Carjacking at gunpoint, Broad daylight, 2 suspects.
(twitter.com)
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I have more sympathy for poor, even criminal "persons of colour" than I do white liberals. I do feel that society should do more to uplift the poor. But we are going about it the wrong way. Notice how the most liberal of places in the country have the highest rates of gentrification (pricing the poor out of renting a place, let alone buying) and poverty. In Ontario, tiny houses are illegal. Each residential building has to be at least 800 square feet and be "up to code" with the provincial regulations. I would like to see those regulations relaxed. Then everyone who is working poor and even on disability/welfare if they seriously can't get a job can afford to live in a tiny house. We could eradicate homelessness without the government having to spend a whole lot of money. Better to be living in a tiny house than to be homeless in Toronto. It amazes me how much money the government taxes and spends and yet where is the affordable housing?
If I was a wealthy philanthropist (unfortunately I'm not) and tiny houses weren't illegal in Ontario, I would hire tradesmen to build tiny homes for the poor and gift these homes to the poor. And then write that off on my taxes. That would be a way better use of tax payer money than the bullshit the government is doing now.
We're going the wrong way about it entirely, but it's the subsidized housing in the big cities that's the problem.
Have them live in sub-800 square foot houses?
The real solution is education and teaching them about some of the options that exist in this country.
If one wanted to, they could move to a trailer around Lake-of-the-Prairies for around $14,000. That's for a double wide, with a deck, shed, bbq, and a firepit.
With a 10-year mortgage that's $140 a month plus lot fees. Tons of crown land for hunting and fishing to defray the food costs.
Two people can easily live somewhere like that with a couple of kids if they're only on welfare, if they get disability then they're living the high life.
Having people live in subsidized housing in expensive cities is ridiculous, there's no social mobility and all that ends up happening is it turns into a crab bucket before everyone secretly admits that it, like Regent Park was a failure and quietly gentrifies the neighbourhood.
We have a ton of affordable places in this country where one can exist quite happily on a minimum wage job, or even solely on benefits. But not in the cities.
People in the cities need Uber drivers, cashiers and food service workers. There needs to be affordable housing for urbanites in those professions. Have you ever wondered why just about every low-paid service worker in the GTA is brown? It's because brown immigrants are pretty much the only ones willing to cram a bunch of people into a room rental while working at Wal-Mart. That's all a person working at Wal-Mart can afford after all. There is a ton of white flight from the cities for a reason. The standard of living in the city is getting very expensive because of the housing bubble and brown people are more willing to tolerate ghetto-like living conditions. While white people would rather leave for areas of the country with more affordable housing.
The service workers in the cities shouldn't be low-paid.
Things should cost more in the cities to account for the cost-of-living.
I know exactly why every low-pay service worker in the GTA is brown, it's because those businesses refused to pay their workers at a rate that could ensure they could live in their communities so they left. Immigrants from dangerous regions however, are more than happy to work any job for the sake of their immigration status and live in whatever conditions ensure that they don't have to return to their home country.
They don't want to live like that, they're forced to live like that. Fuck, I've done the ski resort gap year thing, I know what it's like to live with 9 strangers in a 2-bedroom condo. It fucking sucks but it was worth it because of where I was living.
Subsidized housing ensures there's a supply of low-wage workers but it shouldn't be like that. Taxpayer dollars should not be going towards ensuring that a city where housing is prohibitively expensive should have a ready supply of cheap labour.
Uber in Toronto should be fucking expensive. Food in Toronto should be fucking expensive. Retail in Toronto should be fucking expensive. Half of the reason that the price of housing is out-of-control is due to the affordable housing (new immigrants and refugees get priority,) allowing the city to have low-paid workers.
Affordable housing just widens class-gaps. There is no reason why taxpayers should subsidize businesses that don't pay a living wage for their area, and without taxpayer-intervention they would be forced to do just that to stay afloat.