Council has been pushed out onto a tight rope on the homeless issue, and is looking for a way to safely reach the ground.
The trouble is, the province is at one end of the tight rope, having underfunded social issues in Chatham-Kent to the point the rope is unravelling.
And at the other end are homeowners, who are sawing away at the rope. They don’t want council making a call that could send a homeless encampment towards their neighbourhoods, or they want the ones that are there to move.
Council is struggling to move on that rope. At times, they’ve tried walking boldly, seeking to change setbacks to 100 metres from private property. However, all that did was … cause a gust of legal wind from below, powered by Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and standing Ontario case law that forced them into one tight spot on that rope. Thames Grove Conservation Area would have been the only area where the setbacks “worked.”
Most recently, they crawled back towards the middle of the political tight rope, reducing setbacks down to 25 metres.
So, they started at 10 metres. When people living near the green space around the Public Utilities Commission property on Grand Avenue East complained loudly, the shift went to 100 metres of setback.
And when they realized the decision would eliminate nearly every piece of municipal greenspace from housing a place for our homeless, they had to shift again.
Most of council’s working summer has been spent trying to find a way off that tight rope. Yet is there an escape route?
There certainly is no quick fix to this problem. Homelessness is a three-headed monster that claims lives and negatively impacts those in the camp and living nearby. Lack of affordable housing, addiction and mental health are tightly intertwined. Fixing one does not remedy the issue. All elements have to be tackled in unison.
That’s a tall order, one that a municipal government can’t be expected to attempt to navigate on its own.
Yet here we have our local politicians walking that damned tightrope…
