HOUSING FIRST
Mo, who is one of our regular commenters, passed on this fascinating article about a New York City program that provides housing to the homeless.
It's a "housing first" policy and it is achieving great results.
Do yourself a favour and read this piece.
For all the money and angst being spent by all the local do-gooders, why haven't we found something this simple and this effective?
1 comment:
I don't think this would work here. In NYC there are a lot of genuinely impoverished people who have fallen between the cracks of a society with limited social welfare.
But many of the homeless here are, as Pete McMartin puts it, not indigent, but indolent.
In Vancouver, a lot of the homeless are primarily social rebels, drug addicts, and are unhouseable. Witness what happened with the Woodward's squat participants; the city put the participants up in a hotel for a month, and they trashed the rooms there, costing over $100,000 in damage.
We have a different problem than in NYC. And it's going to require a different solution. And probably
a multidisciplinary one, involving health care, law enforcement, charity mission organizations, and the city.
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