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Notes -
The A&W Halberd
The A&W Halberd is a makeshift weapon, an artifact most likely inspired by meth demons or related brain damage. It is a fine piece of methgineering. The weapon is composed of a crimson plastic broomstick, two chef knives (dull), and copious amounts of grey duct tape. One of the knives was attached to serve as the tip of the Halberd. To poke with. The other, perpendicular to the broomstick, is evidently for striking overhead.
One cold morning, armed with this masterpiece of a weapon, a knight possessed by evil methgic hastily stumbled into A&W. He was agitated, yelling, mumbling, shifting in unnatural ways. We'll never determine whether he arrived to vanquish the demons or to aid their evil cause; the knight was captured by the police of my beautiful, medieval city, Vancouver, BC. We'll never know the real cause. But there is a silver lining to this incident: nobody, not even a single Teen-type burger, was harmed.
Did you know that one homeless shelter in Vancouver, according to this commenter, has a weapon locker that has seen all sorts of medieval arms? Crossbows, maces, flails, swords, shurikens, you name it. If you can imagine it, methiculous methgineers can construct it. Guns are for modern times. Guns are boring. Halberds, spears, whips. Bows, nunchakus, quarterstaffs. These are the weapons I find infinitely more appealing. Infinitely more appropriate for a medieval city like Vancouver. The shelter staff agrees with me: they only reported guns to the police and not anything else of the endless selection of arms surrendered to the locker.
Shortly preceding the A&W Halberd incident, there was a hostage situation involving a dagger-wielding rogue (it might have been a knife in all actuality, but bear with me if you will). That wretched 7-Eleven is not two blocks away from the unfortunate A&W, to which the knight showed up with the halberd. The rogue was shot with the boring guns by the boring police. In the summer of the same year, a machete (let's imagine it as a shortsword) was employed by one raging barbarian to sever an arm of one stranger and a head of another.
These are the three incidents that were deemed worthy of reporting on by newspapers in our boring non-medieval world. But there are many more that go unreported, evident to me by the fact that I had a personal one in the time between the Halberd one and the 7-Eleven one, right by Vancouver Public Library, just across the road from the very same 7-Eleven. A tall 6'5" warlock, dressed in scraps, eyes devoid of any emotion but rabid madness, was trying to obstruct the path of a maiden, and I'm proud to say I fended him off. I waded into the dark medieval fairy tale of Methland for a quick second and became a hero of the day, saved the maiden. In all honesty, it was not really a great act of heroism; I put myself between the warlock and the maiden and with an awkward yet firm gesture kinda shooed him away, more like. His excuse for being creepy was yelled in our backs: "I was just trying to get directions!" If you say so, but I don't trust mad warlocks. If you commute to downtown Vancouver, I wouldn't be surprised if you had an encounter like this yourself.
I have many more incidents to spin my yarn about, much less scary ones, but for now, behold this map. I put all of the four incidents mentioned above on it. With the red cross, I marked my personal treasure: it's a Japanese cuisine place called Ebiten, serving a delicious plate of Kimchi Yaki Udon. I work 10 minutes away from it, and on the days I'm overcome by a bout of laziness sufficient enough for me to forego cooking for the next day, I fancy myself this succulent
ChineseJapanese meal. Also on the map, you can find that murky, dark place, the infamous East Hastings street and it's younger brother Granville street, where I was told all of the vagrants are localized and who never stray from those regions.I live in this fairytale city. I'm on Robson St every work day, commuting. I'm here to tell you that this predicament Vancouver and the whole of Canada found itself in is crazy. Having my office building do multiple lockdowns in one year is not in any way, shape, or form normal. I'm an immigrant here in Vancouver, and I readily admit I don't know the customs and traditions as well as the natively born Canadians, but when they tell me in the comments to the Halberd incident article on Reddit that I lead a sheltered existence, I have to respond: you've lost your mind. It's hard for me to express how thoroughly the Forces of Evil defeated everyday citizens of Canada.
