Almost 20 years ago, a right-wing politician urged Toronto to ban homeless people from the public square in front of City Hall, and was roundly denigrated. Today, a left-wing mayor has persuaded City Council to ban the homeless from Nathan Phillips Square and to send around a team ofsocial workers to tell them they can'tsleep on sidewalks or in public parks,either.
Perhaps only a politician from the left would have enough public support to flip existing notions of compassion on their head. If it is cruel to put pressure on the homeless, isn't it a worse cruelty to ply them with soup and sleeping bags and let them be (and be and be)? Good for Mayor David Miller for trying a new approach that is both hardheaded and compassionate. And good for Canada, if his plan works well enough to deserve copying.
First, what the plan is not: There will be no police sweep through a shantytown, rousting the hoboes, as in so many movies about the 1930s. Nor does the plan declare, as did Tony Blair's Labour government in Britain, that homelessness is illegal. (The British sent around social-work teams to offer a variety of homes and services to the homeless, and then began fining those who insisted on staying on the streets.)
But the plan does include coercion, though Mayor Miller won't use the word. He puts it this way: "You sometimes need to be able to give a little nudge to people." So his social-work teams will tell homeless people that they cannot remain in the square (or on a sidewalk or in a park). But the social workers can guide them to housing -- not merely to a temporary shelter but to the possibility of permanent housing (the $18.4-million plan also includes 1,000 new units of low-cost housing to be built each year) and social supports to help them keep the roof over their heads.
This may not sound terribly radical, and really, it isn't. But it is a sharp challengeto the prevailing ethos of the past gen-eration that placed the emphasis on helping the homeless to make it through the night.
Toronto can hardly be said to ignore the homeless. It spends $114-million a year on 4,200 shelter spaces and board (3,400 spaces are for single adults and youth, and the rest for families), and it provides welfare cheques to street people -- no address necessary. Meanwhile, non-profit groups are out in force each night with soup, blankets and sleeping bags. When The Globe's John Stackhouse spent a week on the streets in December, 2000, he woke up one morning to find someone had thrown an extra sleeping bag over him. All the while, there is much public hand-wringing about how no one cares enough to do something.
But what? Between the mental-health laws, the civil-rights laws and the homeless lobby, all of them well-meaning, there's not much room to move. Or there wasn't, until Toronto achieved some noteworthy success with a more coercive approach. Two years ago, a private landlord steamrollered Tent City, a lakefront shantytown whose hard-core residents had spent an average of 8½ years on the streets. The city provided housing and social supports. A year later, a follow-up study found that 89 per cent were still housed. Last spring, the city evicted homeless young people from makeshift shelters beneath the Bathurst Street bridge. Several youths were persuaded to move into more permanent quarters.
The homeless problem is not one problem but many. Mr. Stackhouse, in his Globe series on the homeless, wrote of the diverse people he met, "from Dexter, the hard-working ex-con, to Peter, the drywaller and inveterate gambler, to Dwight, the crackhead guitarist -- and how each has problems, often unrelated to shelter, that are far different from the other."
A little nudge. It may work for Dexter but not Peter, or Peter but not Dwight. But isn't it worth a try?