I’m in Canada, Toronto specifically and the Homeless situation here is just as bad as it is in the US. I do volunteer work for a couple homeless outreach programs and I’d say easily since the pandemic the homeless demographic has drastically changed.
The stereotype that homeless people are junkies or mentally ill has shattered. The people I’m working with now are, for now, mentally fit and sober. More women than ever, more elderly, more minorities that in the past generally didn’t have many homeless within them because their communities would help prevent them from being homeless i.e. Asians, Muslims, etc
So. Many. Have jobs. So many have families, children, and they are sleeping rough so that they can simply afford to have their kids or older parents or other family members continue to live with whatever roof they can afford over their heads. There are SO many that are sleeping rough because there is simply no room for them to sleep in the tiny studio apartment they can barely afford with their kids, wives, parents, whatever.
I’m handing out food to people who dont’ even look homeless. They can’t afford to BUY FOOD. All their money goes to rent or other important bills. I’m dealing with people who were on drugs and alchol who then got sober in hopes to get off the streets and find work only to relapse because there is no work or what work they can get isn’t anywhere near enough to get them off the streets so they slump RIGHT BACK into that hole because, and they’ve told me first hand, “There’s no point.”
Lines are getting longer every month, The portions for food and other things we hand out are getting smaller because NO ONE can afford to donate ANYTHING anymore anywhere near the amount we need to cover the increasingly rising population we’re working with.
And none of the politicians could give a flying fuck. None of them. Regardless of what side of the fence they’re on and how far away from said fence they are. We could have fixed this years ago, decades ago, but we chose profits over people. We made this bed a long time ago, It’s almost your turn to get into it.
For us volunteers this is no longer a battle we’re fighting in hopes of winning. No, at this point we’ve lost. Now we’re just hoping we have enough bandages to slow the bleeding as much as possible before we run out.
I mean there’s no point to it, it doesn’t speed anything up.
For example this morning I had a client meeting (saturdays, ugh) so I went to the train station cause it has a mcdonalds and it opens at 630am. They have 5 kiosks there and one person manning the til. People who were ordering from the til were getting their orders faster than people who used the kiosks. I had to wait 10 minutes just to get a coffee and muffin simply because I used the kiosk.
And it doesn’t even make sense. I would have assumed all the orders go through the same system regardless of where it was placed but apparently not. apparently people who don’t use the kiosk get priority?