This is purely anecdotal, but in my experience, proponents of the 'HF creates slums' theory tend to fall into one of two camps:

- functionally blind

- landlords

The functionally blind (note that I'm not saying 'sight impaired...this is by design) tend to argue that homelessness is okay...as long as they can't see it. Often, they live in cities like mine (Regina, Canada) where for 3-4 months of the year, it is too cold to sleep outside. Because of this, homelessness in these cities often involves a mishmash of shelters, crashing on various couches, and sleeping in malls during the day/hanging out in coffee shops at night. The rest of the year, whether through policing or civic design, 'homelessness' consists of guerilla camping in parks and other out of the way places. HF does tend to make homelessness more visible. Programs generally start with a marketing campaign designed to attract landlords, then word gets out on which buildings house the formerly homeless.

And, that's when the functionally blind start to complain. Often, the complaints take the same form as people who protest against halfway houses opening up in their neighbourhoods. They print up flyers decrying the 'death' of their neighbourhood, and show up at city council meetings. Later, they seize onto minor crimes (ie - my sister's former roommate's cousin's veterinarian had her purse snatched two blocks from that building) to justify their beliefs.

Landlords are in a more precarious situation. Since HF does not have its own housing, it absolutely requires the support of landlords. Some HF programs are not terribly well funded so, while they guarantee that rent will be paid, they often require some form of discount to be financially feasible. That alone is a strike against them, at least from the perspective of business.

But, if you are a landlord and are willing to work with HF, you have a difficult choice. Realistically speaking, HF candidates have issues which create homelessness in the first place. Candidates often suffer from severe mental illness, chronic addiction, and health problems. They aren't always capable of basic upkeep in suites. So, do you offer up, say 15 suites in one building to the program, or do you spread the suites around multiple buildings. Some landlords have reported that the buildings that house HF candidates are more difficult to rent out and that the rent for all of the suites has to drop accordingly. This is one of the biggest reasons that landlords drop out of the program!

- end racism.

- end childhood sexual abuse.

- decriminalize all drugs, treat addiction as a health problem and make addictive drugs available under provincial prescription drug programs.

- invest billions of dollars into mental health care.

If you think you can accomplish any of the above, I'll not only vote for you, but I'll quit my job and work for you (for free).

Traditional anti-homelessness programs kind of stink because they work in stages. Candidates have to pass a stage in order to move onto the next and if they fail, they move backwards. The problem with this is that it is hard to stay motivated to stay sober if you live in the same dormitory style shelter where you used to live, where all of your goods are subject to theft, and where you are surrounded by people who are high/drunk on the substance you are addicted to! The other problem is that if you stumble, you generally move backwards and end up even further away from independent housing.

I am Canadian where a striking percentage of the homeless population (especially in the west) is aboriginal. In Canada, we have something called The Indian Act which provides certain benefits to 'status Indians'. One of the benefits it provides is that income earned on a reserve is not subject to federal income tax. The big problem with this is that reserves are often horrid places with absolutely no employment and substandard housing. The second biggest problem is that the Indian Act also works to make the concept of status extinct, but that's far from the point. As an example, the reserve where I spent the first two years of my life (I am not aboriginal, but my Dad was in the RCMP) is more like a concentration camp than a community.

I argue (and this pisses just about everyone off) that one way to cut down on aboriginal homelessness would be to amend the Indian Act so that any money invested on a reserve (provided that the venture employed a certain number of people) would trigger an immediate tax credit and not be subject to any Federal capital gains taxes. Further, I'd argue that any profits earned from these ventures should never be subject to any form of Federal income tax.

Because aboriginal people with status (aka 'status Indians') do not pay federal income tax, if you provided strong tax incentives to investment, you can see a route through which manufacturing in Canada has a similar cost structure to manufacturing in either Asia or in our NAFTA partner countries. Employment on reserves would encourage aboriginal people to move back to their communities, provide more pressure to the federal government to fix the woeful state of housing, and ultimately give people an easier route to gainful employment. Studies have shown that when you bring aboriginal people back into their community and their culture, their mental health/addiction outcomes improve.

Alas, the odds of that happening are likely equivalent to the odds that I will be drafted in the first round of the next NHL draft. (I am 38 years old and don't know how to skate).

So, I think that HF is about the best policy that we have. Though, I would like to see it amended.

Purely from a business point of view, I would like to see HF provide more services (financial and otherwise) to the landlords that participate. I argue that landlords who participate in HF often put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by doing so. Therefore, I would like to see strong municipal and federal tax incentives for their participation.

Further, I argue that HF programs themselves could do a far better job of moving their candidates into jobs that they can do. There is no way in hell that many of the people I know who would be HF candidates could ever work in a traditional 'job', but I would like HF to do a better job of exploring non-traditional options.

For example, I am heavy into street papers and think that panhandlers are likely the greatest marketing force on the planet. When a friend and I launched our paper, we gave out a few hundred copies to two highly trusted friends in hopes of doing a nice soft launch to work out the problems. The 'soft launch' generated absolutely massive media coverage - we were featured in every print publication, more than half of the radio stations, and 2/3 of the television stations in our city. It would have cost me thousands of dollars to get that kind of coverage at a PR firm. More interesting, our advertisers had tremendously high conversions, to the point that within two months, our advertisers were offering to pay more to keep their competitors out!

One good friend of mine who sold the magazine those first days suffered from schizophrenia and had spent most of his adult life panhandling. In one very upsetting conversation, he remarked that he always believed that people were following him around with microphones and he wasn't sure, but he was absolutely convinced that this time they were real.

Or, I'm reminded of my friend Scott, an insanely talented artist who buys canvases, paints them at night in his shelter, and then sells paintings on the street.

Consequently, I would argue that HF could turn into something of an incubator for street businesses. Everyone, even the homeless, has an incredible array of talent and often it is more a challenge of how to monetize the talent without contributing to the underlying problem. I can foresee all sorts of businesses from online/bricks and mortar art galleries, to graffiti remediation businesses, to clothing design companies, to full blown guerilla marketing teams emerging out of HF programs. The HF of my dreams would give candidates the option of learning basic building maintenance by providing ultra low cost maintenance/building management services to the landlords who participate.

I also tend to argue that HF needs to do a better job of attracting a more diverse set of professionals to run their programs. Traditionally, they draw from social workers whereas I tend to argue that they should be drawing more from business people. Startup founders in particular have so much in common with homeless people that it would be a match made in heaven.