Naive people continue to push the fallacy that housing for homeless is a panacea.
Absent from Steve Corner’s inference that rugged shipping containers are less expensive than ‘modular homes’ (that of course a broad category including work camp trailers) is examination of why the truly homeless are homeless.
In contrast, Medicine Hat, Alta. only provided housing if recipients accepted help, which could range from help with job applications through training for occupations to psychological counselling. As explained by objective psychologist Michael Hurd, addiction comes from troubled values and lack of thinking skills.
Of course governments deliberately get in the way of people building and earning, by paying planning bureaucracies, pandering to NIMBYs, and having various regulations and laws that make it risky for employers and landlords to give people a chance to prove themselves.
And career activist Christine Brett cements her reputation as a neo-Marxist by claiming one individual has a right to another’s life – that’s what her ‘right to housing’ means, slavery. But initiator of force Brett couldn’t even teach fire safety to campers in Regina Park, instead she exploits them for political gain using typical tactics. Most people know how Marxist regimes housed people – deliberately starved them to eliminate the need, as in Stalin’s Ukraine and Mao’s Communist China, if not outright simply killing them immediately for daring to speak up.
Now joined by other career activist organizers, including the academic ‘nurse’ whose manifestos talk a lot about giving people ‘respect’ by helping them consume what made them homeless – intoxicants, but not about teaching them self-respect for themselves. I haven’t heard her offering her cushy taxpayer-funded environment to house Regina Park occupants.
Keith Sketchley
Saanich
