Rethinking Poverty

"A homeless man sleeps on Queens avenue in downtown Toronto" (sic)

 Recently in the news, it was reported that a homeless man died owing more than $30,000 in fines, due to the Safe Streets Act, legislation from the Mike Harris days. The Safe Streets Act aims to "curb" panhandling by imposing fines on those caught doing so in an "aggressive manner", starting with a $500 fine, and then leading to either a fine of up to $1000, and/or a jail term of up the six months. Aggressive panhandlers can certainly make one uncomfortable within a public space; lord knows, in my short life I've seen panhandlers walking down a subway car asking for money, fights between two men for the "privilege" of opening a door to a Tim Hortons, and have even personally been accused of being racist for refusing to give change (although in fairness to Toronto, that happened in Halifax).

That said, hopefully we can agree that asking an individual to pay a $500 fine for panhandling is a ridiculous proposition; if they had $500 they could spend on such a fine, do you honestly think they would be panhandling  -- especially aggressively so -- in the first place?

In fact, pretty much all of our laws aimed to "stop" panhandling and homeless behaviour are absolute jokes. Fines and jail time are poor solutions because they do little to curb the behaviour. Designating places "illegal" to loiter/sleep in are just as ineffective, at best pushing a street person to a different part of the city, where it's someone else's problem to "deal" with. At worst, it's completely ineffective at "stopping" the behaviour.

The root causes of poverty (which lead to aggressive panhandling) are too complicated to be solved with temporary solutions (such as homeless shelters and food kitchens). Too often, society blames the individual for the state they're in, as if they're homeless because they want to be. As if they could just quit an addiction, cure their mental illness, or prevent the racism or prejudice that placed them on the street in the first place.

The biggest problem in my eyes with many of our solutions to dealing with poverty, is that we try and approach it from a traditional "market orientated" direction, believing that the problem with many people living in poverty is that they don't have enough incentive to lift themselves out of it. It's essentially the same argument that many would use against people they argue are abusing "welfare" programs: if we provide a base standard of living at little cost, then that will disincentivise a welfare recipient from going out into the market and getting a job or inventing iPhones and Snuggies or whatever.

Fair enough, it is certainly the case that some people abuse the system (and probably also the case that better "policing" of the system would cost more than simply accepting that abuse occurs). The problem, however, that the hardcore homeless face (that a normal welfare recipient would not) is that their behaviour can often be leagues more costly. Putting aside the $30k that the homeless man from the intro "owed", there are real costs to keeping homeless people "afloat".

We live in a society that dislikes the idea of giving someone something "for nothing", but also one that refuses to let a person die, even if the reason for poor health is a lack of the basic essentials in life (food, clothing, and shelter). Consider the following costs to the taxpayer incurred with someone who is "full-time" homeless that someone who is on welfare "full-time" will not:

1. Policing costs (e.g. jail time)
2. Medical costs (e.g emergency room visits)
3. "Temporary" costs (e.g. temporary shelter use)

Do the math, and the costs are potentially staggering. That's the genius behind a program like "Streets to Homes", in that it approaches the problem from the opposite direction, asking "what does someone who is homeless need to break out of the cycle of living on the street?" rather than "what's the minimum we, as a society, are willing to pay for to keep someone alive?" Indeed, for most participants, having a stable place to live reduces the three costs above dramatically, which themselves can help be paid for by "welfare" money they would be entitled to anyway.

Even if you disagree with the principle of giving people "housing with few strings attached", if you agree with the principle that "taxpayers shouldn't pay more for a service than they have to", a program like Streets to Homes is a gold mine of savings. But (and this is important!) Streets to Homes alone is not a "one-sized fits all" solution, and some people misunderstand it as such.

So we get garbage like this column with its author wondering about homeless sleeping near City Hall:

Here I thought the city was dishing out $14-million a year — as part of its Streets to Homes program — and had an army of 71 social workers dedicated strictly to getting the homeless and panhandlers off the street and into homes.

"We're paying good money to get rid of them! Why are they still around!?"

Because if there was a one-sized fits all approach to curing poverty, we wouldn't have the degree of homelessness we have in Canada, let alone people sleeping in Nathan Phillips Square!

For starters, the quality of affordable housing and "donated" market housing in the "Streets to Homes" program is rarely going to be top-quality; as one of the quotes in the above says, not all the units have air conditioning. We're not Vancouver; Toronto can get pretty damn humid at its worst.

Secondly, regardless of their have/have not status, many homeless individuals are just as attached to particular areas of the city as any "tax-paying" citizen is; just because you're homeless doesn't mean you don't have friends, support, or favorite places to be in the city. A place to live might be great, but maybe not ideal if it's halfway across the city from your usual haunt.

Thirdly, just because someone has nothing doesn't mean they'll accept anything. Some might honestly view (perhaps even correctly) that housing will inhibit their freedom. A handful of social programs, no matter how well-funded and how well-intentioned they are will not help everyone.

Rather than kicking individuals out of Nathan Phillips Square for "breaking" some bullshit law, we need to figure out why those individuals are choosing to sleep there in the first place. What attracts them to the area? Why here, but not somewhere else? What does a program like Streets to Homes lack that would "solve" this behaviour?

Kicking them out at 2am won't solve anyone's problem.