Relocating Homelessness in Rural Nova Scotia

Imagine your worst, most vulnerable moment becoming somebody else's Facebook content.

Here at the Portal, we have been thinking a lot lately about how people are talked about in our community.

We are increasingly concerned by the public humiliation and dehumanization of people who are already extraordinarily vulnerable… including photographs of people sleeping or using public spaces being taken and shared publicly as evidence of a "problem."

People experiencing homelessness are still our neighbours. They are entitled to dignity and privacy even when they don't have a private place to go.

If someone has no home, very little money, nowhere they are welcome during the day, and few private spaces available to them, their life necessarily becomes public.

And when the conversation about homelessness primarily becomes about removing it from public view because seeing it makes the rest of us uncomfortable, we need to examine that discomfort.

Moving a shelter doesn't make homelessness disappear. Moving a person from a park, sidewalk, or doorway doesn't give them a home. Moving the problem from one neighbourhood or community to another isn't solving it.

It is relocating it.

There are legitimate concerns about hazardous waste, property damage and community safety. Those concerns deserve responses.

But people experiencing homelessness are not hazards.

We should be careful about allowing discomfort and danger to become interchangeable words.

Feeling uncomfortable when confronted with poverty, homelessness, substance use or mental illness is real. But discomfort is not necessarily the same thing as being unsafe. When we blur that distinction, people themselves can quickly become characterized as threats simply because their poverty is visible.

Homelessness is not an individual failure for an individual person to fix.

It is a community and systemic problem requiring community and systemic solutions.

Yes, our communities need safe public spaces.

Yes, businesses and residents deserve support.

Yes, people dealing with homelessness, mental-health challenges, substance use and poverty need appropriate services and supports.

These things do not have to compete with one another.

But there is another "yes" that cannot disappear from the conversation:

People experiencing homelessness also belong to this community.

They deserve safety too.

They deserve public spaces too.

They deserve to be spoken about as human beings rather than problems to be moved somewhere else.

And most importantly, they deserve somewhere to go.

Because until we can answer the question "Where should people go?" with something better than "somewhere else", we haven't dealt with homelessness.

We've only moved it out of sight.