No amount of talk or meetings are going to solve the homelessness issue

By Lethbridge Herald on November 4, 2022.

Editor:

There appears to be a lot of talk about homelessness and tent cities or encampments in Lethbridge this year and no one appears to know how to deal with it and come up with a solution other than talk about it and move a few homeless people around. 

 One letter to the editor on Oct. 26 mentioned one possible solution by saying if 70 per cent of the homeless in Lethbridge are Indigenous then perhaps the Blackfoot Confederacy should re-house them in Indigenous communities and failing that they should fund 70 per cent of the cost of dealing with this problem.

We all know that will never happen and is just wishful thinking, but I like the suggestion. 

The latest from City Hall and Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (Herald Oct. 28), states that a shared response is vital in solving homelessness – sounds great but is all rhetoric and meaningless drivel.

I would think that if you have a problem that is not unique to your city then perhaps the people at City Hall tasked with finding a solution should look at other municipalities and find out how they dealt with this problem.

 After all there is no need to reinvent the wheel – copy what works elsewhere, perhaps tweak it a bit and away you go.

However, there is one minor problem – no one has found a solution yet, and to organize meeting after meeting and to say all the right things just does not cut it although it perhaps justifies some well-paying jobs with fancy titles and salaries at City Hall.

Here is one example: Mayor Gregor Robertson, before being elected mayor of the City of Vancouver in 2008, promised that he would solve the homelessness problem by 2015. In 2008, there were approximately 1,536 people homeless in Vancouver. 

 After having served as mayor of Vancouver for 10 years the homeless population had grown to approximately 2,200, so instead of fixing the problem it had grown worse. So in other words there really is no solution. 

Talk is cheap – politicians come and go and life goes on: we’ll just throw a lot of money at it and that’s about it.

Barney Feenstra

Lethbridge