Whose Neighbourhood Is It?

The NIMBYS are out in full force in my 'hood.  The city of Vancouver has decided to open an emergency shelter in an abandoned restaurant and give temporary housing to more than one hundred fifty of our homeless citizens and members of our local creative class are up in arms as though ISIS has just set up camp in their midst.  One resident Yuppie is circulating a petition to stop this invasion of poor and vulnerable folk.  Some are being downright evil about it.  One gentleman (and I use the term very loosely) protested to one of our local journalists that he actually caught a young homeless man urinating against his condo building and he did not much like homeless people having their junk all over the sidewalk since he has paid big money to live here and why can't they put the homeless in other neighbourhoods instead of concentrating them in the urban core.

I am going to reply to his concerns point by point:

1. It isn't only homeless people who pee against buildings.  On the weekends the downtown area is overrun with drunken yuppies, and middle class louts blithely recycling their craft beer all over our alleys and against out buildings.  I know this because I have lived here for twelve years now, and one such middle class young lout one night threatened me with serious physical harm when I asked him to please pee elsewhere.

2. The sidewalk is public property.  The sidewalk belongs to everybody.  If you don't like it then please move to a street that doesn't have sidewalks.  Or better, just move.

3. Your money has bought your condominium, nothing else.  Until you get off the elevator, walk down the hall, open your door and step inside, you are on public property.  What is yours are those six hundred or so square feet that you purchased and all that clutters them and the clothes you wear and the car you drive.  Nothing else.

4. Moving the homeless elsewhere in the city is not going to solve anything.  Other neighbourhoods will also try to block them.  The homeless were here in the Downtown South before you were, dude.  You have moved into their neighbourhood.  The problem didn't suddenly appear like a spring toadstool.  Don't tell me you didn't know this when you bought here, you sure as hell did know it.  Now man up.  Live with it or move.  Or better, find a little compassion in your heart and see what you can do to be a solution to the problem.