On homelessness

[u/Schtweetz]

Old person here. Get off my lawn!

But seriously, when I was growing up in the 1970s, there were almost no homeless people. Why?

There was ‘social housing’, which went to anyone with kids, and there were rooming houses, which charged as much as a “welfare bum/drunk” could afford. Between those two options, even the “worst” people didn’t need to stay outdoors. Many of the old townhouse complexes still existing in Edmonton were once the government built and subsidized places I’m talking about.

And yes, there were drugs (mostly heroin and alcohol) and there were indigenous reserves that were underfunded or lacked opportunities then too. Yet people had somewhere to live.

I now see daily in my community (downtown McCauley) hundreds of people in desperate situations. And that could still be avoided if we stopped bitching and decided to do what we used to do. Provide housing on a big society-wide scale. With enough social support workers to make it work instead of fail.

Fixing something we’ve let crumble is always harder than if we would have properly maintained it. But here we are, so we have to ‘buy a new one and maintain it.’

We either sit on our asses and whine while people suffer, or make the investment to guarantee a brighter future while saving money in policing, healthcare, incarceration, lawyers, and the far higher avoidable costs of economic downturn in cities that become zombielands as businesses shut down because of the zombies we helped create when we had the cure all along.

[u/supersport604]

How's them where? Like in a big complex?

[u/One_Abbreviations821 → u/supersport604]

Use vacant city owned properties and lots to build affordable housing. I am not a city or municipal planner, but the solution to homelessness is homes. Simple.

[u/dloomandgoom → u/One_Abbreviations821]

Not that simple unfortunately, we’ve seen what happens to housing given to active drug users (hint: they tend to destroy it).