The Decibel - What one annoying sound says about how we deal with homelessness

Episode Date: October 21, 2022

An anti-loitering noise device under a bridge in the small city of Oshawa, Ontario was put there by municipal officials to dissuade unhoused people from setting up camp. It’s raised questions about how cities should be dealing with homelessness at a time when housing is more out of reach than ever.With municipal voting day coming on Monday across Ontario, Marcus Gee discusses the politics of addressing homelessness.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. We're about to play you a noise that's difficult to listen to, but it's important to this conversation that you hear it. There's this horrible noise, and I think it might be an anti-homelessness device. I am over by Midtown Mall in Oshawa. Christine Thornton is an anti-poverty advocate in Oshawa, a city east of Toronto, and she captured that sound in a TikTok video. It's coming from a small gray box under a bridge. It's officially called a mosquito anti-loitering alarm. That is unsafe for human ears. This is unsafe.

Throughout the pandemic, we've seen rising tensions between municipal leaders and homeless populations. In the summer of 2021, police were ordered to tear down encampments in a number of Toronto parks. And for years, there have been ongoing clashes between police, city officials, and people who live in Vancouver's downtown Eastside. So municipalities have been confronting these issues in a variety of ways, including this intentionally irritating sound. I guess there was something that bothered me about it right away. It seemed, and this is something that people there said to me as well, it seems the sort of thing you might do to keep pests away. Marcus Gee is a columnist at The Globe

who's been covering municipal issues, including homelessness and the opioid crisis, for many years now. With municipal elections in Ontario on Monday, we're going to talk to Marcus about the politics of addressing homelessness. This is The Decibel. Marcus, thank you so much for joining me again. My pleasure.

So we just heard a snippet in the intro of that sound, but you've actually been there in person to hear it. Now, a representative from the city of Oshawa said that they brought in an acoustic engineer and they found it was no louder than a dishwasher or a conversation one meter apart. But I'm curious, from someone who's actually heard it out there, what was it like for you when you heard it? Oh, it's a piercing, really annoying sound that you really can't stand. Of course, that's the whole point of it is to drive people away. So it's a kind of a pulsing sound. I read up about it afterwards and it kind of alternates. It's sort of a beep at a very high frequency. So you really, as soon as you get close, you just have to want to cover your ears

and you want to go away because it's really almost painful. So, yeah, the sound, it's really hard to listen to, which is one thing. But does the noise actually damage your hearing if you're exposed to it for a long time? Well, that's certainly one of the concerns about this. I mean, the woman who uncovered all this is an activist in Oshawa called Christine Thornton. And as soon as she found out about it, she started reading up and seeing what she could find. She couldn't find much good research on the health effects. So her concern is that, look, this may not only have the intended effect,

which she considers quite inhumane of driving off people who gather under the bridge, but it might affect the general public, people coming by, walking their dogs or riding their bikes under the bridge, which they do because there's a path under there, might have their hearing potentially damaged. I wonder, why does the city of Oshawa say that this measure is needed then beneath this bridge? Well, when Christine approached them, they sent her quite a long statement from their security chief who basically said, look, there's been crime happening under there. There's been drug use happening under there. We're concerned about people who use the

recreational path that goes under there. And so, yes, they admitted we have put up this device. And I guess I wonder if the city of Oshawa is going to this length to actually do something like this. Is the issue of homelessness a big deal in the city? Yeah, it is a big deal. In downtown Oshawa for quite some years now, there's been kind of a concentration of people living on the street, people with addictions, people who have no homes. And it's been getting worse, people say, because rents have been going up. Of course, COVID was an issue for people with

addictions as well because it was harder to get treatment. So it's a very visible problem, and it's quite a big issue in the city because people are annoyed at kind of disorderly conduct in the downtown, people hanging around parks and so on. We were looking into this and we found that in 2021, there's a count that found that there were 573 people experiencing homelessness in Durham region, which is where Oshawa is. And that's up from 219 in 2018. So that's almost triple the number there. But can you just spell this out for me, I guess? Like, how does moving people away from beneath

this bridge make it safer? Well, I mean, this is what, and I talked to homeless people there, as people are saying, look, we are being harassed and driven from kind of from pillar to post. You know, we can't hang out under the bridge. We weren't really bothering anybody. And we can't hang out outside the church because security guards chase us off. So they feel they're being pushed from place to place, and they have nowhere to go. Because of higher rents now, it used to be in Oshawa you could get a pretty cheap room in a rooming house or a divided house.

And that's where a lot of people who were kind of on the margins in Oshawa would live. That's much more expensive now. So they say, you know, where on earth are we supposed to go? Yeah, because this isn't actually addressing the underlying issues here, right? This seems to be shooing people away from this specific area, but what about actually targeting the problems here? Yeah, that's exactly what advocates for the poor and the homeless are saying. Look, let's take more action on the supply side and get more shelter spaces, more housing in Oshawa. Because Oshawa has been taking quite a strict policy toward the homeless. For instance, there was an organization giving out snacks at the main public park.

