The Encampment Wars

October 16, 2024 7:36 AM

Rather than migrants displaced by war or natural disaster, she likens Canada’s encampment residents to economic refugees, internally displaced by an acute cost-of-living crisis and a housing shortage. She also notes that refugee camps are supposed to be temporary. But of course they can last for years, as long as the emergency that creates them, and Canada’s affordability problems appear only to be worsening.

The battle for the removal of encampments is a prominent news story in nearly news outlet in any Canadian city. I suspect the reason it looms so large here as compared to the US is that we have fewer large cities, a lower overall population compared to the US, so it's a lot more noticeable.

Where I live, one of the most visible encampments was completely demolished due to a double murder. (It turns out the guy who stabbed the two camp residents was not a resident himself but a meth addict with a record who frequented the nearby safe injection site...which was also closed down.)

posted by Kitteh (41 comments total)

so it's a lot more noticeable.

I think as well is that it is being used a political weapon to savage whatever current political party or politician at whatever level of government for their failures so it is a constant source of debate everywhere. People like simple answers and it is easier to blame Trudeau, the carbon tax, international students, the new bypass, developers... On and on.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:07 AM on October 16 [6 favorites]

My dangerously violent and mentally ill father lives in an encampment in BC on Crown Land on the outskirts of Greater Vancouver. It's a good thing that he's no longer near people very much, but tragic and awful that's where he's ended up. In a better timeline, we would still have live-in mental health institutions, which would offer a real and lasting solution to so many who are currently in camps. According to the Canadian government, approximately 50% of people experiencing homelessness have or had a brain injury. Of course they're not going to easily find their way back into society without significant care and help. It's awful.
posted by foxtongue at 8:11 AM on October 16 [33 favorites]

I think as well is that it is being used a political weapon to savage whatever current political party or politician at whatever level of government for their failures so it is a constant source of debate everywhere. People like simple answers and it is easier to blame Trudeau, the carbon tax, international students, the new bypass, developers... On and on.

Oh, absolutely. Listen, I am indifferent to Trudeau, but the weird magical thinking that a new PM--even if it is PP--will make Canada great again is not just limited to Cons this time out. I'm encountering way too many people who would usually skew left that are contemplating voting Blue next election. (Their reasoning has the vibe of "I'm not x, but" statements you get from folks who are definitely x.) Also, I am encountering a very distinct misunderstanding of what municipal/provincial/federal governments are actually responsible for.
posted by Kitteh at 8:17 AM on October 16 [10 favorites]

I have read only half the article but I just have to post because it fills me with rage. Humans have failed! We fail every time! When I was growing up, I would have thought that if there were suddenly huge encampments of homeless people in every major city in North America, this would be seen as abnormal and an emergency and we would do something, but instead we've just sat back, normalized it and tried to crush both the homeless people and the people who try to help them. We are a dumb, bad, selfish, lazy species. Something bad happens to people? Sucks to be them! You're trying to help? We'll use the law and the police to stop you! Just shut up about problems, let the weak go to the wall, that's the human motto.

I am so sick of this. We have completely solvable problems all around the world and all we do is let people suffer and die.
posted by Frowner at 8:17 AM on October 16 [49 favorites]

The lack of compassion is what gets me. I have a warm safe bed to sleep in every night, food in my stomach, and a roof. I am incredibly lucky. I am grateful every day for where I am.

Folks want to lump the unhoused in with the addicts and the mentally unwell; there are Venn diagrams of how these three separate communities interact, but to assume all unhoused folks are on drugs (and fuck, if I were to become homeless, I'd want to escape from reality too) or have mental issues misses the forest for the trees. There is no "one size fits all" approach but we don't want to spend any taxpayer money to figure out multi-pronged solutions.
posted by Kitteh at 8:23 AM on October 16 [13 favorites]

The thought process: it's important to make sure people who fail at capitalism wind up hungry, hurt and sleeping in the snow without even a shred of dignity otherwise more people might think that capitalism is not the right answer.

