Poverty is everyone’s business: it’s our neighbors who have to go to the food bank to make it through the month, it’s the student who has to work several jobs to be able to pay their rent, it is the person who begs because their social assistance check is not enough to cover their basic needs.
In the world of homelessness, we face poverty every day, but above all its complexity. Because homelessness and poverty are far from easy issues.
We imagine that getting out of a situation of homelessness is as simple as finding housing, but the reality is much more complex. Seeing homelessness as a personal failure, which would therefore require personal effort as a solution, completely misses the structural causes of the transition to the street and fails to consider the systemic barriers that people experiencing homelessness face throughout. of their journey.
Far from being a straight line, homelessness appears more like a scribble – a process of social disaffiliation, of coming and going between the street and housing strewn with pitfalls. Homelessness is not as simple as falling into the street, being in the street and getting out. Above all, it is a social phenomenon, not an individual one.
A political choice
Poverty is a political choice: take for example the amounts of social assistance which are deliberately calculated to meet only 50% of basic needs in order to push recipients to “find themselves a job “. With a social assistance check of barely $800 per month, trying to pay at least rent, groceries and travel is a miracle… and that’s without taking into account the lack of access to health care, discrimination and systemic racism, among others.
People in precarious situations must make superhuman efforts to fight against a set of systems in which the dice are loaded in advance. How can we talk about a simple solution to homelessness, when it is the result of a complex accumulation of collective failings and holes in our social safety net?
Even if the idea of putting an end to homelessness by providing housing for everyone is attractive, it is clear that a roof does not make precariousness or social exclusion disappear. Obviously housing is a right and everyone should have access to a safe home.
Let us, however, suppose that each person was placed in housing today: there would still be women who would suffer violence, people who would be prosecuted by the police, others who would suffer discrimination because they use drugs, young LGBTQ+ people who would be thrown out, people who would leave prison without reintegration assistance, people who would not be able to find or maintain a job and who would have difficulty paying their rent at the end of the month , because poverty does not disappear with housing.
No one is against the idea of a world without homelessness. However, the belief that ending homelessness is achievable without profound social changes — without anti-poverty programs, without real access to education, without access to appropriate health care free of stigma, without an income to escape poverty — is dangerous.
If the weight of ending homelessness rests on the shoulders of the most vulnerable and not on those of the State which crushes them, we condemn a large part of our fellow citizens to poverty and social exclusion. Homelessness is a social problem, the causes of which are complex and different for each person: there are as many ways of falling into and living in a situation of homelessness as there are people.
Faced with the inertia of the State, how can we collectively support our neighbors who are suffering the repercussions of social disinvestment, how can we fight against the individualization of social problems? Residents, organizations and citizens, let’s all be outraged, let’s be united and let’s take back this social safety net together.
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