Today, Councillor Krista Loughton posted a YouTube video on Facebook, with the following comment:
“A community cannot case-manage its way out of a [very low-income] housing shortage.
Homelessness is a housing problem. Not only a housing problem, but always a housing problem.”
Prevention is the real solution to homelessness, and without the availability of very low-income housing, people will enter homelessness as rapidly as people exit, therefore showing no change or increases in visible homelessness despite successful work happening.
Very low-income housing options prevent homelessness and must be a priority to alleviate the issue.
Iain De Jong is a longtime homelessness consultant who wrote a book titled The Book on Ending Homelessness. In the following clip, De Jong offers that the one overwhelming cause of homelessness worldwide is lack of affordable housing, by comparing the housing market to a game of musical chairs in which the public blames the losers instead of the game:
It’s a bit rich to get this from a council member who supported the closure of Tiny Homes by September 30 2023 in the midst of a housing crisis (only to reopen it months later), but hey, let’s focus on the merits of the argument instead. And I find that it misses the mark by a mile.
I’ve already explained at length in An insider’s guide to homelessness what drives people homeless, why they remain unhoused, and why they get perpetually evicted even when they secure housing. Here’s an excerpt:
There are more reasons people end up homeless than there are homeless people.
Sometimes the reason is obvious, like for that veteran who lost both legs on a land mine. Even then, the real problem may be severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can be more of an obstacle to housing than mobility issues.
Often it’s not clear at a glance what the cause is, even though it looks like a plain mental health and addiction issue. A victim of chronic sexual abuse may be loathe to open up to strangers, for example.
And then there are those who don’t even know why they’re on the streets. Those clients are riddles, and solving them requires extraordinary patience. Especially when coupled with mental health disorders.
There are nonetheless many recurring causes, addiction only one among a vast lot. Brain injuries caused by concussions, for example, show we’re all one bad fall away from destitution. A significant portion of people on the streets are migrants, often refugees, some facing a language barrier. Domestic violence is a common factor, as are workplace injuries, mental illness, old age, illiteracy, wrongful evictions, prejudice toward minorities, and countless more.
Most people shudder at the thought of becoming homeless. But homelessness is only the culmination of the unhoused’s ordeal, and usually isn’t the worst part by any means. Every person who ends up on the streets fell between the cracks of the system, through the meshes of society’s safety net. Solving homelessness means first and foremost addressing whatever issue got them rock bottom in the first place. In other words, homelessness is the symptom of systemic social dysfunction, not the actual problem.
I invite you to read the whole article, which comes with a graphic example from my own experience illustrating why the entire pipeline fails.
In the current piece, however, I’d like to produce a famous example showing why homelessness isn’t just about housing, but systemic failures and utter prejudice. Allow me to introduce you to Bradley Grimes, an unhoused autistic man who was reduced to asking a judge to put him in jail.
Bradley became homeless in the city of Middlesbrough in the UK during a housing crisis, after being left to his own devices by the care system at the age of 17. Unable to work, he was reduced to begging just to survive.
Unfortunately for him, Middlesbrough is one of those municipalities which discourage panhandling. It led the municipal council to issuing an order of anti-social behaviour order against him, which barred him from loitering in front of businesses.
From that point forth, he had to keep walking, because whenever he stopped, even to sit on a bench, he would get sent to jail for loitering.
In desperation, he asked a judge to send him to jail, since he would end up there anyway. The judge realized Bradley was only being guilty of being homeless, and instead ordered the government to provide accommodation for him.
While that looks like a happy ending, he was sent back to a building he had previously been evicted from, after being found in possession of cannabis, which he may have been using to self-medicate for a brain tumour which was discovered with an MRI in 2012. Months later, a judge sent him back to jail after being found with heroin, commenting that he might decide to accept treatment for his tumour once clean of heroin.
And if you think this is the end of the story, you’re sorely mistaken. Bradley kept being sent to jail, over and over, in municipalities across the country, for breaching court orders against loitering and panhandling.
How did a man end up spending most of his adult life in jail for serial panhandling? It wasn’t because of the housing crisis. Society failed him from the onset by abandoning him at the age of 17 without support, even though he was autistic, disabled, and had a brain tumour. It did because of prejudice against those using medical cannabis, which by the way has been found to be effective treatment against brain tumours. It did because a municipal council stigmatised him with an anti-social label for being indigent. It did because deluded judges genuinely believed sending a vulnerable drug user to jail would somehow make him clean—even though the very last place one should send a vulnerable drug user to recover is jail, where street gangs get his kind further addicted and indebted. It did because governments would rather invest in rabid law enforcement than address poverty crime at the source. It did out of insistence to treat homelessness purely as a mental health and addiction problem, which the unhoused can magically opt out of with a guilty plea.
In fact, to say that society failed him is a gross understatement; it actually persecuted him under the hubristic delusion that those who fare better know better, and that jail is the answer to every problem.
And yet our current municipal council, right here in Victoria, presumes to blame higher levels of government for the whole crisis, for not building enough homes. I say no amount of housing can keep the homeless safe from society’s prejudice. As long as our elected representatives refuse to adopt a client-centric approach, engage with the community, and work with advocates, this self-inflicted crisis will persist.
In a sense, it really is that simple.