Getting rid of the people who have and who enable and put into motion that thought process is how humanity pulls itself back from the brink of planetary humanitarian disaster that is capitalism.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:25 AM on October 16 [11 favorites]

Here in Australia we've got people living in tents because they used to own a house and their houses were destroyed in the 2019-2020 fires and the 2020 floods

and

a) the insurance companies dragged their heels doing payouts

b) the insurance companies tried to lowball the payouts

c) even when their payouts came through, there is far more demand for tradies (builders/carpenters/brick layers/electricians/plumbers) than there are tradies to go around, so people are waiting to be able to get skilled tradespeople to rebuild their old houses.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:29 AM on October 16 [4 favorites]

On a more local level, the governance of the city itself, as the putative master of the cops, that matters a lot when it comes to encampements. Since Olivia Chow was elected Mayor of Toronto there's been quite a shift away from the bulldoze-and-forget approach, instead sending food, health, and shelter outreach teams sometimes daily, making some gestures towards sanitation (portapotties), and having Fire Services visit larger encampments with ideas on how to stay safer. So there's at least some way of making changes at a local level -- get city governance on board with keeping cops the fuck out and sending in people who can help and perhaps make things a little safer. I'm not saying it's great, I'm just saying it's a little less horrible.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:36 AM on October 16 [10 favorites]

The thought process: it's important to make sure people who fail at capitalism wind up hungry, hurt and sleeping in the snow without even a shred of dignity otherwise more people might think that capitalism is not the right answer.

Lol, remember when Doug Ford said recently that the homeless just need to get jobs?
posted by Kitteh at 8:47 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

> even when their payouts came through, there is far more demand for tradies (builders/carpenters/brick layers/electricians/plumbers) than there are tradies to go around, so people are waiting to be able to get skilled tradespeople to rebuild their old houses


The logic that leads to "you have to be unemployed and homeless because we can't hire enough people to build the homes" makes me feel like having an aneurysm.

Sure would be a shame if we made apprenticeships accessible enough.
posted by constraint at 8:56 AM on October 16 [8 favorites]

I still remember the news article about a man who was living in a tent while working fulltime as an air traffic controller in Australia because there simply were no empty houses in that town available to rent, no matter how much money he was willing to spend.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:00 AM on October 16 [7 favorites]

An astonishingly good article about encampments in Toronto just released by The Local.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:04 AM on October 16 [5 favorites]

The part of this I find most disturbing is how many are using this as an opportunity to bring back involuntary commitment. Even the NDP in BC is talking about it.

Here is one example of many stories from a few days ago.
posted by bonehead at 9:23 AM on October 16 [3 favorites]

bonehead, what's even more disturbing is that you have so many citizens going, "YES! YES! Bring back involuntary commitment! If they can't get straight, then COMMIT THEM!"

And y'all, again, it's not just conservative folks who championing this. You have Liberal voters who are also exasperated with the homeless so are like, "ugh fuck it whatever works."
posted by Kitteh at 9:32 AM on October 16 [10 favorites]

A big thing with homeless encampments is that they force cities to deal with the people who become homeless in surrounding suburbs/rural areas. If someone becomes homeless in a sprawling suburb/rural area they're likely to make their way somewhere that has services, stores and facilities in a reasonably dense area. Hence cities are where they end up. That in turn means that somewhere like Toronto isn't just dealing with people in Toronto but all the surrounding areas that are, by design, hostile to human beings on foot.

It works out great for the suburbs in that they aren't responsible for dealing with the problems they've created via unaffordable housing, they get to shift that issue to urban centers and not pay their fair share in resolving the issue.
posted by Ferreous at 9:35 AM on October 16 [25 favorites]

I have multiple family members, colleagues, and friends struggling with mental illness, and the discourse around mental health services as a solution for homelessness always rubs me the wrong way. We're discussing commitment as a solution mainly because we're lacking in all the other features of the social safety net that would keep this issue from happening in the first place. Mental health services, like libraries, are one of the few shreds we have left of a working society and so we're expecting them to act like prisons in the same way we're expecting libraries to act as administrative support and day programs. I work with a lot of community colleges, and locally we have a trend with these schools building student housing (not normal in the US) because without housing attached to their learning programs they will have homeless students.

