https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/homeless-encampments-bc-1.6783020
The situation in Vancouver with the tent city removal makes me very disturbed and also ask questions about the (prejudiced) assumptions people make. For example: is the word "homeless" actually appropriate? In some cases, people who live in tents consider it their home, and it seems they sometimes decline an offer of an "official" shelter when it's offered. That means their tent is their home. You might not like it being their home, and maybe they aren't happy either (though there was a philosopher who was happy living in a barrel), but if they consider it their home, then it is. Maybe "houseless" is a better word?
Viewed that way, the removal of a whole tent city because of some crimes that some people commit is ludicrous, even if those crimes are legitimate concerns. Imagine if a street got bulldozed while its occupants were away at work just because it was a neighborhood with high crime? If we treat that situation as ludicrous, but the tent city removal situation as normal, it proves our discrimination on the basis of wealth.
When I visited South Africa the townships in cities seemed to have many similarities: people who couldn't get a house ending up living in smaller, more temporary dwellings closer together. They had purportedly higher crime which the police also didn't do anything about because they didn't care about the townships. Yet even in that country with relatively racist policies and its enormous gap between the rich who lived in "big" houses and the poor who lived in townships, I never heard anyone even consider the idea of the police going through and *removing* a township. It would just be understood that the idea wouldn't make any sense because that's just where a large number of people live. So I guess South Africa 1, Canada 0: but in both cases, the police should change to treat *individual* criminals who live in the poor, temporary dwellings exactly the same as they treat criminals who live in houses.
Of course it would be great for Canada to do something to house anyone who wants to be housed, but even if you want to argue that it doesn't have enough money to do that, at the very least cities could remove the by-laws that hinder it from happening, as I've been saying for years. That costs $0. I.e. let people build tiny houses, or 2 small houses on one plot of land, or put trailers in someone's driveway with permission, or build a tiny house in a friend's yard with permission. And people can give someone permission to camp in their yard. And the government(s) *must* give people some spot where they're allowed to live in a tent for free, because otherwise they're being illogical, because all the other options cost money, and not everybody has money, so logically there will otherwise be some people who have no valid place to exist. Even having money doesn't guarantee you can find housing - currently houses and apartments require outbidding someone else or being chosen by someone else in an interview, and the only reason I have a place to live is because of being very blessed to be born in the situation I was born in.
