This is how homeless villages become normalized

Environmentalists speak of a “shifting baseline syndrome,” when one’s expectation of what is “normal” shifts as the environment degrades.

For example, a naturalist might see a million birds migrating through a local wetland each spring, and as global pollution increases, that population drops to half a million and he becomes distraught.

He retires and is replaced by a new naturalist; over the course of her career, that wetland is increasingly paved over for suburban development and she watches as that bird population drops to just 50,000 birds, a real disaster.

But she in turn is replaced by an up-and-coming grad student who works with local governments and secures corporate grants to restore the remnants of the old wetland and to create new wetlands along the fringes of suburbia, and as a result, the bird population increases slightly, to 100,000.

Depending on your timeline and expectations, the bird population has either decreased by 90% (from a million to 100,000, a cataclysmic disaster) or increased by 100% (from 50,000 to 100,000, an astounding success).

The problem is that the world created by the failure to protect the environment in the past is understood by the present to be “normal,” and as a result, we cannot now even envision what we have lost.

I’ve been thinking of shifting baseline syndrome as homeless encampments have spread across the city and country.

Five years ago, the current situation of 1,000 people living in the parks of Halifax would have been simply unthinkable.

There was a lot wrong with that world of five years ago — homelessness was criminalized, and people had secret encampments in woods and the rail cut, far away from services that they needed. City crews regularly “cleared” camp sites, picking up all a person’s belongings and throwing them in a dumpster. Then, as now, homeless people were chased out of businesses, not allowed to use the washroom.

Anti-homeless attitudes were so pervasive that in August 2021, dozens of Halifax cops were sicced on the old Memorial Library site to violently evict a handful of homeless people and arrest their defenders.

The biggest perceived sin of the Memorial Library encampment was that a group called Mutual Aid Halifax had erected a semi-permanent structure for someone to sleep in. The cops were brought in so that a city worker could dismantle the structure with a chainsaw.

That was just two and a half years ago.

Attitudes have changed a bit since then. Homeless encampments are no longer harassed by cops, at least not in wholesale fashion, and politicians have reluctantly accepted that tent cities are a natural consequence of a failed housing market.

One big change is that government is no longer destroying semi-permanent shelters with chainsaws, but rather buying such shelters themselves.

Yesterday, the province held a news conference to boast that 19 Pallet shelters will soon be set up at Beacon House in Lower Sackville, the first batch of 200 procured at a cost of $7.5 million.

The Sackville site will open in the next few weeks. If all goes to schedule, another 20 shelters will be set up at the Open Arms site on Exhibition Street in Kentville sometime in February or March; an as yet to be determined number of shelters at the Halifax Forum about the same time; and 30 more shelters at the Ally Centre/New Dawn site on Henry Street in Sydney in March. There could be delays if we get some terrible winter storms.

The province has been criticized for taking so long in getting the shelters up and running, but housing staff say it takes that long to arrange things like electrical and sewage services at the sites, and the Pallet CEO (who Zoomed into the press conference from Seattle) said that Nova Scotia is moving faster to set up the Pallet villages than any other jurisdiction the company has yet dealt with.

The shelters are meant for one person each, with an allowance for a pet. (Couples can live at a Pallet village, but they will have separate units.) The shelters have an AC/heating unit and lights. They can be locked, so the resident’s stuff is safe. The units have no plumbing, but each village will include washroom and shower facilities, as well as provisions for food and security.

What can you say? Obviously this is better than living in a flimsy tent through a Nova Scotia winter. But has our baseline shifted such that homeless villages dotting our cities and towns is now the new normal?

The main speaker at the press conference was Joy Knight, the executive director of Employment Support and Income Assistance at the Department of Community Services. Knight struck me as a knowledgeable and capable civil servant who truly wants to do best by the homeless people she serves.

And Knight has a good conceptual framework for helping the homeless. She spoke for nearly an hour, explaining the department’s multi-pronged strategies for early interventions, transitional housing, and supportive housing, with the aim of getting as many people into permanent market housing as possible, but also recognizing that many people will require supportive housing essentially forever.

“I’ll just give a quick example with The Bridge, which is the former DoubleTree hotel we’ve taken over in Dartmouth,” said Knight. “We’ve been able to move people very quickly along that full continuum. So a wonderful story or anecdote to share. Just recently at The Bridge, 13 people moved on into permanent housing. And I know 13 sounds like a small number, but in the housing crisis, that’s very significant for us.

