincial and federal cuts to the social safety net and public housing. These damaging cuts started in the 1980s and 90s, and were followed by decades of neglect, as well as dramatic increases in rent and housing costs (the fault of cities and their widespread restrictions on relatively affordable multifamily housing).
The damage was caused by government policy, and more recently compounded by the development of highly addictive and deeply harmful drugs, and the COVID pandemic.
The better places needed to undo all that damage are being built, but as I’ve been saying for years, it will take years to build it all, and staff them properly. We need significant levels of investment in both construction and operating from both the Federal and Provincial governments.
And even with that investment it will take probably decades, if not generations, to undo the human harm that was caused.
So we need to move quickly. Efforts need to match the urgency and the scale of the problem.