Have years of dislocation taught us nothing about people living homeless?

What’s left to say on the subject of homelessness? We’ve studied the issue from every angle for almost 20 years now. We’ve lamented it, lived it and produced many, many reports on it, all urging immediate action.

And yet at the end of the day, we’re still standing here wringing our hands - this time over conditions on the Pandora boulevard, but ultimately about a recurring problem we’ve pushed around the city for a long time now.

Once it was the neighbourhood around Holiday Court. Then Speed Street. Then Fernwood, and Cormorant.  Now it’s Pandora. A couple years from now - who knows? If we still haven’t comprehended by then that the solution is to fix the problem and not just move it along, bet on a new hot spot somewhere in the city.

Don’t get me wrong - good things are happening around homelessness. We’ve come a long way in understanding the complex problems and societal changes at the root of modern-day homelessness, a relatively recent phenomenon in every western country. We generally get that things happened to create homelessness in Canada, and things will have to happen to get us out from under it. 

And we’re doing some of those things. A partial list: Cool Aid’s brand-new shelter and services on Ellice Street, opening this fall. Pacifica’s Clover Place housing development. Woodwynn Farms. Longer hours for Our Place.  A terrific new health centre. The fledgling Streets to Homes program. Outreach teams focused on crisis intervention and stability.

But I can see with my own eyes anytime I drive along Pandora that despite the wins, we haven’t yet found a solution for a small and very specific group of people living on the streets. With problems too big to hide, they’re the visible face of homelessness, and lightning rods for virtually all of the community’s wrath and indignation around the issue.

The makeup of the group changes regularly, depending on whose addiction has worsened, whose meds are working, whose families are still clinging on, who’s headed for jail or just got out. Everybody’s got their own story to tell, but they all lead down.  

The group creates big problems wherever it settles. Petty crime rises, as does chaos, garbage, public health hazard, visible drug use and trafficking. Complaints to police increase. Media stories ensue, and businesses operating nearby feel the impact on their bottom line as customers shift away from the area.

I first met a version of the group at Holiday Court, a little motel on Hillside Avenue near Douglas that was the hot spot of the day back in 2001. As is the pattern, frustrated residents and businesses in the area tolerated the problems for longer than you might expect, but eventually cranked up the pressure until police moved people along.

Happy days for neighbours of Holiday Court, but not so good for the string of neighbourhoods that followed. These days, even a rundown motel with rain leaking through the plaster or a fleabag apartment in Fernwood looks like luxury compared to the full-on homelessness the group now lives with.

There was once about 30 people in this public and chaotic group, then 70 by the time they’d shifted to Cormorant Street. Now, it’s around 100. It’s obvious we’re losing ground on this particular front.

Why is that? Let me count the ways: Severe addiction with no ability to access treatment. Severe mental illness with no place to go. People so lonely that even a war zone feels friendly. People so poor and broken that they have to live near the free stuff.

Mental handicaps. Brain injuries. Poor social skills. A system of policing and justice that doesn’t work when people have nothing to lose. A splintered region that doesn’t yet get that homelessness is everybody’s problem.

Put it all together and it’s a recipe for bedlam, and immensely frustrating for all involved. I’ve long thought that someone should just put money on the table and hold a contest to come up with solutions for reducing the friction over this small group. What could we do differently - and immediately?

The transient group is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to homelessness, but their presence shapes the community dialogue.  It polarizes the debate. It leaves us thinking that nothing is working even when it is, because the rubble of these people’s lives is so obvious.

We can do better than just pushing the mess and chaos into another neighbourhood. We can fix this problem. We have to.

Public forum coming up with Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham, Sept. 7, from 7-9 p.m.  at Canada West University, 950 Kings Rd. The topic: "Families, Mental Illness and Police Involvement." Sounds like required viewing if you've ever wondered how police deal with people in an acute phase of their mental illness when they get a complaint.

 If you follow the news, you'll know that a significant number of people in Canada and elsewhere end up killed by police in conflicts that occur due to somebody's mental illness. Often the person's family has even phoned in the initial complaint as a way of getting help for their loved one. Too often, it goes very badly - witness the tragic story unfolding in Pickering, Ont. right now. We all know police have a tough job to do, but there has to be a better way.

Sadly, I can't make this Sept. 7 forum, but I hope to send somebody in my stead to report back. Register at  250-384-4225 or admin.bcss@shaw.ca. The forum is being hosted by the local chapter of the B.C. Schizophrenia Society. 

