City Of God 32

Once upon a time, I lived in a city where everybody had a place to live. No one was homeless. We did have social inequality and there were beggars on the street. But they weren't quite that many and they all had at least a room to go home to. I was a young man then. There was some short-term homelessness, of course, and we had shelters for people, but at the end of the day, it was always easy to help them find housing and to move them along. How things have changed. One of the hardest things to address is our collective memory, which doesn't seem to accommodate that homelessness hasn't been with us always. I often seem to be the only one in this city with a long memory. I remember in 1990 or so when things were already beginning to get worse, and our Liberal politicians of the day were just a year or two from gutting our national housing strategies, and it wasn't long before, in just over a decade, our sidewalks were choked with the bodies of people sleeping rough. Everywhere. This was, in British Columbia, anyway, government-enforced homelessness. The then newly-minted BC Liberal government took the greatest care to further eviscerate its services to the economically vulnerable and marginalized, making welfare much harder to get, harder to live on and easier to be thrown off of. Within a year of their election in 2001, the homelessness population in my city rose by almost four hundred percent, and has kept rising year after year. There was never a shortage of places to live, and construction and new condos and monster homes have turned entire neighbourhoods and the downtown area into unliveable hell-holes of noise and racket. People need places to live, as said one particularly dull-witted individual when I complained about the noise. So, all those shining new condos and looming monster homes were bought up, not by the local poor and low-inco0med, no, let them sleep under the bridge nearby. Our government changed and spiffed-up its immigration policies, giving priority to wealthy and university-educated successful newcomers, carrying bags of money- often illegally-sourced in their native China, India or Dubai- to launder to a pure snowy white in our burgeoning and booming real estate industry. So, who ended up living in those new luxury properties? Go figure! Real estate costs doubled, then they tripled, then they quadrupled, and quadrupled again. While many of those costly condos remained empty, but little hollow gold mines, platinum diamond mines, flipping and doubling in value, our homeless poor huddled in the sidewalks below, with just blankets or sleeping bags to ward off the coming cold of winter. As the cost of real estate skyrocketed, so did the rents, and before you knew it, droves of people on decent incomes and salaries were migrating out of our fabled city, seeking places they could afford to live in, where they could raise their children. How did this happen? Well, there was a time, when my city, Vancouver, was smugly known as Regina-By-The-Sea. Lovely and quaint and not very bright, but surrounded by green forested mountains and shining blue sea. Rather like a young man or young woman of very average intelligence and mediocre talents, but blessed with a fabulous beautiful young body. Who wanted to social-climb. New clothes, new toys, and lots of attention. And the gentleman and lady callers came a running, from all over the world, hoisting their big bags of money in exchange for the nubile feminine charms and the robust and muscular manly appeal of this most beautifully situated city, this city without a soul. The word "world-class" was suddenly being thrown around with abandon. Our little city by the sea became an arrogant whore, a handsome rent-boy full of hubris, putting out for foreign wealth, while starving their poor relations. Vancouver is a very beautiful city, Gentle Reader. But this place is not the City of God, and will never be. But the City of God still grows among the poor and humble, and the real beauty is not going to come from the mountains and trees and ocean but from humble and loving hearts that have resisted this corruption and canker of greed.