The Causes of Homelessness, and the Solution

 

Friend Xerxes the gauche columnist writes of homelessness, a growing problem in Canada. He puts it down to two causes: poverty, and mental illness. Which latter he regrettably conflates with addiction, as many seem to nowadays.

As I see it, there are five causes of homelessness.

First, mental illness. Due to mental illness, some people are incapable of organizing their lives well enough to manage such necessities. These people are urgently in need of our help. We have foolishly or deliberately shut down the mental institutions, turning the chronically mentally ill out on the street to die. And mental illness is growing by leaps and lunges.

Second, addictions. Addicts, if they get any money, spend it on alcohol or their drug, rather than on necessities. This is not the same group as the mentally ill, and the issue is different. There is not much we can do for them; they have to do it for themselves.

Third, abusive families. Young people trying to escape abuse are often too young and inexperienced to look after themselves; child labour laws and minimum wage laws prevent them from making an honest living. For example, this is the simple and obvious explanation for the “missing and murdered indigenous women.” Or the suicide pacts among native youth. Yet we do nothing for this group; we seem to try to make things worse for them. If they happen to come to the attention of the authorities, the first thing the authorities will do is send them back to their families.

These kids are also vulnerable to child trafficking.

Fourth, economic instability. People can be temporarily caught short by sudden unemployment, illness, bankruptcy, a recent move, and the like. One problem is that you cannot get welfare without a fixed address; but it is likely that you cannot get a fixed address without welfare. This almost seems a deliberate catch-22.

Fifth, voluntarily homeless, an often admirable desire to escape the system and get off the grid. Like the Franciscans, or the sannyasins of India.

The best solution, in all cases, is this: build more monasteries.

Monasteries used to be the haven for the homeless. They served this purpose in Europe, in East Asia, or in the Middle East. And they gave not just a temporary bed and a meal, but a reason for living, and the chance for quiet contemplation required to put your life back together. This is the prime cause of mental illness and addictions and voluntary homelessness, that urge to escape, in the first place: a sense of the meaninglessness of modern life. A collapse in faith. Faith is the cure. 

Children from abusive families, in particular, could once escape to a monastery, and receive not just physical sustenance, but a community, a voluntary family, an education, a trade.

The monasteries were also financially self-sustaining; they generally took no tax dollars. Indeed, they were so successful that they were destroyed across Europe and China by an envious civil authority, to crush a competing centre of power and to confiscate their assets.

There was an attempt to revive something like the Medieval monasteries in the “cults” of the seventies: the Moonies, the Hare Krishnas, the Children of God, Scientology and the like. But again, civil authority and social authority came down hard on them. Remember Waco?

It is no doubt true that some such cults were harmful. This is why it is better to have monasteries, that can be overseen by some larger and established authority, rather than individual charismatic leaders. But the cults were fulling a hole left unfilled by the established religions, afraid of crossing the civil authority, and they were better than nothing.

This crushing of the monasteries, then the cults, was a terrible mistake. It was probably also a mistake to close the Indian Residential Schools, which served part of the same purpose, for at least a segment of the population.

Something that might be done, for at least some temporary help, is to buy up the many motels across the country that are now in relative disuse, as vacationing by car has fallen out of fashion. They could be refitted as basic homes: just a bed, a bathroom, a hot plate and a refrigerator. No cost, no questions, but subject to regular drug testing.

And hoe about similarly converting the old abandoned residential schools?