They said, no, you can't do that anymore because people are congregating in that park and we can't keep it clean and so on. Why is the city kind of taking this hard line here? I think they're getting pressure from the public, for sure. I know that in this coming election, the municipal election, there's a lot of candidates running on a kind of clean-up downtown platform. Interestingly, the mayor himself was once homeless. In his earlier life, he was addicted to alcohol and drugs and homeless for a period. What is the city doing to, I guess, help people experiencing homelessness? There must be some measures there that are in place to actually assist people in this situation? You know, Oshawa has a big homelessness task force that's been going for a few years,

and it's been pushing for better supports. On housing, though, most of the housing that's been built there has been built sort of in the north end of the city. It's new housing, it's condos, it's rental apartments for newcomers to the city. It's not specifically aimed at the homeless. There's a few shelters, but they say they're over capacity. So I don't know if they've done much on the housing side for the homeless. The police have been fairly active in sort of taking a new approach that doesn't penalize people who are using drugs and sort of checks in on them more than arresting them because they realize they can't arrest their way out of this problem. Go back to this device that we started talking about. I just wonder, I guess, how you view this, Marcus, because you've been covering this file for a long time, and you've seen lots of different approaches to managing this issue. What does the use of that sound device say to you?

I mean, I guess there was something that bothered me about it right away. It seemed, and this is something that people there said to me as well, it seems the sort of thing you might do to keep pests away you know i do understand that there is a problem there and that there is public concern about crime a disorder and we're seeing this all across the country uh vancouver just elected a new mayor who has uh promised to kind of clean up the streets or make the streets less dangerous in Vancouver. So it's a tough issue. The only question is, is this a way to solve it

with a device that makes it unbearable to be near? We'll be back in a minute. Let's talk about this as an election issue, though, because you mentioned this a bit earlier. And Oshawa, like all cities in Ontario right now, is in the midst of an election where issues like this around public safety and supporting people experiencing homelessness, they're coming up in elections. I mean, it's a growing problem across Canada. I mean, you see it in Vancouver on the downtown east side where there are 10 encampments right on the street in downtown. You certainly see it in Toronto where I think the city says there are 150 places in the city where there are at least some tents. The city has removed some of them from some of the bigger parks. And smaller cities too,

I've seen it a lot. Residents get mad. They demand that the mayor and the city council do something about it. There's a big tension in just about every urban area in Canada about it. Ken Sim. His campaign focused on public disorder, as you mentioned. He pledged more police officers, psychiatric nurses to deal with some of the issues that we've been talking about. But I wonder, because in contrast, I feel like in Toronto, we're not hearing quite as much about homelessness specifically in the municipal election race in Toronto. Why is this issue maybe not as being talked about as much here as it is in a place like Vancouver. Well, I think Vancouver just has a uniquely visible problem in the downtown east side, which is, and I've been to some American cities with downtown issues and places in the developed world that are super poor. And I've really never seen anything quite like what you see on the streets of Vancouver. It's quite shocking and it's gotten worse every time I've visited. So it's risen to the surface

there. It could easily do so here as well. It was certainly a big issue when the mayor ordered a major park, Trinity Bellwoods, to be cleared of tents some time ago. This election campaign has been a little bit of a quiet one, to be honest. The mayor is kind of coasting to re-election, so it hasn't popped up, but I'm sure it will again. Even though we haven't necessarily heard too much about the issue of homelessness, the issue of housing affordability is top of mind, seems to be top of mind, at least for a lot of people. I guess I wonder what you think about that contrast that we were talking about housing affordability, but I guess we don't necessarily translate that interest to this issue of homelessness. They're mixed issues, but they're

sort of separate in a way. There's affordability. Young people in particular can't afford to buy a house. And then there's the need for housing for low-income people or people who are actually indigent or homeless. And so Toronto has been, in our case, been doing quite a bit to provide temporary and supportive housing for the homeless. The mayor has been touting some stats on there. His critics say it's nowhere near enough, but they've certainly accelerated the building of,

A, shelter beds for temporary accommodation, and B, quickly constructed housing for the very poor and homeless. Are there any solutions that we've seen that actually could be something to look at to help this issue? Yeah. I mean, this solution, I guess, of very rapidly constructed modular housing is being tried in Toronto now. It's been tried in several places. And the idea is, look, it takes so long to get low-income housing built. We need to do something really quick. So what Toronto has done is taken parcels of municipal land that are surplus. And it's given a contract to look, you have a year or whatever, six months

to build this modular housing that's thrown up very quickly. It's very simple. And the city's gone out on a limb in a bit because some neighborhoods aren't crazy about the idea. But the mayor, to his credit, has gone out to all the meetings where this has been discussed and said, look, we just have to do this.

We have a huge problem here. We're going to manage it as well as we can. But just to say, not in my backyard, we'll cut it. So Toronto's having some success with that, I think you could say. And I guess we're talking Toronto specifically, just to bring it back to Oshawa, I guess. Is Oshawa kind of experimenting or trying kind of some similar solutions to hopefully find some kind of success as well? So attitudes are changing, but then you've got this pushback from the other side that says, look, there's just too much disorder there. There's people leaving garbage in front of my business.

There's somebody using drugs in the park when I take my kids there. And so there's a lot of tension still over this issue. Marcus, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you. Before you go, another thing you should know. I have therefore spoken to His Majesty the King to notify him that I am resigning as leader of the Conservative Party. After only six weeks on the job, British Prime Minister Liz Truss announced she's stepping down. She'll be the shortest serving prime minister in British history. Another leadership election for the UK's Conservative Party is set to be held within the next week, and there are talks of the possible return of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. You can read the latest at theglobeandmail.com.

That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms Our producers are Madeline White Cheryl Sutherland and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin David Crosby edits the show Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor Thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you next week