I'm originally from Russia, that backward warmongering authoritarian country, and naturally, I made friends with Russians here in Vancouver. One of my friends
waded into that dark domain of East Hastingsdrove through East Hastings in order to record it, by the request of her father. He's a teacher and now uses the footage as a piece of propaganda about the decaying West - it's that jarring to us Russians. It's bizarre to our sheltered minds: the tents, the drug use, all of the fent zombies bending down, all of the trash piling up on the sidewalk. Not to say that homelessness doesn't exist in Russia; it naturally does. Just take the Three Station Square in Moscow (famously visited by Tucker Carlson) that serves as a shelter for the homeless during the winter frost and in all other months too but especially during the cold winter months. When the denizens get kicked out of one station, they migrate to another - a perpetual problem for the guards and the police, an eyesore for the commuters (more of a nosesore? is that a word? they smell is what I mean).(Sidetracking, calling a station on Three Station Square "a station" is a disgrace to it, to be honest. It's vokzal (вокзал). A big station. A grand station even. Each vokzal is a huge pavilion and for you North Americans to understand - it's big-mall-sized. More-than-a-big-Costco-sized. Imagine enormous Stalin-era-skyscraper style waiting halls and nooks and crannies and unused toilets where you can sleep, drink and shoot up at night)
Homeless people in Russia are neatly tucked away for the most part. It's harder to see them than in Canada, where they sit or lay everywhere cocooned into blankets. In Russia drug users mostly use drugs in condos and apartments. For the most part homeless people huddle in the aforementioned vokzals and stations, underground walkways or maybe along insulated pipes, anywhere warm, in fact. Train drivers traditionally turn up the heat in one or two cars on the last late-night intercity train for the homeless to warm up and sleep in peace during the winter (a small act of kindness, but not a sentiment broadly shared by the public. From 2023 onwards, persons in dirty clothes are forbidden from entering public transport, as if it wasn't already hard to be a homeless person). Sewers and entrance halls for apartment buildings can tide one over for a night. Public spaces like vokzals are the main ways to survive - various NGOs like Nochlezhka and government organizations like Doctor Liza are much more scarce and have much less funding than their Western counterparts.
I didn't live in Moscow, but I lived next to Moscow, commuted there every day. To me, trains, train stations, subways, and public transport are familiar environments, so naturally, I met a decent amount of homeless people. Maybe they were fragrant and unpleasant and often drunk, but I was never afraid of them (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the Vancouver ones). The homeless in my motherland were rarely drug addicts, and even then, never were they really aggressive. I felt (and still feel) pity for most homeless when they were harassed by the police. I still perceive them as people down on their luck and for the most part they were. From what I know, it is not uncommon for Russian homeless people to be working towards reintegration. They weren't scary and that's the most important part. They lived a regrettable existence, but they were still humans who held on to some semblance of dignity that I almost never see in homeless people in the West.
As sheltered as my upbringing was (I like to think that it wasn't), I was never on guard when I was at Three Station Square; I could never imagine an "unhoused person" in Russia threatening me with a makeshift polearm, it just wasn't an issue for me or anyone else commuting downtown. Did I expect them to beg for change? Yes. Stab me? No. Expecting it and just accepting it as a status quo, from my oh so very sheltered perspective, is crazy. This commenter, and from my perspective, Western society at large just gave up, surrendered after a few policy misses, and just left this wound to fester and fester until cities like Vancouver ended up magically teleporting back in time, to medieval Europe with polearms and all. Don't westerners want to enjoy their burgers without being embroiled in a 100 year war?
My first idea is that everyone just fled downtown to quiet and comfortable suburbs and this is why Canadians don't care, but don't Vancouverites work downtown, commute there and have to deal with this shit and squalor every single work day of their lives? Downtown Vancouver is chock-full of offices, various government services, restaurants, sight-seeing attractions, doctor offices, etc. There are legit reasons to go there every day of the week. Well, I find one. I don't want this to become an urban vs suburban debate: it's just that as a person who grew up in a very urban environment of Moscow, I'm shocked to see the neglect of the shared parts of your city.
One big difference I see between how Russia treats homeless people and how Canada does is that it's just hard for them to live as vagabonds. Yes, you technically can tuck them away in vokzals and underground walkways, but it doesn't mean that the police aren't harassing them constantly. Yes, it's not illegal to live as a homeless person, but it's also really hard and shameful. You can't really sleep in a vokzal without getting woken up every hour by a cop who tells you to remove your feet from the bench. And cops will kick you and punch you too, a big taboo in the West (those damned "human rights or whatever). Having less funding, NGOs can't provide the same level of care as in the West. They don't receive as much in subsidies. Homeless are routinely getting kicked off public transport by the police or even commuters. They are refused entrance to grocery stores and medical facilities.
