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Shorter Edmonton Committee to End Homelessness report

You'll be glad to hear that we can end homelessness in Edmonton. We just have to buy homes for all those homeless people. It'll cost a billion dollars.

There, wasn't that easy?

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Comments (11)

dcardno:

Thanks - I was short on twaddle.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Garth Wood:

My old home town has never been short on these well-intentioned and totally unworkable "committees" (all comin' at ya from the "social justice" oeuvre).

And their solutions all seem to cost at least a quarter of a bil.  Must be the vast sums spent in the oilpatch that they keep hearing on the news that causes them to become totally numb to the sound of that much money being pronounced aloud.

Like the U.S. lawmaker said: "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking serious money."  Until we get to that stratosphere, surely we can afford to spend this kind of money on our most vulnerable, can't we?


Garth

Imethisguy:

"Build it and they will come"

The argument is that we will save more by keeping core homeless out of the ER and the shelters than it will cost to house them. As far as it goes, this might be true (though name me one social-housing enterprise in human history that has come in under budget). The real problem is the one Imethisguy points out: if you empty the ecological niche occupied by the 2,000 core homeless, or however many it is, their replacements will arrive within a matter of seconds.

Geoff:

I mean sheesh, right? For a mere three times that figure, the Canadian government could temporarily delay the collapse of the Detroit auto industry.

Candide:

Speaking of the homeless...
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=r0oksz8hPRA

I'm not so sure the problem is that you'll empty the "ecological niche" of homelessness so much as you'll be trying to house people who, in the chronic cases, have rejected normal housing.

George Skinner:

And then there's the regulatory approach - just ban all homeless people from Edmonton. Hey - the same people advocating housing the homeless seem to think that the blanket ban will eliminate gun crime...

Sean:

How much does it cost to grind homeless people up and recycle them into Purina Dog Chow?

Mambo Bananapatch:

Grind up homeless people? That's just sick.

If you diced them and dehydrated them, they'd be nice and crunchy AND they'd help clean Rover's teeth.

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