The Homeless
I've spent a lot of time living outdoors.
For a few years in the 1970s I lived in a little hut in the woods that I made myself using my own design. It was basically a plywood tent with a poncho for a door.
I've also done many bicycle camping trips - the longest was a ride across Canada.
I know what it's like to live off the grid and without plumbing.
I liked it ( and it would be harder now since computers are so important to me.)
I know what it's like to have my camp gear on my bike looking for a place to set up for the night in a place where I'm a stranger.
But I've never been homeless - I was living the way I wanted too.
Now when I walk to the store I pass a lot of homeless people.
These are not campers. They sit or sleep on the hard sidewalk with maybe a blanket winter or summer, rain or shine.
I don't know much about them, but I do observe that people only stay in that state for a short time. I see people sitting in a place outside the soup kitchen, but it's always different people.
I live in a nice secure place now, but when I first moved here my income was precarious for a while and I faced being evicted onto the street. Not only would I be sleeping on the sidewalk but I'd lose everything. All my books and pictures and tools. It was terrifying.
I got through; the rent got paid. But a few times it was close. I can understand becoming homeless.
And I'm not psychotic. I don't run around with delusions and yelling and screaming and being belligerent. In a building I can keep the water in the plumbing. Some people can't. That can make you homeless.
These people are not having a good time. They are not campers like I've been; they aren't there because they want to be and they aren't equipped at all.
But also, I think that various social services work to move them off the sidewalk and into shelters of various sorts.
In the past 10 years people have been taking over parks and setting up tent communities.
The logic here is different from when I was bike camping. I needed to be unobtrusive and invisible. And I needed to be with my gear all the time to protect it.
What the tent communities provide, at a most basic level, is a communal security against predators.
The city calls these people homeless and tries to move them into shelters. It doesn't work very well. The problem is, I think, that they aren't homeless any more than I was when I was on bike trips or living in the woods. They are campers. They are there, in large part, because they want to be.
For one thing, the places that charge the minimum rent are not nice places to live. There are bugs and rats. The walls are thin. Some neighbors can't keep water in the plumbing so it comes through the ceiling. So, while SRO places may be a step up on a road to recovery for people sleeping on the sidewalk they are often a step down for campers.
What we consider homes are more or less permanent structures to which we can attach addresses. We get used to the various social constraints involved with that. There is the huge discipline of paying rent or mortgage. My rent is my biggest single expense and I'm lucky I don't have to worry about affording it now. Campers can be scavengers who are pretty rich one day (in a relative way) and broke the next and they don't have to worry about that.
One time I was a member of a co-op printmaking studio on Granville Island here. There is a big public market and every night at 6pm a coffee vendor would give away whatever coffee he had left and there was always a lineup of people with cups.
I got to know them over time. Most of them were scavengers who gathered at the market to grab the food that merchants couldn't sell but was very edible.
Sometimes the merchants would carefully set out trays of stuff rather than dump it in the bin.
Other times the scavengers would make arrangements with merchants to take out their trash in return for out of date stuff.
And when one of them scored big they would share all round since they couldn't carry it home. It was kind of a happy scene there around the dumpster bins.
One day one of the scavengers asked if I'd like to see where he lived; I was honored.
There was a small cut in the land holding an abandoned railway track that was all overgrown and wild on it's banks.
My friend took me to a garden of bushes at the end of the bridge over that cut, and we ducked down under the bushes and crawled on all fours to a path through the little wilderness.
Over here was a latrine. Over there was a place to store scrap aluminum. There were other places for bottles and cans - all well organized. And then we came to where he slept. It was a plastic fantastic made of branches and plastic sheets with a mattress within. He even had pictures on his walls.
All this was invisible from the road just across the cut - though you could hear the voices of people walking there.
My friend did not want an apartment - not even a nice one like I have - there would be noplace to put the stuff he scavenged. He'd need a job or (shudder) welfare to support it. He just wanted to be left alone.
The city has been pretty aggressive about trying to close the camps that spring up in city parks. What it does is move the campers on to another place. It's a bit like whack-a-mole. Now the campers have set up on the sidewalk along Hastings St close to where I live (like 2 short blocks).
The sidewalk is blocked so much that people need to walk in the road and for a while couldn't get into their apartment buildings. The police are starting to remove the campers - but advocates for them say there is noplace for them to go.
My point here is that the homeless and campers are people in different situations.
The homeless face a catastrophic episode.
The campers often face a society that places demands on them that they aren't able to satisfy - like holding a job or paying rent.
What do you think? I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.