It's really, really cold during winter in Russia. The most common cause of death for a homeless person in my Motherland is freezing to death. That fear of death, less drugs on the street, constant harassment and shame are crucial motivators. These things sound bad, but the fear of getting beaten, the fear of hardship, the fear of freezing to death can be drivers for rehabilitation and, most importantly, prevention.
In 2024 Scott wrote about homelessness. I posted the article. When I hear about the Finnish model touted by Scott, it makes me laugh. If you see a medieval encampment like the Skidrow on your street and your thought is "let's make their life even simpler" you've given up on the homelessness problem. It's honestly self-evident to me: make their life harder for them! Not simpler! Scott admits himself that draconian ways work in the article, so let's do it, why not do it the draconian way? We are not even talking about people experiencing temporary homelessness, we are talking about hardcore drug users who are dangerous to themselves and to the society at large. They don't feel any sympathy for me or a for a guy getting stabbed when he buys a Monster Energy Gold at a 7-Eleven, so to me, a foreigner to this culture it's impossible to understand why Canadians still feel sympathy for them. It's so evident to me: no more safe-injection sites, no more funding to NGOs, no more investment into safe supply, no more free money and food to subsidize drug-addiction lifestyle with it.
When I see Ken Sim, the current mayor, do a "fire inspection" clean up of East Hastings it makes me... audibly sigh. You have this dangerous, armed medieval brigade and your best idea wasn't to make their life harder. Your idea was to evenly spread them across the city. With all of their weapons. Huh?
When I see a safe-injection site next to the most hipster movie theater in Vancouver (VIFF) and a playground for kids, it makes me laugh, again. The West truly may have fallen, I refused to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes: a guy smoking meth (presumably he got it from the safe-injection site) on that playground and not a single father to even try telling him to fuck off. People just stopped using that part of the playground, moved aside in fear. Not a police officer in sight too. Don't even get me started about a meth zombie erratically waving a knife near kids with a knife in a school. (While trying to find the exact article I saw, I found out that there were multiple incidents involving schools and men armed with knives).
My solutions for this problem are as radical as they come and I feel silly typing them out because they seem so self-evident to me:
There's one and only one takeaway from this whole ordeal for Canadians, the one that will prevent the worsening of already bad areas once and for all: you can't entrust your safety to someone who fundamentally cares about fent zombies more than they care about making your presence in the city safe and pleasant.
So when a commenter tells someone who is surprised by the plethora of weapons in the homeless shelter weapons locker that he lived a sheltered existence, maybe I did live a sheltered life, maybe I did, but I also know when I'm afraid and I see with my own eyes that you are afraid of the archers and infantrymen of Methland too. I've seen liberals go "I'm not actually uncomfortable about them, homelessness is just a part of life and you need to be okay with it. That's just what Downtown is like" and at the same time conveniently avert their eyes from a situation where your compatriots yield completely when a part of a playground for kids is occupied by an invader. Well, in any case, their compassion for drug addicts seems horribly misplaced, at the very least.
The question of "why and how did we allow all of this to go to shit?" is the hardest part. Does it all go back to the old Motte argument that the police in the West exist to protect homeless people from you, not vice versa? (I'd be grateful if someone could link). If so, why? Or is it just a temporary liberalism pendulum swing that happened perfectly in sync with drugs becoming more potent than ever before in history? I don't know. I'm just an observer whose opinion on homelessness was shifted to a diametrically opposite one by real-life experiences of living in a West Coast city.
I'll close with this: Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval. Neither you need to give up your emergency room — it can be safe, actually — for the staff and for the patients.
A&W can be safe, too! Take your A&W back! Be mad! No sane person should have more sympathy for Methland invaders than for little children! My message to proud Canadians: you don't deserve to live in fear of being stabbed by a polearm!
For people who dislike both homeless having halberds and Moscow-style oppression, I want to note that middle ground exists.
For example in Eastern Europe homeless exists and resemble in level of problem Moscow ones described in this post.