Most of the 13 people had entered The Bridge from sleeping on the streets, said Knight. “They moved into that transitional emergency sheltering environment where they received on site medical care. There’s a clinic there available to them. They received wraparound services, housing support, and then into housing… Those 13 individuals moved into public housing. A number of them through a new agreement we have with the Nova Scotia Public Housing Agency to identify those experiencing homelessness as a priority access stream. We moved a number into supportive housing and a number moved in to market rate housing. So we know that that’s a wonderful anecdote around the importance of having multiple solutions.”

I don’t doubt that those 13 people have a better life now. But as I was listening to Knight speak, I couldn’t help but think that no matter how well-intentioned she and her staff are, no matter how capable they are in helping people make that transition from homelessness to housing, they’re probably overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people entering into homelessness. So I asked her about it; our exchange:

Bousquet: Ms. Knight, I’m wondering if you can give some context. I hear and understand all your processes and I’m sure your people and all the relief organizations are doing the best they can. I’m not questioning that. My question is about — you had mentioned 13 people going through The Bridge program, going from homelessness into permanent housing and some other housing like the Waverley and so forth. Stepping back, is that 13 fewer people living on the streets, or are there more people becoming homeless quicker than you can handle?

Knight: Yeah. So our analysis shows that just over a thousand people have been prevented from entering into homelessness because of the investments made to date. But we do know more people are entering into homelessness, yes.

Bousquet: I guess that’s my bigger contextual question. And I mean no offence by this whatsoever, but it does strike me that there’s something of a disaster capitalism happening here in that we have this housing crisis immediately, and good people — good people in organizations, good people in government — are trying to address it. And we’re coming up with these solutions that would not even be entertained a few years ago — if someone said a few years ago we were going to have homeless villages where people don’t have washrooms in their units, they would be told ‘you’re just looking for a way to reduce governmental costs.’ And now it’s becoming normalized. And I’m wondering if you can just address that issue.

Knight: It’s obviously very complicated. In community services, we know we have to work really closely with our partners in municipal affairs and housing, because we know lack of affordable housing is one of the key issues for people entering into homelessness. And so we have to be working very collaboratively with them on their housing action plan, and we are. Also moving towards that preventative piece that I talked about. And I know that affordability in general, inflation, all of those things are putting pressures on people and exacerbating the homelessness situation. That’s hard for me to predict, how those things will will change over time. that will alleviate some of those pressures. Of course, our long-term goal is not to have Pallet villages. It is to have the right housing solutions for all Nova Scotians. And that’s the path that we’re going to have to continue on. We will continue on. And I’m confident that we’re going to be able to better meet those needs as the years move on, because we have the government funding and commitment behind us.

I don’t know what I expected Knight to say. She has a job to do, and I believe she does it to the best of her ability.

It’s not Knight’s fault that housing has now become the best vehicle for people and real estate investment trusts seeking maximum return, or that computer programs now determine the most costly possible rent that can be charged on any given apartment. Knight certainly has no ability to close the fixed-term lease loophole or to stop the 5% rent increases that are about to be allowed under the ever-weakening rent control regime.

Still, I fear that perhaps simply in order to keep on with the work it is doing, the bureaucracy seems completely incapable of recognizing the stark economic reality of the housing market.

Knight and her staff focus on providing supports for people experiencing homelessness, and that involves a lot of work around mental health and addiction issues. That’s important, and I’m not criticizing it.

But it simply can’t be the case that just a few years ago only a relatively small number of people had mental health and addiction issues and now thousands of people do, and so therefore suddenly there’s a thousand newly homeless people.

A much better explanation is that even despite mental health and addiction issues, a few years ago people could obtain some sort of housing, but now rents are so high and affordable housing so scarce that they can’t. People haven’t changed. The housing economy changed.

What’s needed is massive government involvement in the housing market, and by that I mean a billion dollars spent annually on building and maintaining affordable publicly owned housing. Not gimmicky kickbacks to developers to build “affordable” units ever more slippery defined by a temporary and too-high percentage of the too-high market rate. Not pennies tossed at under-resourced non-profits without the expertise or experience to maintain housing. Rather: government owned and operated housing, and lots of it.

I can’t help but see the measly $7.5 million spent on 200 Pallet units in the context of a government unwilling to spend truly meaningful money on public housing.

If our baseline shifts enough — if we come to see Pallet villages as not just a normal part of our cityscape, but a good part of our cityscape — then government won’t feel the need to truly address the housing shortage.

Don’t let the baseline shift. The Pallet villages should horrify us. When we see them, we should understand them as a visual representation of government failure.