Homeless in Abbotsford, BC

A letter to the residents of the Clearbrook neighbourhood of Abbotsford BC:

While I cannot say I share exactly your frustration over recovery houses, homelessness and crime problems, I can say I too am intensely frustrated over recovery houses, homelessness and the crime fallout from the way people and politicians continue to fail to exercise basic common sense in responding to the situation.

I concur that we need a recovery house policy, not to appease citizens but to protect the addict(s) in recovery who are seeking safe and supportive housing to continue their journey of recovery. Having witnessed the damage and pain that results for those who have the misfortune to end up in one of the houses that has nothing to do with recovery, I whole heartedly agree that we as a community owe it to those seeking recovery to ensure that is what they will find at a recovery house in our City.

What I find so frustrating is the continued failure of people and politicians to exercise common sense by asking some basic and obvious questions, then proceeding to address the issues raised by these questions. So here are some questions for the residents of Clearbrook to think about – and to demand the City answer.

Where are the displaced residents from houses that close going to go? Why would those who find themselves “released to homelessness” do anything other than join the ranks of the homeless who currently call the Clearbrook area home? There are no services, resources or housing to draw them away from the Clearbrook area, an area they are familiar with.

Have you considered the effect that dumping between 100 and 200 newly made homeless onto the streets of Clearbrook will have on the area? If you think you have problems with crime, homeless and addicts in the area now, what do you think is going to be the result of tossing large numbers of additional people onto the streets?

Are you prepared for the newly made homeless to take up residence in sheds, yards, parks, doorways, under trees and bushes, on the sidewalks etc? These people are homeless why would you expect them to just disappear? Where else do the homeless have to go?

Why is it that when these points were raised with the City over a year ago, when they first began to work on recovery house regulations, they have failed to address the most basic and pressing question of what/where are you going to do with those released to homelessness?

What kind of neighbour, what kind of citizen are you? Are you about solving these problems or are you about chasing them to some other part of the City, into someone else’s backyard as the homeless were harassed out of the downtown and into Clearbrook?

What is the point of the City chasing the homeless, the poor from residential neighbourhood to residential neighbourhood when they have no other place to go but around in circles, from spot to spot within the City? Would it not be common sense to provide leadership, support and political will to provide viable alternatives for housing, support and recovery?

Do you want to continue to act thoughtlessly or to act with purpose in pursuing long term, solution focused policies? Do you want these problems and issues to continue endlessly into the future, worsening year by year, or do you want to achieve the goal of the issues and ending these problems?

Think about it, then demands the city, provincial and federal governments begin to act with thoughtful common sense…

New Roommate Needed

I lost a podmate (roommate) today when he returned to the great outdoors. Lately Income Assistance had been playing their non-assistance games with him; with Income Assistance as the cat and him as the poor cornered, tormented mouse. He began to feel trapped and a prisoner of their whims to the point he was driven to move out onto the streets in order to regain his freedom, peace of mind and self respect.

The sobering, somewhat scary thing is that I can really understand where he is coming from.

I need to get a CPAP machine to make my sleep more restful and revitalizing. However that would require dealing with Income Assistance and previous deals with them have so scarred my psyche that I have a mental block against taking any action that would cause me to have to deal with Income assistance.

Also it was not all that many days ago I was starting to look longingly at the back seat of my car with fond thoughts of the time spent sleeping and living in said automobile. I get a strange look from people who have no frame of reference to understand this point of view when I acknowledge there are days or periods of time when the thought of getting away and living in my car again is so enticing.

I know if I was not myself ensnared in the limbo that is the transition off the streets and getting ones life moving under ones own management, I would lack an understanding or awareness of just how difficult this process can be. I am experiencing it, I have run into the barriers or watched others run into different barriers, but some days the process is unfathomable.

It was so easy when I was young and starting out on my own. I travelled across Canada from ocean to ocean; moved from Southern Ontario to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan without a hitch; moved on to other cities to other employment; moved across country to Abbotsford, BC; all with relative easy. But the move from Mental Illness to Recovery (of the best mental health I have ever had), the move from homelessness and the streets to employment and a home is proving to be more akin to scaling Mt. Everest.

Truthfully, it is beginning to seem that climbing Olympus Mons on Mars (highest peak in the solar system) would be less difficult than scaling the heights of employment and housing.

This leads to frustration, major frustration, and hammers away at your spirit until hope is lost. Caught in the pit of hopelessness you feel like a fly in a spider’s web; your struggles seem pointless, only entangling you deeper into the web you are caught in. The primitive part of the brain kicks in the fight or flight reflex and the seeming freedom of open spaces beckons with its promise of relief.

You bolt for liberty, self-determination and free will under the open skies and the stars of night - so enticing a siren song.

I came so very close to listening to that song myself just two weeks ago. I was thinking longingly of the freedom from frustration and the ability to leave cares behind. There were a few evenings when the craving to seek out a favoured parking/camping spot for the night as opposed to returning to the cell of my habitation was nearly overwhelming.

