4 ms·

Vancouver is a disaster in housing affordability, economic opportunities (outside of real estate), and they have a very big and public homeless crisis.

• jollybean 4y ago
  Homelessness and home prices are actually separate problems, even though they feel linked, they are barely so. You can have a relatively affordable city like Montreal and still a lot of homelessness.
  • zozbot234 4y ago
    They're very closely linked problems. The easiest way to solve homelessness is to give the homeless a place they can call home. Which is a lot cheaper if housing is already in abundant supply.
    • jollybean 4y ago
      About 1/2 of homelessness is not a money problem, it's a social/behavioural problem. The homeless people in my neighbourhood are all crack addicts. They get up and urinate/shit 3ft from where they are standing instead of walking 100ft to the park. They are 'feral'. If you gave them a 'home' it would immediately be a crack den for them and their buds. The bathroom or anything else would literally never get cleaned ever. It'd fall into disrepair quickly. There'd be no hope of them having any kind of job or anything like that. The other 1/2 are temporary homeless, usually due to some kind of calamity. Housing prices isn't so much the problem a they need to be 'stabilized'. A 20% shift in rental costs will not affect those people very much. Low housing costs can positively affect a huge swath of people, freeing up income for other things, but it won't change the number of crackheads on the street and probably not the % of people that 'fall out of the system' for a few weeks. High housing costs are mostly a strain on working people. w