HOMELESSNESS
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
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Ask anybody who does frontline work with the homeless population and they’ll tell you how much easier it is to help someone when they have stable housing. Funding programs like the rent bank, which help keep people in their homes, is an investment that pays for itself many times over. Getting people off the street is obviously incredibly valuable and important, but if we don’t turn off the tap of people landing on the street, we’ll never be able to make real progress on this issue.
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Many concerns have been raised about the way personal belongings are handled during interactions between city staff and people living on the street, including whether there is a clear process for retrieving possessions that have been removed. Beyond the human impact, these practices may also be ineffective and costly. We should review current practices to ensure our approach to managing homelessness is fair, effective, and delivers good value for taxpayers. While some level of enforcement is necessary, it should be carried out in a way that respects people's dignity and supports better outcomes for everyone.
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Throughout the continuum of supportive housing in the city, there are many people who are ready to move on to the next stage, but don’t have someone guiding them there. Building on work by councillor Loughton and colleagues in Vancouver, we should hire a staff member whose job will be to ensure that people are helped along to the next stage as soon as they’re ready, freeing up badly needed space for others.
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Historically, our zoning bylaws have limited multifamily housing construction to places where multifamily housing already exists. This is a recipe for maximizing displacement. The city has taken some good steps to move away from this, but we should go further in ensuring that when development occurs, we’re not mandating that it occur in places where the most displacement would occur.