Yes, it's something like the Finland solution that Scott talks about in his article. It works in a lot of places, but (without knowing the specific countries you are talking about), Finland has:
In Canada I want us to move the needle towards safeguarding citizens even a little bit, so proposing the most expensive solutions that require a lot of funding and good will from the public seems like kicking the problem down the road because Canadians neither want to fund, nor do the politicians have the good will.
If you are talking about something else, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how you think this was achieved without the oppressive way of dealing with the problem.
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Dodge this you bastaaaaaaaaaaards
This would be a great Halloween costume if it were more popular. I could totally see myself running around at party dressed up like this and screaming that over and over.
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I think it’s a specific case of the more general hyper-normalization. The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens. Cops are barely allowed to do anything about crimes that happen in front of them, and resources are limited so there’s pretty much permission to do low level street crimes as unless the cops happen to witness actual and undeniable stealing (they basically have to watch you take something off the shelf, stick it in your pocket, and walk out the door, and aren’t allowed to give chase off the store property). If a guy is walking around looking for a car to break into — literally shining a flashlight into cars to see if there’s anything there, the cops can be standing right there, but until your window gets smashed, he’s not allowed to do anything. If you call the cops? They take a report that both you and they know will never be read, let alone investigated. And even with an arrest, prosecutors are not going to actually prosecute the crimes that don’t involve a corpse.
Other parts of society are accepted as always been shitty and will always be shitty. Schools are expected to suck, which is why almost every person of means tries to send their kids to private schools rather than public schools, and the first question anyone asks about a property is “how bad is the school district.” Nobody expects potholes fixed, or safe public transport. In fact, Americans hate public transport because unlike Europe, it’s basically a skid row on tracks, and if the stop is close to a place you care about, you’ll watch is skid row moves in. Nothing will get Americans to oppose you faster than trying to put a public bus stop or train in their safe neighborhoods as the6 know it’s a rolling skid row and it will ruin their neighborhood and basically devalue their house.
That is not the aim of Western governments and has not been for some time. At least not "all citizens". The aim in terms of citizens is leveling -- making life better for the worst off and worse for "the rich". Outside of that, governments explicitly prioritize things which traditionally man has struggled against -- predators, "the environment" -- over citizens.
edited to focus on a different aspect
Do western governments prioritize these other aspects because there is the presumption that the base citizenry is a hemostatically stable organism able to self regulate? Whether this assumption is wrong or not, this is a first order difference vastly different from the Asian societies I am familiar with. Here the governments view the citizenry as needing a level of government management to internal forces spiralling out of control or external forces from disrupting what is posited to be a delicate balance. Social shame is employed and even sanctioned by governments to effect this ethos, and it seems much less expensive than deploying active state resources to gently encourage irredentist antisocials back into the fold.
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I was in Vancouver a few months ago and my main feeling was how much safer and cleaner it felt than Seattle or San Francisco. I stayed out of Chinatown on my friends’ advice, but I went around most of the rest of the West End and it was pretty fine. Some fent zombies out at night by Davies Street, but otherwise I walked downtown to the Pacific mall, the stores didn’t have every item in locked cabinets, there was still some high end retail, families were walking around outside together (not something one saw much of in downtown Seattle). I went to the convention center and walked all the way around to the aquarium and I remember thinking how nice it was, actually very pleasant as a city.
I don't want to seem as I backtrack from the original statement - I think the situation in Vancouver is worse than it's ever been in Moscow and I'm baffled that nobody is working towards improvement. Moreover, people accept it as status quo, turn a blind eye to it, which is reflected in your mindset of "only some fent zombies". The correct amount of fent zombies, according to my impossibly high foreigner standards is "none".
With that out of the way, The Halberd + Medieval Weapons Locker struck a chord in my brain: did we Vancouverites somehow found ourselves in medieval times? And that's how idea the post was born. Am I worried for my life every time I go downtown? No, it's fine most of the time and the problem really is localized to East Hastings, Granville, Chinatown. I found it weird to have 3 cool meth-related incidents in one year around where I have lunch sometimes, far outside of those isolated areas. Do other cities have it worse? Absolutely.
Vancouver overall is beautiful and I do love living here, I wouldn't stay if I didn't love it here. The positives absolutely outweigh the negatives.
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Honestly, yes.