My pessimistic opinion is that the people who are currently unhoused will be failed by our civilization because it's going to take a generation to build up enough robust support to treat all of our humans as worthy of life.
posted by q*ben at 9:42 AM on October 16 [9 favorites]

Back in the day more than a few families had, shall we say, unstable family members...cousins, uncles, etc. But often they were kept within the family, living with them.The more severe were housed in institutions, either not ideal, or perhaps satisfactory. Our homes housed several generations together. No need for child care...Those days are long gone. And the rise in drug use has certainly contributed to the homeless problem. A sad decline indeed.
posted by Czjewel at 9:46 AM on October 16 [2 favorites]

Back in the day more than a few families had, shall we say, unstable family members...cousins, uncles, etc. But often they were kept within the family

Be careful what you wish for.

The elderly couple that once were our neighbours had an adult daughter living with them, who we now believe was schizophrenic or similar. The daughter was fed and housed, there's that... but that was about the unhappiest household I've encountered. Screaming matches, frustration, tension, anger, unhappiness all round. I don't see that as an optimal situation.

That article from the Local was very good. Still kind of bleak, with not much optimism for improvements.

Can anyone point to "western" countries that are doing a better job with homelessness, untreated addictions and mental health needs? Something that we in N America could emulate?
posted by Artful Codger at 10:05 AM on October 16 [5 favorites]

This is enraging, and thanks for posting this.
Massive cuts in corporate taxes ramped up by Paul Martin, the deficit slayer when he was Chretien's finance minister, following on the heels of Mulroney's whole sale gutting of federal services and the endless mantra of private public partnerships and supply side economics and here we are.
I live in Vancouver and I have seen homelessness explode over the last 20-30 years. Our current Premier, David Eby, said one of the stupidest things I have ever heard from a politician; that we can't have vacancy control because then developers won't build rental housing. The rental housing being built is exorbitant in cost, you have to been such an extraordinarily fucked piece of ignorant shit to think the private sector is going to be the solution for the rental housing crisis but here we are.
We actually had vacancy control at one point in the '70s but Social Credit, who later morphed into the BC Liberal party, ended that in the early '80s.
The most maddening thing about all of this is how preventable it was, but the extremely short term thinking, focused on a set of economic ideas that are better understood as magic realism, put us here, and the same vile elements keep screeching that somehow more of the same will fix everything.
Also, fuck Ken Sim and his puppet master Chip Wilson to the ends of the earth, and fucking fuck them there as well.
It's upsetting as hell and I just feel like screaming. If I lose my place, which I am grandfathered into and can still afford, I will quite literally be living in my car because of what the dyspeptic shit gibbons who run everything have created here.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 10:17 AM on October 16 [8 favorites]

ugh. I know Canada has never been the utopia it's deemed to be in American minds, but it was pretty decent, and it's sad to see so many things sliding into a more USian model. I live in a city with a vast and terrible homelessness crisis, about which we do nothing but push them into the worst neighborhoods so we can ignore them.
posted by supermedusa at 10:23 AM on October 16 [2 favorites]

Can anyone point to "western" countries that are doing a better job with homelessness

Finland [worldhabitat.org]
posted by HearHere at 10:38 AM on October 16 [12 favorites]

One important difference between the Canadian context and the American:

In Ontario, courts have ruled that it is illegal (counter to the charter of rights and freedoms) for cities to clear homeless encampments if there aren't enough shelter beds to house residents. (Not having enough shelter beds is a long term problem that has all layers of government pointing fingers at each other.)