I'm going to be writing about the "camping" problems on Pandora boulevard this Friday - did a quick search on Google News around homelessness and discovered this story out of Australia, which now puts its homeless population at 105,000. Can't imagine what Canada's figure would be if we ever added everything up, seeing as B.C. has at least 15,000 people living homeless even by conservative estimates. The one thing that seems to unite all the western, democratic countries these days is a staggering rise in homelessness over the last couple orf decades.

I always wondered how funerals for poor people got paid for, and now we know, at least in Toronto. Haven't been able to find B.C.'s rules yet, but here's a related story from 2008 about the same issue in Quebec. Looks like prices have risen significantly in less than two years if you compare the figures from these two stories.

Creating prey for the next Pickton

Our sex-work laws kill people.

We had a reminder of that just last week, when Willie Pickton’s murderous ways were news again. Only the streets can provide so many potential victims to a predator like him, and it’s our ineffective and dangerous laws around sex work that create those streets.

Then last Friday, the Vancouver Police Department released the report that we all knew had to come - one that detailed the tragic inability of B.C.’s police forces to act on years of tips that women were being killed at Pickton’s farm. I’ve watched our conflicted attitude around the sex industry for too long to be surprised by the public’s muted response to that damning report.

We talk a good game about how much concern we have for the women who Pickton and his ilk prey on. But our actions tell a different story every time. It’s beyond ironic that even as the shameful story of B.C.’s missing women returns to the headlines, the federal government is introducing much tougher penalties that can only increase risks for sex workers.

We light candles for dead women without a moment’s thought for the appalling working conditions that primed them as targets for murder. We lament the Pickton legacy without giving one hoot for the people who we continue to banish to the fringes. The hypocrisy is unbearable sometimes.

I was working with sex workers at PEERS Victoria when Pickton was on trial. Media outlets from across Canada called me frequently to ask what I thought, and whether anything was changing for sex workers now that there had been so much publicity about the hard life of a street-entrenched sex worker.

How can anything change when our laws remain resolutely the same? Working outdoors and alone in the middle of the night would be a dangerous business no matter what product is being sold. As long as we continue to deny adult sex workers a safer workplace and a place in our communities, nothing changes.

The federal government’s recent decision to ramp up penalties for people convicted of keeping a common bawdyhouse will add significantly to the risks. People convicted of operating a brothel will now face a mandatory jail sentence of at least five years (compared to a maximum of two years under the previous law). 

The Department of Justice says the change is needed to fight organized crime. Unfortunately, the tougher penalties will also ensnare many, many independent sex workers and small business people operating thousands of escort agencies, massage parlours and bathhouses across Canada.

Perhaps there are still some people who believe that closing down brothels will eliminate the sex trade. I’m not one of them.

The commercial sex industry thrives in every country of the world, courtesy of a rock-solid customer base and a strong profit motive. A crackdown on indoor venues won’t stop prostitution, it will merely push sex workers deeper into the shadows and closer to the streets.

How is it that we can mourn the Pickton murders so eloquently, yet do nothing to address the real issues for sex workers?

We have erected monuments to murdered women. Lit a few thousand candles in their memory. Spent a small fortune on bringing Pickton to justice.  But we haven’t done a thing to reduce the risks for  Canada’s sex workers, who apparently hold our interest only when they’re dead.

Our laws are as conflicted as we are. The sale of sex is legal in Canada but anywhere that it happens is by definition illegal, because a bawdyhouse is wherever a sex worker regularly conducts business. You can sell sex through a newspaper ad, but risk arrest if caught soliciting customers in a public place.

The last time our country’s police forces cracked down hard on indoor sex venues was in the 1970s. The result was a notable rise in street prostitution and an even more notable increase in assaults and murders involving sex workers.

Can we possibly be here again? That would be the biggest tragedy of all - to have learned nothing from the deaths and suffering of so many women and their families.

Not everybody shares my opinion on the sex industry, of course. But I think even the nay-sayers want laws that work. Our laws are all but useless in preventing the sale of sex, but frighteningly effective at increasing the misery and danger for those in the industry.

Canada has poorly considered law, random enforcement and a strong undercurrent of moral judgment when it comes to sex work. It’s a lethal combination.

More jail time for people with the audacity to want to work indoors certainly won’t change that. Neither will tears and candlelight vigils.