“This Could Be You…”: On the Disciplining Power of Seeing Homelessness
Indulge me for a minute (or five) if you will
Like most people on this planet, I live in an urban centre. And like many cities, mine is struggling with several issues relating to housing and homelessness. Articles and research papers abound with explanations and solutions, yet the entwined crises not only persist, but are being exacerbated by a mixture of activity and inactivity.
- “Renovictions” and evicting people from affordable rentals to make way for “luxury” condos.
- Pressure from immigration/emigration creating an imbalance between supply and demand.
- Zoning laws and NIMBYism, particularly in North American cities, that protect single-family dwellings at the expense of multi-unit dwellings.
- And the on going opiate/drug addition crisis and chronic under-funding/de-funding of addiction, mental health care, and preventative medicine.
This article isn’t about those issues, though. Instead, I wish to socialize a pervasive feeling that has been haunting me as of late.
Thesis: the political and wealthy elite are consciously and unconsciously leveraging homelessness as a visual disciplining mechanism to keep us in check in a desperate attempt to sustain an economic system that is on life support.
Finland has nearly eradicated homelessness, and London is hoping to do the same following Finland’s lead. On the other side of the Atlantic, paltry attempts made by the Canadian and American federal government to address the homeless crisis are little more than band-aid solutions — and flimsy ones at that.
Put succinctly: Canada and America have the space and means to end homelessness. They are just choosing not to end it.
Why?
Because the house of cards we call capitalism is perpetually teetering on the brink of collapse, and the site of dehumanizing homelessness in these wealthy countries acts as the lone adhesive keeping together a fake economy built on nothing more than debt that is verging on imminent implosion.
The sight of people living in tents, the smell of people without access to sanitation, the sounds of struggle that emanate from people’s hungry mouths all serve as a reminder that you are one or two missed paycheques away from joining their ranks.
How did we get here?
Since the 2008 recession, decisions made by central bankers to collapse interest rates has contributed to mass wealth and housing inequality. In the wake of central bankers’ decisions, the Toronto State Exchange composite has more than doubled since 2009 ($12 to $30), while the S&P 500 has grown almost 6 fold ($74 to $435).
Housing in Canada, for example, has largely matched the nation’s primary stock exchange composite, with average prices more than doubling since the Great Recession.
But housing, which is a key component of the Canadian “consumer price index” (CPI), was never meant to inflate at this rate. The role of central bankers is to maintain inflation at 2%, and while the overall composite — which includes expenses such as energy, gas, food, etc. — remained within range (up until early 2022 that is), housing and rent far surpassed the 2% target. And governments and central bankers simply stood by and did nothing to stop it.
Prices in 2023 are now entirely detached from reality, but Canada’s housing market was already deemed one of the most overvalued in the world back in 2015.
Since the 2008 recession, and as a result of historically low interest rates, housing transformed from a traditional, long-term investment into a short term “pump and dump” / “flipping” business. Residential Estate Income Trusts (REITs) also grew, snapping up property for cheap, taking on huge debts, and jacking up rents in the process.
Not only have governments done little to nothing to tame the price of property, but in many ways they have exacerbated the problem with their policies, with some going as far as to argue that governments have leveraged their power to purposefully design the exact system we currently find ourselves in.
As result of asset inflation, your paycheque is worth less and less each year.
Wage devaluation
Say you make $60,000 and the following year you get a 3% raise. Your salary increases to $61,800 (before taxes/deductions). If inflation grew at the mandated 2% that year, you would, in theory, have an additional 1% of income to save/invest/#treatyoself. Divided by 12 month, the $1800 extra you would be earning would come to about $150 each month — or $105 if we deducted 30% for taxes.
Now let’s say your rent was $1000 a month and it increased by the standard inflated rate of 2%. Your rent would now be $1020.
$105–$20 = $85 extra a month to cover the 2% increase of other expenses (groceries, bills, entertainment, etc.).
Of course, the above scenario is not how cost of living has played out in North America, with rents in Canada increasing 12% alone in 2022. And that’s the average for all of Canada. In Vancouver, for example, a 1-bedroom apartment now costs $3000.00 a month, a 16% increase from the previous year.
The value of assets/investments have radically outpaced CPI inflation and wages. “The average two-bedroom apartment is renting for $3,918 or $47,016 a year,” writes Katie DeRosa. “That means two people with an average before-tax household income of $96,423 would be spending almost half their earnings on rent.”
If a one-bedroom is equivalent to half of a couple’s pre-tax income, than what does that equal for an single occupant?
“Nobody wants to work anymore”
As if all this isn’t horrible enough, working life itself has become seemingly unbearable. Corporate life was never really great to begin with, but your reward for corporate conformity was an income that afforded you middle-class amenities — and maybe even some occasional luxuries. Now, not only does that salary not provide you with those middle class amenities, amenities which have somehow become “luxuries”, but the demands of corporate work have become so toxic and so demanding they’ve inspired strategic resistance and outright revolt:
The demands of work have grown as exponentially as the market, but the rewards for your labour have diminished in the process.
- Expectations that you work outside your standard working hours (without increased compensation) — see: acting your wage; quiet quitting
- “On call” shifts and/or perpetual availability (via phone/email) — see: nobody wants to work anymore
- Educational requirements and work experience that do not match salaries — see: nobody wants to work anymore
- Chronic “burnout” — see: Great Resignation
So not only does your salary not match your cost of living, but you’re also destroying yourself in the process making the money you need to pay for someone else’s mortgage.
Capitalism has almost literally brought us back to a feudal economy.
“This could be you if you misbehave”
The multi-concentric bubbles central bankers and governments blew up over the last decade and a half with their fiscal and monetary policies have brought us to the brink of an emotional, psychological, economic and social implosion from which we may never recover.
“Quiet quitting” and “acting your age” a small kinds of resistance that seek to create some level safety and balance in a system that is entirely unsafe and imbalanced.
Good.
But by no means are they radical challenges to a system of oppressive late capitalist feudalism (although neither am I shaming or diminishing them for not being those things, nor am i suggesting that should). And this is where the daily sight of people experiencing homelessness comes in: it serves as a reminder not to push back too hard.
Don’t push back too hard…or else.
Post your confessions on social media. Live off your savings for a bit. Post memes about “lazy girl jobs” or “self care”. That’s all fine. Just make sure you get back to work sooner or later and do as your told.
Governments and their institutions have created a system of oppression that has split societies between the “haves” and “have nots”. Traditionally middle class asset owners in North America, who have historically been the white gentry, have become rich simply by owning — or inheriting — property while the “tenant class” has struggled to survive.
Politicians, particularly those in North America, are choosing to not to fix the housing crisis — lest their families, friends, benefactors, and donors suffer only profits rather than obscene profits.
Their solution? Maximizing the visibility of homelessness.
Homelessness isn’t the problem politicians’ created making housing unaffordable.
It’s their solution.