In the US, the Supreme court recently ruled that the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.
posted by Popular Ethics at 11:59 AM on October 16 [14 favorites]

"The more the worldwide axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialized agriculture at the periphery, provisionally reserving for the center so-called postindustrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, over-armament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the center, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths. "Masses" of the population are abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy), and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption. It is to the credit of thinkers like Antonio Negri to have formulated, on the basis of the exemplary case of Italy, the theory of this internal margin, which tends increasingly to merge the students with the emarginati." - D&G, ATP p469

I've been engaged with encampments here in Philly for the better part of a decade and live right in the middle of it. I've witnessed a procession of mayors, each promising to end the crisis but none ultimately effecting more than an increase to the police budget. Our current one, emboldened by the Supreme Court, has gone all-in on incarceration and compulsory treatment, despite ample evidence that it's ineffective and deadly. There's been some pushback, but the outlook is bleak.

While a bureaucratic 'fix' to the problem would be simple enough-- ~$250 million per year would be more than enough to expand a Housing First program to cover nearly every person experiencing homelessness in the city-- the political will is not there. Will it ever be? The above passage from ATP suggests that rather than being lamentable social ills, economic precarity and destitution are the pillars of our modern social structure. End homelessness and hunger and who would bike your $25 cheeseburger to your doorstep at 3am? Fail to punish homelessness violently and who would pay $2350/mo for an 826 sqft 2br to live down the block from someone sleeping for free?

Of course, it doesn't have to be like this. Cuba abolished landlordism and created a strong enough safety net and civil society that healing and re-integration into the community are taken as serious endpoints. The chasm between here and there is vast, however, and the path leads through a major restructuring of our society. As a starting point, we might dispense with the handwringing and Dickensian framing of those who live in these encampments as powerless victims and start considering them as a power base. The choice to live in an encampment is a powerful refusal of the violent machine that masquerades as 'social service,' and all the fascists who would just as soon have us die and decrease the surplus population if we can't populate their prisons and workhouses. This refusal is known as destituent power:

Destitution asks how do we rob the power structures that exist of their power over us? Certainly there are times that violence does this. I’m not making a pacifist argument in any way. Riots and looting are often destituent. The police lose their ability to enforce the law. People play with the materials of the city. A liquor store becomes a communal free bar, a limousine becomes a barricade and a source of heat. A supermarket becomes a kitchen. But,riots are temporary and they can just as easily turn into a legitimizing factor for a security force, or become so focused on an antagonism with the police that the forms of life created within them are lost. This is the danger of fetishizing militancy, of delinking the war-machine from the care-machine[...] Destitution asks us to consider in each moment what action will give us the most power and minimize the power of the police or the economy or whatever apparatus we’re trying to escape. Destitution has an affinity for fleeing, but it also has an affinity for mockery. As some friends said “The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn’t even mount a frontal fight. It neutralizes it. Empties it of substance. And then steps to the side and watches it expire.” - Revolution & Destituent Power

I'm not blind to the suffering that occurs here, and I can hardly be an idealist after ten years here in Kensington. But I've also witnessed communities figure out water, electricity, and sanitation in these spaces. I've seen them build caring networks caring to protect themselves from overdose better than any EMS system could. So I choose to see the encampment as a front line of our struggle against fascism, one worth our time and solidarity.
posted by Richard Saunders at 12:08 PM on October 16 [18 favorites]

As if you could "solve" homelessness now and not how you'd usually solve a complicated, multicausal, entrenched and systemic problem - ie. starting at least twenty years ago.

Criminalizing it now is really the rational response, tbf.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 12:18 PM on October 16

In Ontario, courts have ruled that it is illegal (counter to the charter of rights and freedoms) for cities to clear homeless encampments if there aren't enough shelter beds to house residents. (Not having enough shelter beds is a long term problem that has all layers of government pointing fingers at each other.)

While this is true, nothing stopped Kingston from using a crime to get what the city wanted: which was to shut down the encampment around the city's only safe injection site. Kingston Community Law Clinic--will be filing a Charter challenge (which is how they stopped the city last year because of this ruling). I hope they win again.

