Exclusion and poverty root causes of homelessness

By Lethbridge Herald on March 15, 2023.

Editor:

I cannot offer very useful suggestions to resolve homelessness.  I can only write what I saw. I hope someday soon wise persons can identify the relevant issues that may lead to the resolution.           

In 1968, I joined a group of church workers to study the issues in cities including homelessness.  It was called the “Canadian Urban Training Program” held in Toronto directed by Dr. Ed File, a sociologist from York University.  

We wanted to look at the reality through personal experience. Its first phase was a total plunge into the homeless life in downtown with $5 in the pocket. It was a minimum amount of cash on a person required to avoid the charge of loitering. 

 We put on worn-out shabby clothes and lived among the homeless people for three days.  We ate at soup kitchens and slept in the shelters. 

 Decent people avoided eye contact.  People behaved as though we didn’t exist, even in the church I went during worship for warmth.   

The  street people in Toronto during those days were mostly unemployed Caucasian men and hippies. 

Indigenous people were not visible on Toronto streets: They were the Prairies phenomenon.  The problem of addiction I saw was mostly alcoholism.  I did not see any drug addicts.  I found that drug addiction was among the middle-class who could stay at home conducting a normal life in their jobs and professions. And the hippies who were from the middle-class families.  The addicts on the streets were there because they were poor.  

The homeless in Toronto were in the few thousands at the time.  I walked with them all over the city.  Rarely did we talk.  I never felt threatened.  I follow them because it was the easy way to find free food and shelter.   We sat on the park benches to rest, or lied down to sleep on the grass in the Sun.

During the 1990s in Montreal, every year I took teenagers from the church to help serve the Christmas dinner at a downtown city mission.  

I saw some unshaven men in their dis-sheveled three -piece business suits wearing dirty but good quality shoes.  The manager of the mission said that those men began to appear after a new casino was opened on the former Expo ‘67 site. 

You can only guess how they ended up living on the street.  

My daughter was once swarmed and beaten for no reason by angry people in downtown Toronto.  They were not homeless people.  It was during the recession of the ‘80s.  She sees the same kind of angry persons driven to senseless violence in downtown Toronto and the subway system in 2023.  She wonders if the cutbacks affecting the poor has something to do with random violence.

In Kenya, there is a settlement known as the world’s largest slum outskirt of Nairobi, the area called “Mathare Valley.”  The population was estimated to have been about a million people.  Many of them were families. I saw the place in the late 1970’s. The industrial scale commercial agriculture came into being as a part of “development” frenzy to East Africa. 

They grew cash crops like coffee, palm oil, sugar, tea and beef for export.  Family farmers lost their homes, land and livelihood.  They came to the city to find work and joined the massive homeless population. 

They lived outside of the city boundaries in tin shacks with no water, no sanitation nor sewage.  Many South American big cities have the same phenomenon.   Those communities are often ruled by criminal gangs as municipal authorities do not extend the service.

Homelessness is a universal problem of big cities including in the U.K., the U.S. and Europe. 

I saw a tent settlement in a downtown park in Portland, Oregon like the one we saw in Lethbridge.  During the days I travelled for work, 

I did not see homeless people in two cities: Beijing and Johannesburg.  It was illegal to be homeless in China.  Cities were under the strict control of the police of the Communist government. When the homeless were found, they were sent to countryside or factories for forced labour.

In South Africa under the racist Apartheid system, cities were divided into white and non-white areas.  In the white area there was a curfew for non-white people.  They went home to the Black Townships after the sunset.  There were no white homeless people in South Africa.

Homelessness has been around for a long time.  I don’t remember the time when I did not hear about it in my lifetime.  

No one country nor city has a monopoly.  None has worse problem than others. The bigger the city, the more homeless people.  Also they are made up of diverse populations. 

No one can point to one particular ethnic group as the source.  They all share poverty and exclusion.

The simplest way to eradicate homelessness is to ban it: make it illegal not to have a home. 

 It takes a totalitarian regime to do it.  Do we want to live under a totalitarian dictatorship because we do not want homeless people around us? 

We must find the  answer to the problem of exclusion and poverty which are the real root causes.

Tadashu (Tad) Mitsui

Lethbridge