There's a pervasive belief that homeless people in various comfortable climes are migrants from harsher locales, but when you do the research you apparently tend to find that they're overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there: they aren't "imported". So the "warmest place in Canada" thing is unlikely to be meaningful, unless there's some reason a comfortable climate makes housing less stable.
>In the City of Vancouver’s 2019 homeless count, based on those who responded, 16% (156 people) of the homeless reported they were from an area elsewhere in Metro Vancouver, while 31% (299 people) were from another area of BC, and 44% (435 people) from another area of Canada.
If you go to the actual report[1] instead of whatever this site is, you'll see that question (3.9) was asking where they lived before they moved to Vancouver, not before they became homeless or whatever that site is attempting to imply.
If you scroll down slightly (3.11) you'll see 81% of respondents had a home in Vancouver before they became homeless, which is the data to match the claim ("overwhelmingly people who had stable living situations in those comfortable locations, and became homeless there").
So they moved to Vancouver, had a home for a year, then become homeless. The news article did not claim that the homeless respondents were homeless before they moved; simply that they are not local to Vancouver.
If you become homeless after 6 months of moving, you weren't financially stable to begin with.
EDIT: It's a moot point anymore. The fact is, they are in Vancouver and are homeless. We should help them regardless of where they came from.
The majority of small towns in northern BC have been gradually depopulating for decades, due to economic pressures similar to those in the Rust Belt of the US. (And plus, it's just damn cold up there, so it's hard to be homeless if you do end up homeless.) Their populations have to be going somewhere.
Yes, homeless people don't actually sit on the streets of e.g. Quebec City, begging until they can fund a trip to Vancouver, with the aim of living on the streets here instead.
But people are often in some kind of unstable living situation wherever they are, and find out about some job offer, or housing offer, in Vancouver, that lures them to come here for a chance at a more stable living situation. But after coming here (and spending what little capital they have to do so), their job offer falls through, or it was just a seasonal job, or a job with very tenuous stability (e.g. in construction); or the housing they found was a sublet in a rent-stabilized building, but the building owner then figured out how to work around this by "rennovicting" all the tenants so they could jack up the rents; etc.
I live in the East Hastings area. I speak to the people wandering the streets pretty often. I get the impression that many of these folks had a "stable living situation" for a year or two after coming to Vancouver. But this stability was an illusion. They didn't have the earning power to support themselves long-term in Vancouver's high-cost-of-living environment.
These folks are used to smaller low-cost-of-living towns, and just want to escape a failing small town with no economic opportunity; but they don't tend to have job skills that are highly-valued in dense urban areas (e.g. doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc.) These people can still move — but not to high-cost-of-living Vancouver. (Even the highly-employable "service class" of Vancouver, can't afford to live in Vancouver; they have to commute in from quite far away.) Rather, these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
Prince George as non-failing? Have you been there? I've never seen so many zombified homeless junkies wandering aimlessly than I have in Prince George. Not in Vancouver, San Francisco, Portland, or Seattle. Not in any other city. Prince George is horrific. Honestly the worst town or city I've ever had the displeasure of visiting. All of the 'normal' people inside businesses had thousand yard stares, shell shocked, and asked why I would even visit their town.
>these folks would be much better off moving to another small-ish, lower-cost-of-living, but non-failing town in BC. Prince George, Vernon, Mission, etc.
That's an interesting idea, but the smaller BC towns also have their own homeless issues. I don't think their municipal gov would be open to the province providing relocation resources to these people.
Also East Hastings draws vulnerable in, and has an iron clad grasp on them. These people might not want to move due to friends/nearby support non-profit/substances.
Finally, some of them have drug addictions after they move to Vancouver. There should be resources to help them exit first.
The small towns in BC don’t have their homeless issues, because without services, you either die or are in a bus to Vancouver. A common route for homeless people in Montana is to wind up in Spokane first and then Seattle later, since you can’t really survive in MT at all without a job, and while Spokane used to provide a bunch of flop houses (my grandfather owned one), those are gone now and it is too cold to live unsheltered there in the winter. Cities do pick up much of a national problem because of the social resources they can provide, and accordingly only national solutions have a chance of working.
Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief.
Admittedly, my belief has only weak evidence:
- San Francisco pays homeless people more than most other places, and has relatively weak enforcement of laws related to camping, drugs and petty crime
- Anecdotes about people on the street being interviewed, and admitting that they lied about being from SF, in order to qualify for benefits
- Hearing some accents that don't sound (to me) like they're from around here
"Seventy-one percent of those surveyed reported living in San Francisco, 24% in other California counties and 4% outside California.
