City’s planned scarcity can turn deadly
Focus on spending as little as possible created dangerous shortage of shelter beds
When’s the last time you went to Tim Hortons or Starbucks and found they had run completely out of coffee?
I’m going to guess never. Because in business, you need to have enough of the main product you deliver to meet the needs of every customer who walks in the door. Which means you order and stock more than you expect to need, so that you never run out.
As a rule, the city government doesn’t follow this philosophy in budgeting for the services it delivers. Our politicians’ focus is typically on making sure as little money as possible is spent, and therefore providing as little service as is feasible.
If you want your kid to take swimming lessons, you need to get up early in the morning and participate in a registration frenzy for the limited spots.
If you want to take the Yonge subway to work in the morning, you often need to wait while several overfull trains pass you by and then snuggle right up in- timately with your fellow citizens, because there is too little transit for the people who want and need to take it.
If you want to borrow a copy of Michael Wolff’s new Trump book from the library system, you need to get on a waiting list almost 2,500 names long for one of the 300 copies it has.
This planned scarcity allows our politicians to assure everyone that no money is being “wasted” on surplus supplies.
Now, in many cases, this can be frustrating. But in other cases, it can be inhumane, or even deadly. Consider the shelter system that protects the homeless from the street.
The city of Toronto targets a 90-percent capacity rate in the shelter system — a target it has never met.
During this very cold winter, we’ve all become familiar with repeated stories about a lack of available beds in the shelter system.
These have continued even as more beds have opened up, at the Better Living Centre and (finally, after lots of argument) at the Moss Park Armoury. The lack of beds continues. On Jan. 23, co-ed shelters were at 98-per-cent occupancy, women’s shelters at 99-per-cent occupancy, youth shelters at 98-per-cent occupancy, family shelters at 100-percent capacity. As a whole, the system was at 95-per-cent capacity, though that calculation does not count the 754 people using emergency overnight respite centres, warming centres and out-of-the-cold locations. Some of these winter emergency services were also overfull, including the armoury at 122-percent capacity.
In total, there were 6,443 people using the shelter and winter emergency services, against Toronto’s 5,974 permanent shelter beds. Most of us can do the math to see that total demand significantly exceeds supply.
The problem here is obvious, or should be: When the system is overcapacity, it means people who need a place to stay tonight do not have one. When you see a number like 98- or 99-per-cent capacity, it means the same thing, for a variety of reasons (the only available bed could be halfway across the city, for example).
The city knows it would ideally have a higher available supply. That’s why, after all, they set that 90-per-cent target, because at that rate they are fairly sure a bed is always available for someone who needs one.
So why do we never, ever, reach that target? For years on end?
Those paying close attention will have seen that shelter demand is way up this year over last year and the year before. But that is not the reason why. Last year, and the year before, we still never met the 90per-cent capacity target. We still had too few beds.
This is not a new problem. It was not a new problem in 1997, when Mayor Mel Lastman claimed there were no homeless in North York just before someone froze to death sleeping in the street. It was not a new problem in the early 2000s, when homeless people set up a famous tent city on the waterfront. It was not a new problem when we wound up having to open the armouries as an emergency measure in 2004, as we had previously in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
There is nothing surprising about it now.
The shortages this year were predicted well before the cold weather set in: street health nurse Jessica Hales wrote an op-ed in the Star in October with the headline, “City is ignoring Toronto’s shelter crisis.”
Then, Hales and other advocates were asking for 1,000 new shelter beds — and a motion by Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam put that request to council.
Council declined, and instead approved 200 new beds, and more new respite drop-in spaces. Hales and other advocates said it would not be enough. Sure enough, it has not been enough.
There’s no surprise. So what is it that prevents us from opening the beds we need? Well, a big part of it is an apparently paralyzing fear among our politicians of opening too many beds. They don’t phrase it that way, of course.
Gary Crawford, the budget chief, just helped shepherd a plan the mayor has recently signed on to that will budget 1,000 new shelter beds over three years — including 240 by the end of this year. Homeless advocates still say this is not enough, and held a protest at City Hall on Wednesday demanding more.
“We are doing our best to ensure that we are meeting the need,” the Star quoted Crawford as saying on Tuesday. But the qualifier to that statement was quoted in the same article. “Our residents want us to build a city, but they also appreciate that we strike the right balance — that we tighten spending, that we find the efficiencies and we don’t hike taxes sky high.”
“Strike the right balance.” That’s how you say you are “doing your best” to meet the need, as long as your best doesn’t allow any possibility of exceeding the need.
This is a ridiculous balance to try to strike. On the one hand, you might have a spare bed that sits empty. On the other hand, someone might freeze to death on the streets. Even when no one dies, a lack of beds still means suffering. In overcrowded drop-ins with no beds and no showers, or on the street in the blistering cold.
Finding we’ve funded too many beds is a problem we should want to have. Having more than you absolutely need is how a business ensures its customers are never disappointed. Surely the same should apply to our government, in cases where disappointment can be life threatening.