Let Me Fix That Headline For You

I like the author of the story warning posters not to be disparaging or personal in their comments. How could you not be. The guy lives like a total slob, which demonstrates he has no respect for himself or the property he lives in. This should be used as a case study in journalism school, of what not to do when selecting subjects to support your story.

"Sufficient" affordable housing is by definition, a con. If it ever happened, it would
lower the value of mortgaged properties and that would place them "underwater".
Don't believe most home owners would be in favour of that initiative.
.

Yeah well...

It is said that men are bears with furniture...perhaps with some merit....as I look about my cave.

I have a plaque by the door.

"Although you'll find our house a mess,
Come in, sit down converse
It doesn't always look like this
Some days it's even worse."

I'm comfortable..so's the dog...the roof don't leak...I have a woodstove......

I don't believe the journo's queue-jumping first comment in the comment section. Fortunately many of the commenters are taking the mickey out of her for it in subsequent comments.

One of the main reasons that there is a lack of affordable housing is government interference in the ability to evict some of the destructive renters and pigs in general. Renters now seem to have more rights than landlords. If the press uses this slob for a hard luck story, it won't get better any time soon. Many landlords see eviction and renovation as their only escape from these destructive people and don't take a chance on renting again. My sympathy goes to the landlord.

But remember, it's "for those less fortunate".

@ Cyclist
Nothing wrong with helping the less fortunate, but only if it's appreciated and some effort is made to abide by common sense ground rules. I do share your sarcasm though.

Rent Control, huh?

i pay $650/month in downtown calgary

In the early `50s a Toronto slum became attractive to Italian immigrants, many of them northern Italians with building skills.

Ten years later it was no longer a slum.

I've lived variously in barracks with four guys to a room -- (spotless by order of the CSM, CSC or whomever), cheap rental accomodation with two room-mates (messy but clean), alone in a two bedroom apartment (a bit messy), a trailer (messy but clean), a detached split-level, and a townhouse condo (clean and orderly exceopt for the den). At no time has a hole spontaneously appeared in a wall. At no time has a window spontaneously broken, and at no time was the place messy unless I'd been on a run of on-call commitments and amazingly, the place cleaned up immediately after I or my room-mates cleaned it. Perhaps some lefty could enlighten me about how mess, dirt, holes in the wall and broken glass just seem to magically appear among certain populations.

From the article - "But, it is hard to imagine anyone suggesting they deserve to live in such squalor." Um, I can.

And Chris's apartment looks like that because he's been busy? Give me a break!

Mary Agnes Welch is a soft ball "reporter" in Winnipeg whose stories never fail to miss the point.
She has written on many subjects that all end in some variation of "wicked middle/upper class jerks need to fix things for "working class" people".
In Manitoba, "working class" is code for unemployeed, underemployeed, youths in gangs, aboriginals living on social assistence, union members and basically everyone else looking for a handout. If you don't collect money from some level of government in the form of assistance as your main source of income, you are considered part of the problem according to our dear Miss Welch.

I used the report abuse button on her, I would suggest similar goings on may happen in the near future.

Diphtheria , Cholera with other urban plagues used to control pests like this. Including the politically stupid. Natures way of housekeeping.

In Winnipeg the five vampires of the apocalypse are the Government of Manitoba, the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba Telephones, Manitoba Hydro, and Manitoba Public Insurance, all of which rip off the taxpayer and provide zero service mostly and minimal service on the very occasional good day. Screw the taxpayer/customer. Only Manitoba Telephones has competition, but they still behave like collective farm management.

Just another finger wagging lecture from the gaping dimbulb MAWelch .... repulsive, feminist, commie that she is .... she would not lift one finger to help anyone clean up.

Care to bet her own house is a pigsty as well?

Not being the best housekeeper in the world I can sympathize to a degree with these people, but only to a degree. I've finally allowed a yard care company to do my yard but refuse to let anyone inside my house to clean. Like DrD, I find the place gets quite messy after a week of 14 hour days but I usually lose something important in the mess and have to clean it up to find it.

Many of the people who reduce rental housing to the form depicted in the article really should be living in long term psychiatric care. Riverview once had thousands of patients who had clean living quarters but then the theory that the mentally ill could be managed in the community possessed the BC government of the time and Riverview was emptied out onto E. Hastings. So, now one has schizophrenics with a heroin and cocaine habit (but of course using government supplied sterile syringes at government supervised injection sites) as well as being HIV+ and HepC+. A few of the formerly happy residents of Riverview have gone to quite extreme measures in an attempt to get back into a psychiatric institution and more than a few have died in the process.

Hoarding is an interesting problem in this population. If one happens to be well off and reasonably intelligent, then hoarding behavior is viewed as "collecting" and described positively such as Jay Leno's massive automobile collection. OTOH, if an individual who is of borderline intelligence, schizophrenic and lives in a large city, then hoarding behavior isn't looked at as fondly. The problem with large cities is that they are full of dumpsters containing treasures beyond belief. I've had many patients spend the majority of their lives in dumpsters making one amazing find after another. My dumpster diving was carried out by proxy as I'd pay a couple of my patients to bring in old laptops which, astoundingly, people will simply toss in the trash. I've had a discarded portable Japanese EKG machine brought in as well as some laptops which were so ancient that they were probably worth far more than the $20 I paid the dumpster diver.

Whenever these people get a place, the first thing they do is to start carrying their new-found treasures home and, in short order, they've run out of space and usually end up getting evicted around this point.

The severely disturbed hoarders have lost the ability to discriminate what is valuable from what is trash and just keep everything. These are the people that should be in long term psychiatric care.

A long time ago, when the old country kids were young, I thought I would help my overworked Old Country Girl out by getting her a cleaning maid to come in once a week. That was a total bust. She spent more time cleaning getting ready for the cleaning person then she did before we hired the service.

I have learned that you never, NEVER, let anyone come into your house - particularly visiting nurses. They make reports back to the various thuggery departments about everything in your house, its cleanliness, the medicines you have in your medicine cabiner, whether you have throw rugs on the floor, and any animals (dogs, cats) in the house. We never had any repercussions from DHS about this yet, but we will not let visiting nurses on our property. There is nothing that they do that we can't do ourselves.

I agree with Loki that many of these people should be in the loony bin along with all those strange people downtown in the cities.

The City of Edmonton keeps talking about downtown residential development as a high and mighty goal. Ain't ever goona happen since they gave the streets to the people kicked out of the nuthouses.

40 years ago, I never felt the slightest bit threatened downtown at night. In the years I spent going to theatres, bars, etc. I saw maybe a couple bar fights involving only fists. Today there are seriously frigged up people occupying the downtowns.