Editor: Maureen De Baene’s recent letter (“Better decisions needed over homeless situation,” Aug. 6) accurately highlights the frustration felt across Chatham-Kent regarding visible poverty, but misdiagnoses both the cause and the solution.
Framing homelessness primarily as an issue of police deployment logs and poor facility locations treats the symptoms of a crisis while ignoring its root cause: a severe shortage of deeply affordable housing and social supports.
A five-fold increase in police presence around encampments is not proof that educating the public on homelessness is “deflection,” rather it’s empirical proof that using law enforcement as a substitute for housing is an unsustainable strategy.
When individuals lack basic shelter, privacy, and material stability, substance use often becomes a mechanism for survival and coping with trauma. Expecting social disorder to disappear simply by moving shelters or clearing encampments overlooks a basic reality: displacement does not reduce the unhoused population, it merely forces vulnerable people into darker corners of the community.
Public safety and community balance aren’t achieved by dividing Chatham-Kent into competing camps of property owners versus “special-interest groups.”
Business owners and residents deserve safe neighborhoods, but unhoused individuals deserve the basic human right to shelter and care.
If we want to end public drug use and reduce calls for police intervention, we must stop treating homelessness as a spatial management problem. The only evidence-based path forward is investing in permanent supportive housing, expanding harm reduction, and addressing the material deficits that force our fellow human beings onto the street in the first place.
Ken Bell
Shrewsbury