I also live in Vancouver, and while parts are bad, they're not that bad compared to what I've seen in other cities. Overall, I feel safe except for perhaps a few blocks in a few areas. That's not to downplay the deleterious effects of shambling fent zombies, A&W pikemen, and other baddies from the medieval monster manual, but in my opinion, the disorder is usually more of the theft/streetshitting/nuisance variety.
Anyway, here's a fine specimen of a methhead light skirmisher attempting to fell an Amazon truck (not pictured) with an improvised javelin.
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Yeah I think /u/teleoplexy might want to avoid Seattle, SF or Portland if you’re already feeling blackpilled by Vancouver. Those other cities might radicalize you.
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Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:
And:
The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.
The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.
What the hell? They were released? At minimum, they are plainly guilty of trespassing on property that isn't theirs. And there's good reason to suspect them of murder (in my opinion they definitely murdered the guy, but due process and all that) so they should be held for an impending trial for both those things. That's the minimum that needs to happen here. What kind of feckless idiot was in charge of that situation, that they went "eh let em go"? Is it always that bad in SF these days, or was this some kind of isolated incident based on a particular DA (or whoever) being bad at his job?
The DA at the time was Gascon, who's usually described as "would be the most lenient DA of San Francisco of all time, if not for his successor Boudin."
If I recall correctly, after a wellness check by police (who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer, and decided, well, I guess that means he's fine), the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank.
I suspect there are also aspects of the circumstances which would complicate the case. Why would someone let a homeless vagrant live in his house with him? Absolutely everyone, even (or especially, really) in San Francisco, knows this is a really bad idea. But, to add some color, Brian Egg was a single man who worked as a bartender at a gay bar. My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing. In this type of situation, with no witnesses or material evidence, it'd be easy enough for the vagrant to claim the homicide was in self-defense against a rapist. And who knows, might even be true; even if so, the killing, dismembering, covering up, and other crimes would be enough for me to convict.
But that makes this an absolute stinker of a case. It would be salacious, the public would project whatever their own opinions are onto it, and the jury would get confused about what they're supposed to be considering. Better to just dump the case in a fishtank and hope no one notices.
This reminds me of the sad story of Kai, who found himself in a similar circumstance and also murdered his host.
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Oh certainly, other cities have it bad too and I didn't intend to present Vancouver as a uniquely bad locus of dark forces. Certainly no dismembered people in fhish tanks. It's just that Vancouver suddenly became medieval, I found it strange, funny, worthy of weaving the narrative around.
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That story in your link had quite the quote
“ Scott Free was also a neighbor and good friend”
We definitely live in a simulation
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I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.
From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character
"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."
The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal). Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”" I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point. But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well. Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in. (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).
I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything. Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems. It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.
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Try searching up 'killed by homeless person New York' and 'killed by homeless person Moscow'.
In New York, homeless weirdoes kill you or eachother:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/24/us/ramon-rivera-nyc-stabbings/index.html
https://abc7ny.com/nyc-manhattan-stabbings-homeless-man-stabbed-stabbing/12048673/
In Moscow, you kill homeless weirdoes:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/10/26/russian-teenagers-kill-homeless-man-for-fun-a50464
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5015259/Woman-killed-14-homeless-Moscow-jailed-13-years.html
Of course there's the Neely case but it does not fit into the Russian paradigm of pre-emptive strikes (special urban operations?) on the homeless.
From a New York link:
This is it in a nutshell. The Innocence Project would never exist in Russia. It only exists in countries infected by cuck politics. By cuck politics I'm thinking of a status quo where Pakistanis will move to the UK, become MPs and ministers, then feel confident and secure in asking the government to build a new airport... in Pakistan: https://x.com/SamanthaTaghoy/status/1906001493997547538
In foreign affairs, cuck politics is sending aid not as a bribe but out of genuine selflessness, it's climate commitments, paying random countries billions and handing over key bases to them because of international law (see the whole Chagos islands scandal, again in the UK)... At home it's providing all these accommodations and umpteenth chances to hardened criminals and negative-value people, refusing to be racist and crack down on those Asian grooming gangs. It's when nobody can ever be punished for anything serious, no matter how damning their failure or negligence, when there are whole organizations trying to reduce the amount of punishment going on. It's the part where people are induced into accepting anarcho-tyranny and railing against safe, acceptable targets like the stupid youtube-commenter rightwinger.
