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The cover of Down To This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown. (FPinfomart: Restricted, Canada.com: Restricted) |
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From Tent City, lessons on homelessness
National Post
Friday, August 6, 2004
Page: A14
Section: Comment
Byline: Jonathan Kay
Column: Jonathan Kay
Source: National Post
Until it fell victim to bulldozers in 2002, Tent City was one of the most famous squatter camps in the world. A collection of leaky shacks erected on an unused industrial property near downtown Toronto, the community was hallowed ground to the city's anti-poverty activists -- at once a symbol of society's heartlessness, and a monument to the grit of its victims. Suburban yuppies looked down on it in wonder as they drove home on the Gardner Expressway. Documentary filmmakers, photographers, missionaries and social workers swarmed the place -- journalists in particular. Even The New York Times did a piece on it -- "Amid Prosperity, Toronto Shows Signs of Fraying" -- putting forward Tent City as a metaphor for Hogtown's decline.
But the stories were superficial. Reporters who visited either came away traumatized by the stench and squalor, or set the residents up as loveable hoboes doing valiant battle against City Hall and Home Depot, the property's legal owner. Few could stomach the place for more than a couple of hours. The earnest scribe who spends a week on subway grates and in government-run shelters seeking fodder for an "eyewitness report" on homelessness has become a cliche of the urban newsroom. But living alongside coked-up ex-cons in a self-governing shantytown infested with rats, hepatitis, drug addicts and vicious dogs -- that requires a level of journalistic courage few in my trade possess.
A heroic exception is Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall. In November, 2001, the then-27-year-old B.C. native put down stakes in Tent City. He didn't move out till September, 2002, and only then because of the bulldozers.
Bishop-Stall's story -- told in a new book, Down To This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown -- is by turns harrowing, hilarious and touching. He has produced nothing less than a masterpiece of urban anthropology -- a must-read for anyone who pretends to understand the roots of homelessness.
The standard take among activists is that homelessness is a symptom of poverty, a lack of affordable housing and a breakdown of society's safety net. In Down to This, a different picture emerges. Many of the Tent City denizens the author describes are fallen members of the Middle Class. What kept them down was crack cocaine. The men fought over the stuff, the women prostituted themselves for it. In the community's final days, the whole place was colonized -- quite literally -- by dealers.
There are a dozen emotionally exhausting tragedies played out on the pages of Down to This. None is more agonizing than that of Eddie, a tough guy who blossoms into ecstatic fatherly pride at the birth of his child. Bounding home from the hospital with his girlfriend, he announces plans to give up crack, leave Tent City, move into an apartment, find a job -- if that's what it takes to get Child Services to hand over the child. Back at his shack, Eddie lights up a celebratory crack pipe, insisting it will be his last.
And then the drugged months pass, and the baby slowly fades from his thoughts. By the time Tent City folds, he has renounced all pride, performing menial tasks for the local drug kingpin in return for a rock or two.
But even the drugs, toxic as they are, seem a symptom of something larger. In Bishop-Stall's interviews with his neighbours, child abuse is the universal back story. And in most cases, there are other soul-destroying experiences added to the mix: family deaths, prison, abandonment. The result is an urge to self-destruction that asserts itself whenever steady employment, a safe place to live or a spot in a rehab program materializes.
As Eddie put it: "That's why I started beating myself up ... 'cause I was just a dirty rotten piece of s--t. Today, when I didn't need to flip out, I flipped out. Why? To punish me -- to make sure I don't get the kid."
Earlier this summer, Toronto's NOW Magazine, a left-wing news-and-arts weekly, published an attack on Down to This by a writer named Kathy Hardill. The substance of it was that, by telling the sordid truth about Tent City, Bishop-Stall had knocked down the idea that the homeless poor were mere victims. This in turn undermines the case for more low-income housing, the left's traditional panacea for homelessness. To Hardill, this makes the author a class traitor.
But Bishop-Stall's views are more complex than that. In his epilogue, he does, finally, come around to public housing -- just not for the reasons proffered by Layton and Hardill.
Even crackheads seek social sanction. And what made Tent City such a pathological place was that it legitimized self-destruction: There are few other communities in Canada where selling a kitten for crack money is seen as normal behaviour. Once Bishop-Stall's neighbours had been forced to trade their shacks for subsidized apartments, on the other hand, at least a few of them started to rebuild their lives. It was not so much that someone else was paying their rent -- but that they didn't wake up every morning to see their sickness reflected in other people's faces.
"It was a circus in there," Bishop-Stall writes of Tent City. "And we were all swept up in it. When the show was strong we all laughed along and kept on raging. And when it fell apart we all fell apart with it, raging even more. But once we left, the circus was gone. And then it came down to each one of us, and what we could accomplish on our own."
In other words, it takes a village to validate a drug addict. The lesson of Down to This is that you don't just need to separate the urban destitute from their drugs and their demons. Sometimes, you have to separate them from each other as well.
Illustration:
• Black & White Photo: The cover of Down To This: Squalor and
Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown.
Idnumber: 200408060181
Edition: National
Story Type: Column
Note: Jonathan Kay is Comment Pages Editor of the National Post. jkay@nationalpost.com
Length: 969 words
Keywords: HOMELESS PEOPLE; BOOKS
Illustration Type: P
PRODUCTION FIELDS
BASNUM: 4184553
NDATE: 20040806
NUPDATE: 20040806
DOB: 20040806
POSITION: 3
