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Originally Posted by blankall
Involuntarily committing people is also a form of imprisonment. The main difference between that and jail, is that in jail the health services are voluntary. As it is, the ability of the government to hold someone, without conviction, for mental health reasons far exceeds that same power for reasons of criminal prosecution.
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Yeah, that's my point. Do we want to get in a situation where we're just rounding up drug users and committing them? Beyond the ethical issues with that, I think people are kidding themselves if they think that's going to solve the problem.
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As for dystopianism, it's getting pretty dystopian out there as it is. Downtown is full of thousands of people dying and doing drugs right in the open and in front of small businesses. Families, with two income earners, can't afford rent. Ownership is being consumed by both the government and large corporations.
Whatever is going on needs to change.
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All those things are more or less caused by the increased financialization of housing, and no one seems to be actually proposing anything that will fix that. Even the people who do identify the issue don't seem to have any better answers than "build, build, build" or basically stopping immigration. But that hasn't made a difference in Vancouver at all.
Greater Vancouver's current population growth is around its lowest in history, increasing by about 280K in the last decade. Given the average household size, you'd need about 110-130K new units in that period to absorb that population growth. Well in the last 10 years Greater Vancouver has built over 250K new units, 2-2.5x the number needed. But have prices gone down in that time? Of course not, because housing is increasingly being treated as an investment where people wanting to live in a place have to compete with people wanting to make money off of it.