Cuck politics is where people feel this pressure to pussyfoot around the issue saying things like 'this is insane' or '!!!' or 'PC gone mad' or 'imagine if it was the other way around' rather than 'Let's smash this via X method, Y policy and Z action' or 'I will make this illegal, enforce the law and drive them out'. It's the reverse of everything Kulak says.
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Haha, a fellow Vancouverite! You mentioned the safe-injection site above. Let me tell you a story about that site which, to me, illustrates all the problems with the system.
When the safe-injection site was first proposed, it was proposed as an experiment. The proponents had several outcome metrics and statistics which they said the safe-injection site would improve. As part of the two-year pilot, money was allocated for a study which would verify these metrics and provide a solid scientific basis on which to continue or stop the project. So the pilot was approved and started up.
Six months before the pilot was to end, the study was canceled as the safe-injection site was "obviously working". And thus the site was made permanent.
The problem is that the people in charge simply deny reality. They'll tell you that all of this is sensationalized. They'll say that you have no proof or studies that your solutions will work. You can't appeal to metrics, because they're the ones in charge of generating those metrics and they're cooking the books.
I always thought Seattle should have a Safe Injection Site by its most famous landmark, just to make clear to all the tourists what Seattle is really all about. Call it the Space Needle Needle Space.
Just reverse the name and call it the Needle Space. Simple, and neatly inverts the optimistic futurism of the original.
Imagine telling someone in 10 years it used to be called the space needle and having them go "space? Who cares about space? Why would we ever name something like that? It's always been the needle space, you must be a fascist trying to Undermine Community Wellness!"
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Not going for the obvious "Space Needle Safe Needle"?
Safe Needle Space Needle?
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But all the hobos hang out by Pioneer Square (or at least did when I had the misfortune of living in Seattle a decade ago), and it would be oppressive to force them all to trek up to the Space Needle to shoot up safely.
Especially when they'd get run down by the mounted police posted to keep them out of the pikes place tourist zone. Do they still do that?
Imagine owning a business around pioneer sq and being told "you have to pay taxes so the police can herd all the vagrants onto your doorstep so politically connected businesses can actually make money at your expense"
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Perhaps I'm missing something but are you talking about Insite? Because that was the first such sanctioned facility in all of North America, and AIUI how that went was somewhat different: Insite was started in 2003 as part of a three-year pilot study, with a special exception to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act applying to it so it could function as a safe injection site. The exception was slated to expire in 2006, but it was granted yet another three-year extension so more research could be conducted. Health minister Tony Clement eventually stated there was a lack of health benefits and denied it yet another extension, meaning Insite would close, but a constitutional challenge was brought by the operators and proponents of the facility.
The case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that the benefits for already-existing users were clear and that failing to extend the exception would violate the rights of its clients as outlined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically the Section 7 rights to not be deprived of life, liberty or security in accord with the “principles of fundamental justice”. Note that the Court did not establish a positive right to safe injection sites, but did make it so that once InSite was established, depriving its users of that benefit would be a violation of their s7 rights. Because of that ruling, BC is now obligated to continue exempting Insite.
Case in question is Canada (AG) v PHS Community Services Society.
Funny how the judges never seem to care how the injection site might impact the broader public. That’s never a consideration it seems - what about MY right to security?
Here's where the YIMBYs lecture us about how we have no right to veto ruinous forms of construction and zoning. Such as homeless shelters and safe injection sites anywhere near where I live.
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Yeah, I think this story would have been printed in the first 3 year pilot, before the Conservatives came to power. The situation may have changed after it was published.
And I think the point holds, the Conservatives attempted to stop it with research, but failed.
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Do you have a link discussing this, for the benefit of us non-Canadians? The nefariousness of that situation seems fairly extreme; I'd like to say it's shocking but truthfully I find it pretty believable.
Edit: Posted this and immediately noticed there was another comment already asking for a link... whoops. I'd like to see it too though, fwiw.
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I didn't know about the study. Would you share a link with me?
But also, the baffling part, regardless of why was it put there in the first place, legitimately or illegitimately, is the common sense of the situation: the playing ground was already there, less than a block away.
Unfortunately, it was a long time ago, maybe 20 years. I read it in an actual paper newspaper (maybe the Georgia Strait, if anyone remembers that, one of those free very left-wing weeklies). To be honest, I only remember it because it was a strong point in flipping me from a Chretien/Martin Liberal to conservative. Along the lines of if you agree to try a potential solution, it's permanent regardless of effectiveness, then it's better not to try anything unless you absolutely have no choice.
