A Solution To Reduce "Homeless" Cost...

...licence those individuals, and make them declare their income and pay taxes, who have staked out areas of the city as their private peserve. A few of these are:
 * Allen Expressway At Shepherd
 * Allen Expressway At Lawrence
 * Allen Expressway At Eglinton
 * Metro (Dominion) At Lawrence And Keele
 * Sobeys On Ridelle Avenue
and I am sure readers could list the peserves in their neighborhood.
 
Toronto's homeless hideout: Levy

The results of the city's homeless count won't be ready until after the city's budget is finalized. Does that make sense?

By Sue-Ann Levy, City Hall Columnist

Last Wednesday at one of the few meetings they’ll hold to review this year’s $9.2-billion operating budget, councillors spent a mere four minutes dealing with the costs to manage the city’s homeless files.
In fact, none of the left-wingers on David Miller’s hand-picked budget committee asked a single question about the homeless budget — which tops $161 million this year.
That $161 million — which includes $14.7 million for the Streets to Homes program with its battalion of 70 social workers — does not include the tens of millions of dollars that will go into affordable housing projects.
I didn’t expect for a minute that any of the socialists would question the expenditures on the homeless file seeing as they’ve been responsible for ensuring it truly has become an industry at City Hall.
But — other than Coun. Doug Holyday — not a single councillor representing the right was there to poke holes in this, or any other budget, making me wonder whether members of council’s Responsible Government Group have decided they no longer intend to be responsible for keeping their NDP compatriots’ fiscal feet to the fire.
It’s rather obscene that they care so little about how our tax dollars are spent.
They should have been questioning why if, as city officials claim, 2,800 hardcore homeless have found homes since 2005 under the mayor’s Streets to Homes program, there are still street people parked on grates all over downtown Toronto and sleeping on Nathan Phillips Square.
Shelter way over-budget
If anyone purporting to be fiscally responsible here at Socialist Silly Hall was on the ball, they’d be asking about the status of the 40-bed Peter St. homeless shelter, the renovation costs of which have climbed to nine times the original $560,000 budget.
The shelter, which was supposed to open in late 2008, won’t be ready until the end of May at the earliest, if there are no unforeseen construction delays, I was told last week.
But in particular, they should have been asking why, after nearly one year, the results of the latest homeless street count are still not out.
After all, shouldn’t those results be used to determine what needs to be funded, and how much, under the homeless file this year?
Wasn’t the $120,000 census — taken last April 15 — supposed to determine whether the massive number of dollars thrown at the problem since the last count in 2006 have achieved any results?
Phil Brown, general manager of shelter, support and housing, told me the census results won’t be released until next month’s community services committee meeting, scheduled for April 23.
That’s exactly one week after council is expected to pass this year’s operating budget.
But Brown denied the timing had anything to do with ensuring the homeless budget is passed first.
He said “workload issues” have created the hold-up, noting that if not for last summer’s strike, the census results would have been out already.
“Very simply, bottom line it is workload,” he said, noting “nothing could further from the truth” that the results are being held until after their budget is passed.
He also insisted the results won’t be dated once they come out a year after they were taken.
“They will still be very useful,” he said.
Staff of 759
Now Brown is always a helpful guy. But surely to goodness, given the 759 staff in shelter, support and housing department, he could assign one or two to massage the numbers, er, do the analysis.
Holyday thinks it’s unacceptable that the release of the results has taken so long, especially since they would help define the problem and be of some value in preparing this year’s budget.
“They’re going through the budgeting process without the benefit of all this information,” he said. “If that makes sense to someone, I’d like to know about it.”