Living in my car I have to focus on day-to-day tasks: shower, food, laundry, drinkable water and a place to park and sleep. Your focus on merely surviving chases other things out of your forebrain, a kind of enforced mental holiday from frustrations.

Fortunately (or unfortunately?), I had some meetings and other items on my schedule that served to remind me of the goals I intend to accomplish. When one seeks to bring about major changes in homeless, addiction recovery, housing, social and poverty policies, awareness and behaviour I suppose one has to accept that frustration is a basic fact of life. Examining the frustration of my personal situation in the context of the frustration of witnessing the waste of money and lives of current behaviours, systems and policies … well How Important Is It? This Too Shall Pass. One Day at a Time. Let Go and Let God.

When I first heard them these slogans seemed so trite but in listening, learning and thinking about them they became tools to be used to overcome things like frustration and other “stinkin’ thinkin’”.

Because falling prey to stinkin’ thinkin’ is what gets all of us in so much trouble and causes so many problems and difficulties within our lives, community, society, country and the world.

Carrying out some mental hygiene let me adjust my attitude and get back to focusing on what is important – bringing about change. Although I am left wondering if one of the changes I should most seek to set in motion is to get everyone practising good mental hygiene and overcoming stinkin’ thinkin.

So, how healthy and hygienic is your mind?

Do Societies have a tipping point?

The changeeverything.ca website had a poll on environmental change and tipping points which got me wondering if societies have a tipping point. Is there a point at which the imbalances within a society become so pronounced that a massive rebalancing with its attendant “natural disasters” is unavoidable?

At this point in considering this question I am not exactly sure what such a rebalancing would look like, but it would undoubtedly be chaotic with a frightening potential for violence.

In previous generations there was the promise and real opportunity of improving ones life, especially for your children. This current generation will be the first generation getting less from their parent’s generation than their parents received form the grandparent’s generation. Where once the future held the promise of the stars, for current and future generations it now promises only a shrinking world and increasing competition for evermore scarce and costly resources.

There are also the far-reaching economic, environmental and sociological effects of climate change being bequeathed to the future.

A fair and balance society would have the flexibility to deal with and adapt to the changing world, to the stresses and strains of a diminished and diminishing future. Unfortunately our society and social structure has become imbalanced as never before in our history as a nation. What is it that leads me to conclude our society is so out of balance that we, as a society, need be concern about redressing the balance before anarchy erupts in the form of class warfare?

The wealth of the nation has become concentrated in the hands of a small percentage of the population and that concentration continues to increase.

Upward mobility is fast becoming a concept of the past except for a lucky few who in effect “strike it rich”. Prior to this time hard work and effort held out the promise of an improved economic situation. In Vancouver today there is an entire group of workers who even though working full (or over) time cannot afford housing the city they work in. This is also holds true in Abbotsford where I am aware of those forced to live homeless by hard, cold economic reality. Their housing and other choices narrowed and complicated by the fact they are working full time.

Other working people find themselves being ground down into homelessness and poverty by groaning debt loads. Yes a portion of that debt burden is often the result of poor money management, but all to much of it stems from the onerous cost of housing.

Despite our pretence of being a classless society we are becoming a class society – an economic class society.

I. The privileged moneyed class whose power is a function of their control over the wealth of the nation.

II. The operating class, those whose education, skills and talents are needed for the operation of society and by the moneyed class.

III. The working class, the drones who perform the day-to-day labour required to run society. Kept in a kind of debt slavery but their large, sometimes overwhelming debt owed to the moneyed class.

IV. The throwawaclass. The boogeymen and women whose spectre is used to keep the workers in line. Increasingly these days the very real fear of falling into this class serves to drive and distract the working class drones.

Just a few decades ago the distribution of people from poorest to richest was more of a continuum: poorest .................................................richest.

The above continuum held the inherent promise of an ability to move upwards (or downwards) along the continuum. During the past few decades this continuum, with its promise of moving up the continuum, has begun to break-up and form “economic planets” around points I – IV above. Like the planets of our solar system these “economic planets”, or classes, are separated by wide distances with their current orbital trajectories taking them further away from each other over time.

The old adage “The rich are getting richer and poor are getting poorer” has never been truer. Except that currently “the poor” has expanded to include the working class, not just those living in poverty. Even the most basic shelter has become so costly that our streets are being inhabited by people working full time, even overtime, but still unable to afford shelter.

The middle class as we knew it is an endangered species having all but disappeared. Along with this many are facing the disappearance of retirement, facing the need to continue working or face the real risk of a descent into poverty, homelessness and finding themselves joining the growing ranks of retirees depending on the Salvation Army and their local Food Bank for their daily bread.

We have become a society of economic classes with the differences between these economic classes growing. As the separation between the classes grows the economic fairness, indeed the fairness of our society itself is decreasing at a faster and faster pace becoming more pronounced and in your face day by day.

How much unfairness can our society contain before it begins to come apart at its seams, along the splits between the classes? At what point does society have lost so much cohesion that it begins to fly apart?

At a time when circumstances in the world are placing increased strain on Canadian Society, when we need to pull together as a society and country as never before, we are becoming less of a society – indeed in many ways less Canadian.