Of those with a prior residence in the city, 17% said they had lived in San Francisco for less than one year, while 35% said they had been in the city for 10 or more years. The remaining 52% of those respondents said they lived in the city between one and 10 years before becoming homeless."
At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
- The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
- The people actually collecting the information mostly work for city-funded non-profits, who also depend on those numbers being high for their income. (see page 56 of the report, under "Enumeration Team Recruitment and Training".)
2. The numbers are self-reported, and we know there are $ incentives to never admit you're not from here.
> - The folks at the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, which commissioned the survey, depend on those numbers being high in order to justify their budgets and salaries.
I'm not sure I understand this argument. If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California, how would that reduce the demand for a department tasked with addressing the problem of homelessness?
If, say, it came out that 100% of the local homeless population became homeless elsewhere and were bussed to California
If this were the case, I suspect proposed solutions would shift away from building and maintaining shelters and Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and more toward helping people return home. The latter would require much less than the $600MM+ the DPHSH spends each year.
Do you have any data that is based on some combination of things that are good indications of someone making San Francisco their permanent home, e.g.
- tax filings/returns (W-2 and 1040)
- utility bill payments
- high school graduation (or even enrollment) records
- rent receipts or rental contracts
I'm not saying all of those are required. But if the data come from a biased source (like one whose existence or funding is threatened if the data say these folks are all from out of town), then it's hard to accept it when absolutely no historical records are used to back it up.
> Can you point me to any of that research? If I'm wrong I'd like to update my belief
I'm curious why you feel the need to update your beliefs if you're wrong if this is your standard for evidence. Shouldn't you not have a belief in the first place?
> At least in san francisco it seems its people who lived in SF before becoming homeless that are in the majority.
This is bog-standard mis-reporting of statistics, and I would encourage you to download and read the original homeless census report.
A person who had home in SF for 1 month and then lived unhoused in SF for 10 years is counted among those "long term" SF residents who became homeless. They're not really from SF, even if they technically become homeless while living in SF.
It's a bit more complex than that. At the surface, it's true - only 15% of homeless people in Seattle lived out of county before becoming homeless. But a deeper look shows as many as 30% more never really could afford housing - they had marginal housing situations, living with a friend, relative, or romantic partner without paying a proportionate share for their prior living situation.
This is part of the discrepancy - one side shoves the 15% number at everybody while the other side shoves at 45% number at everybody - we can't agree on what we're measuring.
Vancouver isn't just the warmest place, it's also the most expensive. There definitely have been cases of other parts of the country paying for a bus ticket out to the coast, just like they did to homeless people in Vancouver, sending them to Victoria during the Winter Olympics.
Victoria, Nanaimo etc. also have significant homeless issues, and I fully support out of province homeless people moving to Vancouver for whatever reason they might have. Freedom of movement is important to democracy.
But just as Oakland/LA/SF and California are passing the bucks, the federal and provincial government are pretending they are deaf and expect the local BC municipals to handle the national homeless crisis. This is simply not possible.
I used to live in Nanaimo as a kid (Go McGirr!). The city's economy was royally fucked in the 2000s. There were no jobs other than Provincial services like VIHA or the one paper mill that I think ended up shutting down. Hells Angels were also always a thing back there, and there was a reservation nearby which had some persistent social issues. I still have family there who ended up making a killing in construction thanks to Chinese money and idk if Nanimo will ever get better.
Harmac ended up being bought by the people who actually operated the mill from an American company that went bankrupt, and has been running well since 2008.
Oh! That's cool to hear! I went back to Nanaimo a couple years ago and it does seem much less grimy/blue collar than it was when I was a kid, but it does still seem to have that sense of PNW rust belt malaise to a certain extent.
I definitely see less homeless people in places that go to -40 in the winter. Now I don't know why, maybe they still exist but are less visible. Perhaps the threat of homelessness is a lot scarier when it is cold outside. Maybe homeless people in those climates move. I don't know, but anecdotally it does seem like there are much fewer homeless people in cold places.
But you have to have some form of shelter to survive -40, which means that nature itself forces something (or you just die).
(Note the homeless veterans, that's just an absolute embarrassment to the country as a whole; something major should be done like just re-activating them and providing housing).