It's hella demoralizing to witness/overhear/read how people just feel free to talk so much shit about homeless folks, not realizing they too could be a job loss or eviction away from joining their ranks.
posted by Kitteh at 12:22 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

the current crisis is not just a product of post-COVID economic strain, but decades of chronic underinvestment in housing and social supports. “We have to understand that our economy is producing homelessness,” she says. As long as that’s the case, Canadian society owes something to those left out.

Well put
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:41 PM on October 16 [10 favorites]

A big thing with homeless encampments is that they force cities to deal with the people who become homeless in surrounding suburbs/rural areas. If someone becomes homeless in a sprawling suburb/rural area they're likely to make their way somewhere that has services, stores and facilities in a reasonably dense area. Hence cities are where they end up. That in turn means that somewhere like Toronto isn't just dealing with people in Toronto but all the surrounding areas that are, by design, hostile to human beings on foot.

I know this has been the common wisdom for a while, but it’s not the experience of my Canadian province. We have homeless people and encampments in towns large and small. And there have always been those who scrabbled together a shack in the woods eg. on Crown Land. People move to cities in hopes of employment or services, yes, but rarely move directly into an encampment - usually that’s an endpoint after other options and attempts at making it have failed. And cities are just populous, so the majority of homeless folks are from that area. Sure, they might get forced into a given neighborhood from a different neighborhood or part of the general metropolitan area. But we don’t tend to talk about such local migration the same way for housed people. There’s an othering that unhoused people are commonly subject to, where people don’t want to think of their unhoused neighbors as neighbors and as co-community members.
posted by eviemath at 4:13 PM on October 16 [5 favorites]

I think it’s also important to remember that homelessness includes people living in their vehicles, or people who are couch surfing with family or friends because they can’t afford their own place. Sure, the fewer community connections or knowledge someone has, the more visible they will be if they become homeless. Likewise, the more someone is unable to conform to social expectations due to mental illness, the more visible they will be if they become homeless. Making generalizations or assumptions based on visibility runs the significant risk of confirmation bias.
posted by eviemath at 4:24 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

It's hella demoralizing to witness/overhear/read how people just feel free to talk so much shit about homeless folks, not realizing they too could be a job loss or eviction away from joining their ranks

Also, when you consider how many average, housed people in the US and Canada are dealing with mild to moderate mental illness, it’s worth considering how and how quickly that would be massively exacerbated by homelessness.

One thing I have learned being exposed to unhoused people every single day in my library job that I did not think about much before is the degree to which the degradations, discomforts and dangers of homelessness are actually a significant cause or accelerator of a lot of the mental illness being used to stigmatize and dismiss them.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:03 PM on October 16 [10 favorites]

There’s an othering that unhoused people are commonly subject to, where people don’t want to think of their unhoused neighbors as neighbors and as co-community members.

As someone who has sat in on city council meetings regarding the low-income or affordable housing in the heart of the downtown Kingston neighbourhood I reside in, this is 100% correct. It was fucking vile to hear some of the shit my neighbours said.
posted by Kitteh at 5:09 PM on October 16 [2 favorites]

The only real way to solve this is to build a couple of million no-frills housing units (for the USA, like 25M of them), but the cost is unfathomable, and you won't have the political will for it because it will depress the resale value of all the massive number of people who use their home as a means of building wealth.