These increasing internal and external stresses are beginning to tear at the fabric of our society, pulling us apart. If we sit around ignoring this reality because it is uncomfortable and unpleasant we will find our society has become uncivil to the point where a form of civil war between the classes inescapably breaks out.

A rebalancing of the economic class structure we have allowed to be born will be uncomfortable, especially dealing with wealth concentration where the wealth of Canada needs to be spread more fairly throughout all levels of Society. Will we achieve this rebalancing in a Canadian manner or wait until chaos erupts? How close are we to the societal tipping point? Have we passed the point where we can have any control over the rebalancing of economic and societal fairness? Is economic warfare between the classes now inevitable?

"If we are to be who we are, and what we are; if we are to accomplishgreat things, then we must learn the heart's most essential rule:

'Never Surrender Dreams.' "

J. Michael Straczynski

The Legend of Compassion Park.

It transpired that the other day I was listening to Councillor John Smith bloviate the Legend of Compassion Park:

In the spring of 2006 Mayor Ferguson stayed the hand of the City then met with the poor unfortunates of Compassion Park, rallied the resources of Abbotsford, finding jobs and housing for those forced to reside in the Park. When all had jobs and housing, when the Park was no longer needed, the City cleaned up the area and all lived happily ever after. Thus it is that the Legend of Compassion Park recollects the events of the spring 2006.

I have heard the Legend told many times; a tale used to show the city is addressing homelessness wisely and effectively.

I decided it was time to acquaint the reader with the actual events and outcomes in order that they can make their own judgment about what transpired. In all fairness I must admit that I am tired of hearing the legend, even more I am worried that the legend is allowing procrastination and complacency on the issue of homelessness by the City.

Mayor Ferguson did indeed hold off on sending in the police and city workers. Whether this was because he recognized the pointless expense of continuously chasing those with nowhere else to go from point to point around the City (although the police and City quickly resumed this chase after the closing of the Park) or whether he was motivated by the front page picture in the Abbotsford News I cannot say.

Mayor Ferguson did focus resources such as Income Assistance on the problem and some jobs were offered. It is from this point in the events of last spring that Legend and Reality begin an ever-widening divergence.

Reality is that finding jobs and housing for the homeless is not fast and easy. However, rather than invest the time (months) required for getting the residents of the Park housing and employment, the City made arrangements for them to be “sheltered” while the efforts of others continued to find housing and employment. Having covered its a** in this manner the City set a deadline for leaving the Park and encouraged compliance by moving in at the deadline confiscating, that is, “cleaning up” any possessions remaining in the Park.

Not only had the City managed to divert public attention from homelessness and avoid any adverse media coverage, the Legend was born giving the city an answer to give when questions of homelessness and poverty arise. Sheer luck or political brilliance it matters not, the result was the same either way.

What were the actual outcomes for the seemingly forgotten residents of Compassion Park? Well the jobs disappeared with the end of media attention and accolades for the employers. With one exception the homeless are still homeless, returning to the streets after exhausting their time in shelter or being unable to sustain themselves in housing.

For the one person who found and remains in housing, it was as much in spite of, as because of the city’s actions. If it had not been for the citizens who gave their time and caring to help, even this single resident of Compassion Park would not have a home today. It is this type of ongoing community support that is a key ingredient to ending homelessness.

A Success? A Failure? I suppose that depends on whether you are listening to the “Legend” of Compassion Park or what actually transpired. For the City of Abbotsford the Legend is a tale that makes it appear the City is doing something or has a handle on the question of homelessness. It allows them to avoid taking any responsibility or actions to help those with so great a need for compassion and a helping hand on city streets.

Lest you think the City is merely delusional and in denial about the Legend and the homeless on its streets let me show you evidence of the fear that Abbotsford has that public attention and concern could force them to provide leadership and action on homelessness.

Below is the City’s demonstrated solution to Homelessness. When in the early spring of this year 2007, it came to the city’s attention that once again there were homeless forced to take shelter in the area that was dubbed Compassion Park, they quickly posted No Trespassing signs, moved in and confiscated the tarps, tents and belongings of the homeless.

The fact that we were in the midst of a 10-day deluge and taking everything left these homeless exposed to the elements made no difference. It was apparently more important to the City that there be no opportunity for news coverage and public attention to return to Compassion Park exposing the unpleasant truth behind the Legend. But then Legends seldom truly correspond to Reality.

IF:

not poverty = a living wage

THEN:

poverty = not a living wage

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IF:

businesses reliance on = not a living wage

THEN:

businesses reliance on = poverty

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IF:

comfortable life style and wealth = businesses success

THEN:

comfortable life style and wealth = poverty

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THEREFORE:

The comfortable lives and wealth of Canadians arises from the poverty of other Canadians. These comfortable lives and wealth depend upon wealth transference from the working poor via the means of poverty levels of wages and working conditions.

Canadian society has become inherently economically unbalanced and unfair; this unbalance and unfairness will continue to grow, as will those living in poverty, until living wages are paid to those currently paid for their work with poverty.