Though I think your second part is a little unfair. In a crowded city, there will always be a park or school or something with a couple blocks of the site. And I imagine that the proponents would assume that junkies would shoot up inside the site, rather than just outside it. It might even have the effect of reducing the number of junkies in the park.
There are a few stories of that. IIRC, one city has "sex offender bridge", which is the only location within city limits that's more than X distance from Y locations, and therefore the only legal place for registered sex offender to live in the city.
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I have to disagree with the premise that too much liberalism created the problem. The solution is more liberalism: legalize gun ownership and deregulate housing. This approach has proven itself effective in the real world, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't require an authoritarian state.
Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.
Houston's homelessness rate is about 30 per 100K. Denmark's homelessness rate is about 112 per 100K.
Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.
I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.
It depends. Generally in cities in blue states residential construction is illegal and only happens by special exemption.
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The places in the US with high rates of homelessness (e.g. San Francisco) are places with restrictive gun laws and restrictive housing and building regulations. The places with liberal gun laws and liberal housing regulations have low rates of homelessness. It's very consistent.
Houston's housing first policies are good, but they only work because the baseline rate of homelessness is already extremely low. This is mostly due to cheap housing. When the lowest tiers of housing are so affordable that someone with drug and mental health problems can afford to live there, you end up with far fewer homeless people. You also avoid negative feedback loops where, once someone becomes homeless, their lives tend to spiral and their issues get worse. When housing is attainable for even the lowest income people, it provides a sort of "ladder" people can climb to get their lives in order.
Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.
You never answered my question about what specifically liberal gun laws are doing to facilitate this state of affairs. Is there even a single recorded case of a transit rider firing a gun at a homeless person in Houston? If there is, do you believe that this would be the correct course of action for a gun-carrying rider on a bus? (Homeless guy asks me for money, I quick-draw my gun and start blasting, and hope none of the bullets hit anybody else on the bus?) I’m as anti-homeless as anybody on this website — I’ve argued that they’re an inherently parasitic class with essentially zero legal rights, and that an appropriate course of action might be to round them all up into something like concentration camps — but this strikes even me as a dangerous and wildly irresponsible overreaction.
I maintain that you continue to posit causal relationships between different things which are, in reality, only correlated.
It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it. I never carry a gun, but I look like I could be carrying one, and that by itself changes the way people treat me and others in public.
I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.
If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect. Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun; even if the bum is thinking in that way, I would assume he’d also recognize the likelihood of an otherwise-law-abiding citizen would fire his gun on the subway as very low, and therefore not weight it significantly in any cost-benefit consideration.
The correlations you’re observing are simply an artifact both things being true under Republican government. As @hydroacetylene notes, Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy, and these areas also independently tend to support expansive gun rights. The former policy has a lot to do with curbing the behavior of bums, whereas I believe that the latter policy has very little effect.
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Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?
Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.
An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.
There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:
make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;
jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).
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Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.
The mechanism here is one that tends not to occur to functioning upper-middle class people; poor households are incentivized to get the number of contributing adults into a household which fit in it. The more dear housing is, the stronger the incentive. When you already have a roommate sleeping on the couch your cousin who’s down on his luck cannot just sleep their instead. But in areas with cheaper housing, it’s not worth it to let someone sleep on your couch. So your down on his luck cousin gets it instead.
Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.
I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.
The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.
In DFW you have plenty of bums- generally less threatening bums but bums nonetheless- in Dallas county, but in tarrant county(Fort Worth) you have very few. The judges and prosecutors in tarrant county are all republicans; cops know this and make more arrests and are more willing to use force. In Dallas county judges are almost all democrats(and there are fewer bums in the areas under Republican circuits), and so bums are often ignored when they do minor crimes, because city of Dallas police know there’s no point.
The Republican Party runs campaigns on the difference in public safety between the two counties. They’re right next to each other.
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Canadians define themselves as a society, that is more civilized, more progressive, more better than USA. I don't think this is going a popular proposition amongst the majority of citizens, unlike dealing with the homeless in one way or another.
