Gentle Reader, I really don't know who much more I am going to have to write about this before there is any indication at all that I am being heeded by those who have the power to implement change, but someone's got to do it. I am extremely grateful to those who do much more than me to raise awareness of our crisis of homelessness. I only hope that my small effort can also bear fruit.
Today I saw downtown, as always, a lot of homeless people, sleeping on the sidewalk, in doorways. One appeared to have shat himself. I noticed people walking by, well dressed and well-fed, averting their gaze, or perhaps not even noticing their fellow humans languishing in a way that is so vulnerable and so humiliating. I suppose one of the blessings of iPhones is they provide a very convenient excuse for not noticing that which is distressing to us.
I think that most of us are well aware of those who are suffering around us. I am also aware of how helpless we all must feel and so we shrug, look away, or don't look or just stay focussed on our little plastic rectangles that we hold in our hands. Worse, it has become very clear to me from conversations I've had that a lot of people believe that we have always had homelessness in Vancouver. There just aren't as many people around who, like me, remember a time, thirty years ago, when homelessness was very rare in this city. In a few short years this was to change drastically.
As governments were compelled by neoliberal interests to cut back on public health and social services spending we began to see the fallout. There was a small but growing number of people begging on the street, and more were becoming homeless. Welfare rates were either frozen or rolled back and rents were already beginning to rise disproportionately to people's incomes. Economic restructuring shut down or scaled back some forms of employment, among others my own job as a home support worker. Positions, contracts and work became increasingly hard to get. The rise of temporary contract work made job security perilous and many of us ended up having to settle for earning a pittance. Some of us became particularly impacted by the growing stress of income insecurity and a shrinking social safety net. They kept cutting back. Some of us began to lose our mental health.
The neoliberal government, the BC Liberal Party was elected in this province in 2001. Even though it was already abundantly clear that we were suffering from lack of opportunities and resources it was declared that it was our fault, it was falsely claimed by our elected representatives that we were lazy, didn't want to work, and suddenly thousands were kicked off of social assistance in a few months. Very few of those who lost assistance were work ready or even employable. In that time our population of homeless people mushroomed by almost four hundred percent. I remember this particularly well since during that time I was working front desk at a homeless shelter and, yes, we kept statistics.
In the meantime, housing costs went off the chart and even people with moderate incomes felt threatened with homelessness, one paycheque away from the street, and have since been leaving Vancouver in droves. In the meantime the supply of accessible affordable housing remains tragically scarce. New buildings and units have been built and there is more on the drawing board but it is still not keeping pace with the need. It is very easy to blame it all on people moving here from out of province and ending up on the streets, but since this has been always true up to a point this is still evidence that we are not working hard, smart or fast enough to adequately address the housing needs of low income people in this city. By all means tax the bejesus out of offshore millionaires, limit supply for foreign ownership and shut down on Air B and B. But also, let's do even more to help close the gap of income inequality, make social assistance sufficiently generous and accessible to all who need it, and enshrine as an inalienable human right and act on it, access for all Canadians to safe, decent and affordable housing.
It appalls me that we have allowed things to spiral out of control for this long; for me it is absolutely offensive that small-minded and mean-spirited voters have successfully held our governments hostage through their hatred of the poor and their absolutely unjust and wrong-headed assumptions that we are poor and on welfare because we are too lazy to work and therefore deserve to be punished. If BC enjoys the most robust economy in Canada it is partly because we have enriched ourselves on the backs of those we have kicked onto the street by reinvesting money that could have kept our poorest citizens alive and housed into our already bloated and very unequally distributed economy.
What the BC Liberal Party has done to the poor and homeless is in effect a crime against humanity and I hope I see the day when the architects of this pogrom against the poor have to appear before the International Criminal Court for how they have harmed even to the death our most impoverished citizens. This spectacle of human suffering called homelessness dehumanizes all of us. We are diminished and by extension we are made less by the suffering of our sisters and brothers who have to live out in the open on the pavement, vulnerable to all kinds of weather and all manner of abuse and mistreatment. This traumatizes all of us, and it is time to make homelessness a much larger priority. If we can find enough love in our hearts then we can do it.
I ask you please, Gentle Reader, to think of seven people who would benefit from reading this article and that you please send it on to them. And yes, I do watch my stats. :-)
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