EDIT: and by "build" I mean simply dump onto the market and let supply and demand do its thing. NOT build them and give them away to homeless people, which will never ever happen regardless of what you might want.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:04 PM on October 16 [2 favorites]

When I was growing up, I would have thought that if there were suddenly huge encampments of homeless people in every major city in North America, this would be seen as abnormal and an emergency and we would do something

In 1996 I went to San Francisco for the first time, where I was so shocked and upset by people sleeping on sidewalks, etc., that I was filled with dislike for the city and had no desire to return. Twenty years later, of course, this was Vancouver, too. And I was walking past those sleeping bodies just as casually as the San Franciscans who had once horrified me. The human ability to adapt is a blessing and a curse. I often think back on the days of Watergate, and how Trump's crew make Nixon look (almost) not that bad, really, and how if you'd told the average American in 1975 that one day the losing candidate in a presidential election would refuse to concede and would round up his followers to attack and invade government buildings that it would be considered a dystopian fantasy. And that somebody would indeed do something.
posted by jokeefe at 6:31 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

As someone whose god-brother died after an amputation from passing out in the cold while homeless, and sister who suffered while she was homeless, and killed herself partially out of fear of being homeless again (and during a meds switch).... Most recently this past year my cousin died after he was not allowed to stay at his mom's camper at the walmart camping lot by the community there... He died in that freak freeze that happened in Oregon this year... This is important shit to me.

I hated the people who do everything to push them out of site without actually helping. Or worse, locking them up, harrassing them, etc... There are plenty of "good ones" who just fell on bad times, there are "good ones" who have been down and out so long, they're no longer seen as one of the "good ones", there are plenty who have had a rough life.

Anyways. This is about the Irish housing crisis from Irish Musician/Singer/Dude "Meryl Streek":
Death to the Landlord (slyt).
Much of it is based on Irish politics so some of the frames of reference are difference (Tatos and Kings, I assume are some class based consumerist thing where one is the cheaper brand but they're both owned by the same company - I assume this is referring to politicians who pretend to be for the poor, but still are in the pocket of big money). I do think it's a bit unfair to complain about bus drivers who "can't be arsed to pretend to smile for 2 minutes" - sounds like a very american entitled thing, so IDK, if there's some difference in Ireland, or what.

But yeah. I've jammed to this the past couple months since I found it.

The housing crisis, like the immigration crisis, is going to get worse. They aren't inseparable either, of course. I've yet to see any political party or politician really willing to tackle this on a scale necessary, or holistically as necessary. Sorry I don't have a lot to comment on the specifics of the Canadian aspect, but just wanted to share my own little experience as someone whose had 3 family members die due to homelessness & related situations this past 10 years. And share that track.
posted by symbioid at 11:12 PM on October 16 [4 favorites]

What really gets me down isn't as much that some people are unhoused. Yes, that sucks, but it's way more depressing to see how abusive neighbors and politicians have gotten of late toward people who are unhoused.

I used to live in Miami, like actually in Miami, not out in the endless suburbs, so I'm not exactly a stranger to seeing large numbers of people sleeping on sidewalks or wherever they can find to lay their head down. I simply cannot fathom the irrational anger and hatred people have for those who are sleeping rough. Like any other group of people, most are somewhere between friendly and indifferent. In 7 years, not one person gave me any real trouble. Only once in 7 years I was even slightly bothered by someone, and that interaction lasted for all of five seconds.

I remain firmly convinced that it isn't the unhoused who are the problem, it's the people who refuse to see and interact with them as people who bring the negative experiences on themselves.

Nobody I talked to was looking for pity or trouble or much of anything really, just to be treated like anybody else. Occasionally a brief conversation or a cigarette. Sometimes people would ask me for some spare change, but nobody ever got shitty about it when I told them I don't carry cash, probably because I actually looked them in the eye and spoke to them like an actual human being. No frown, no walking past them like they don't exist, just a statement of fact and genuine well wishes.

When people complain about having to walk near people sleeping on the sidewalk I really can't help but think about the world's smallest violin playing just for them. Step quietly around them and let them sleep, same as if you had a friend sleeping off a hangover on your couch or whatever. It ain't fucking hard.

And then maybe, just maybe, when you start seeing all people as people, no matter what situation they find themselves living in, you can find it in your heart to ensure that your government at the very least treats them as full human beings. It's not enough, but it's a good goddamn start, at least in places where people aren't going to die of exposure because they have to sleep outdoors.
posted by wierdo at 11:16 PM on October 16 [9 favorites]

When people complain about having to walk near people sleeping on the sidewalk I really can't help but think about the world's smallest violin playing just for them.