Vancouver desperately needs more of this, but not to get rid of homelessness, just to make the city more affordable, which will tackle homelessness to an extent. However my argument is that creating more housing isn't enough. There should be more incentives for people to not go homeless. By carrot or by stick. Would I prefer carrot? Yes, I'm enjoying my carrots already. Some people just need a stick, don't you agree?
I don't see how "you can carry a weapon" would come off as significantly less civilized to Canadians than "police can beat you up because they deem you a socially acceptable target (and socially acceptable targets include the homeless)".
To me the difference is imminently obvious:
The catch is that the nuiscance stage is only the beginning of backsliding. Police has the unique opportunity to stop the freefall into the nightmare stage. You think about dealing with the nightmare stage, where crime is through the roof and you need to defend yourself, I think about how we can prevent it.
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We just came off of two years of police being allowed and encouraged to mace grandmas for not wearing masks at the beach. Do you really not see how that works? And isn't the entire leftist theory about the police that they are "descended from slave-catchers" and only exist to oppress acceptable targets?
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Because carrying a weapon is done by an individual -- i.e. those civilization are intended to keep down -- and the police beating up people is done by the authorities -- i.e. representatives of civilization.
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Repealing the ALR- you know, the thing that'd solve the problem more or less immediately- is coup-complete for the same reason dealing with the homeless is: it's what the average Vancouverite (and Victorian) votes for.
It's not popular amongst the majority of Vancouverites, who vote to have more homeless on the streets because [reasons]. Once you leave the city, the viewpoints tend to become a bit more realistic.
If I were a Tzar of BC, and had a save file to roll it all back when Vancouverites inevitably try to kill me, all of the zoning laws would go. There would be two zones: "mixed use" and "industrial", the minute details I'll figure out as we go.
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I am not afraid of the homeless, because I live in Texas, where upstanding citizens can shoot ne’erdowells threatening them with makeshift medieval weapons. I expect them to try to steal, but not get violent(and street toughs won’t typically try to fight blue-collar tradesmen, even if they’ll happily steal unattended items).
I wonder how effective / causally important this really is. I suppose it would be quite difficult to study empirically even if one wanted to. But, for example, to my knowledge there are places like Albuquerque which have a reputation for violently drugged-out homeless people and also permissive gun laws; on the other hand here in Boston, which has famously draconian gun laws -- up until a few years ago you couldn't even carry pepper spray, although that was eventually repealed on the (annoyingly identitarian but frankly correct) grounds that it was bad for women (as a small aside, I have known two separate women here who regularly carry knives, which is still quite illegal) -- the bums are not that bad, in the grand scheme of bums, and the bad ones tend to stay localized to known bad areas.
To be clear, I broadly support gun rights, and certainly if I lived in a city known for having violent addicts on the streets I would want to be able to carry a gun. However, while this would certainly have a benefit for the safety of the individual gun owners I am not convinced it would actually have any meaningful impact on the broad behavior of the homeless population -- I would expect the fear effect to be minimal on strung-out junkies who have already largely taken leave of their senses, and I would expect the, shall we say, culling effect to be negligible.
New Orleans and St Louis are extremely dangerous cities with very lax handgun laws. Concealed carry is not a solution to general crime. But it does serve to raise the stakes for homeless psychos; few of them are hassling bodybuilders.
I support concealed carry because the people who carry concealed should be prioritized over the people who attack them. This is clearly accomplished. I agree that the worst handful of homeless are unlikely to be deterred but most of even the psychos make some risk calculations.
Yeah, this part I very much agree with.
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Acceptable outcome for me, but what's interesting is that weapons in Russia are very illegal and controlled, much like in Canada. If I'd rank my preference for the outcomes it would be:
Alas, I don't think it's possible to easily legalize guns in very very progressive Canada
Canadian gun laws are almost certainly much better enforced than Russian ones, as in many other differences between the two countries.
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If we are trying to be accurate here, handguns rather than guns. Long gun regulation in Canada is lax by international standards. The permit to own a shotgun, rimfire rifle, or bolt-action centrefire rifle is shall-issue, and 22% of Canadian adults have one. Relaxing long gun law further is within the Overton window and will probably happen if the Conservatives get a majority - the last time they got in they destroyed the gun registry.
What isn't in the Overton window in Canada is US-style mass handgun ownership, and a long gun is the wrong tool for plinking fentanyl zombies.
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