Why Do We Stigmatize Homelessness?

This will be a quick one.

I've moved to Vancouver, BC very recently. I plan to write a nice, long article about the false advertisement Vancouver spreads about itself and how that's contributing to many of its problems including the Real Estate bubble. But I will elaborate on that some other day.

Today I met a homeless guy and we just exchanged few words. This was the second time I met him. The first time, he tried to sell me a gift card to a fancy steak house for a fraction of its value, because they wouldn't let him in. Because he's homeless. He said he had received that card from a tourist who was on her way back home. To me, he did not look that much different from many backpackers who pass through Vancouver.

And today, he just said it's nice that the weather is getting better. I asked, where does he come from. He said from Alberta. One of the reasons why Vancouver has so many homeless people is that it's the warmest place in Canada, so there's been quite some homeless migration.

In Vancouver, there is no shortage of homeless shelters, volunteers who want to help, centres for curing drug addictions etc. So why do so many people still stay homeless? Well, as terrible as it sounds, from a certain perspective it is actually easy to be homeless. Easier than having to work some ßhitty job for a ßhitty salary and then shelling out most of it for renting a ßhitty apartment.

During the first year of elementary school, I was always passing by a pile of discarded building materials and I remember daydreaming about building a little home in the middle of that pile of rubbish. The idea of not having a house to maintain and just living minimalistically has always seemed very romantic to me. But even as a six-year-old kid, I knew it would sound arrogant if I ever told anyone, because I had been lucky enough not to be born homeless, and it would be unfair to all the homeless people with no choice if I ever decided to live in the streets.

So today, as I walked home from conversation with my new homeless friend, I asked myself, why is it even that important to have a place to live. Why do we put so much importance on such a shallow thing? Why do we "help" people by convincing them not to be homeless and by stigmatizing their lack of house?

Why do we fight homelessness at all?

What if we instead increased the comforts of living in the streets to increase the quality of living for everyone? Just finding a quiet place to sit down during the day without having to pay for a coffee is a headache. I only realized today, after some intelligent person ringed the fire alarm at the Public Library, how difficult is it to even find a nice place outside without a terrible construction noise.

If we instead of our obsession with huge houses and luxurious flats increased the options to live without a permanent bed; if we had more places to take a shower for a couple of cents, places to just eat our own lunch indoors, lockers to leave some stuff so we don't have to drag it around the city all the time; if we perceived housing as a luxury rather than a necessity to pass as a full-fledged member of this society, maybe if we stopped forcing people off the streets, we would all feel more at-home in our cities.