I like to call it, "OH NO I MIGHT SEE A POOR". There is also the "what about the children?!" tactic these people use. You know what you tell your kids? Compassion is free, not everyone is fortunate to have a roof over their heads, and help them in recognizing their humanity.

My city just announced that they are converting a closed assisted living facility to transitional housing for folks 55+ plus as well as medical offices to assist, and the people who live nearby are losing their fucking minds. They've been protesting this since the city announced it in February, worked to get it changed to something more "family-friendly", and the city held steady. Now they are out in force on our local subreddit, conflating homeless with "they are all addicts" and whining about their property values and that their kids might see a poor.
posted by Kitteh at 4:48 AM on October 17 [8 favorites]

Oh, also this closed assisted living facility is located in the suburbs so of course.
posted by Kitteh at 4:49 AM on October 17 [4 favorites]

Now they are out in force on our local subreddit, conflating homeless with "they are all addicts" and whining about their property values and that their kids might see a poor.

It truly does feel like such a shift in attitudes just over my lifetime. I grew up visiting downtown Chicago regularly, and one of the first things my folks taught me was not to be afraid of people living rough or panhandling, and to always carry some small bills/a snack so you could give something to a person in need. (My dad in particular would just happily and knowingly let himself get "taken in" by stories about bus tickets being stolen, sick aunts in Cleveland, what have you, explaining afterward that it didn't matter why they needed the money; all that mattered was they needed it and we had it.)

Now, look. We were poor as hell ourselves and I remember more than one night of "sleepover in the van!" that was actually "we are sorting out this eviction!" So I know part of my folks' approach was because they knew how close it was, how easy to end up there. But this wasn't an uncommon attitude among the parents I knew and they weren't all poor. Fear/disgust about poverty was something the asshole parents did. What happened??
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:18 AM on October 17 [6 favorites]

Fear/disgust about poverty was something the asshole parents did. What happened??

I discussed these attitudes with my therapist and she suggested that more kids live "bubble wrapped lives" these days.
posted by Kitteh at 9:30 AM on October 17 [2 favorites]

‘They’re moving here for the services’: Academic debunks myths about homelessness

Requires a subscription to read the whole article. If you’re in Canada, you might potentially have access through your library? But memail me for a copy for academic purposes.
posted by eviemath at 3:44 PM on October 17 [2 favorites]

Back in the day more than a few families had, shall we say, unstable family members...cousins, uncles, etc. But often they were kept within the family, living with them.The more severe were housed in institutions, either not ideal, or perhaps satisfactory. Our homes housed several generations together. No need for child care...Those days are long gone.

Partly, remember, because woman are less constrained by social expectation to stay home and care for disabled family members. Massive amounts of (invisible, uncompensated) female labour are required for the back in the day model of social services...

symbiod, so sorry for the loss of your family members.
posted by jokeefe at 9:30 AM on October 19 [3 favorites]

There is one aspect of back in the day that made a big difference, and it's rents/housing prices. Before housing got turned into a semi-monopoly by big landlords, before housing was fully financialized, if you had a relative who wasn't well, you could rent a bigger place or rent them a small place. Believe me, someone who is addicted or ill is so much less addicted and ill when they have housing, because they are less stressed, they are sleeping better, if they're doing drugs they are more likely to have a stable relationship with a source and are less likely to get bad drugs or go into withdrawal (and if someone has a stable place to live, it's easier for them to have test strips, etc, to check the purity of their drugs). Someone with housing can develop a stable routine to help keep themselves on track. Also, someone with housing can work with social workers/carers rather than being chaotically chased all around the city by the cops. I'm not saying that made things easy, or that the burden of care didn't fall on women, but it was a way that you could at least keep a roof over an ill relative's head.
posted by Frowner at 12:40 PM on October 19 [9 favorites]