podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 It's been a minute since I've done one of these.

Today's episode is Housing for 2SLGBTQ + Youth on Hidden Stories of York Region. It's part of a four-part series on the housing crisis in York Region (for those of you not from around here, that's the mess of suburban sprawl north of Toronto where yours truly grew up). The episode features Jesse Vacarciuc, a youth worker with lived experience of homelessness, and Dr. Alex Abramovich, a professor and researcher. 

It focuses on the unique needs of homeless queer and trans youth*, and the ways in which current institutional structures fail them. I am old enough to remember when one teenage squeegie kid in my home town was cause for hysterical editorials in the local paper; now, Jesse relays the horrific stories of young people camping out in cemeteries because no shelter space or affordable housing was available to them. It challenges the notion of homelessness as an exclusively urban problem, and the image of the suburbs as insulated from the class issues that exist everywhere. It's very grounded in pragmatic problems and solutions, and I hope the right people listen to these voices.


* One ongoing critique I have overall with this type of content (not singling out this podcast in particular) is the heavy reliance on euphemism. Saying "people experiencing houselessness" doesn't get us any closer to solving the problem than saying "homelessness" does. This episode does quite well in terms of calling things what they are. /digression

Comments

[mistersmearcase]

The euphemism treadmill is so frustrating. In a year it will be something else and that will solve EVERYTHING.

[sabotabby]

It particularly grates with disability, as I have lived experience (ha ha ha) but I honestly feel it applies to any type of marginalization. I remember trying to teach kids not to say "that's so gay" and they immediately started saying "that's so homosexual." Which is exactly what this type of evasive language use teaches them to do. As long as you say the right words and not the wrong words, it's okay!

Unless "people currently experiencing houselessness" gets politicians to unload a massive amount of funding and resources and convinces them to crack down on exploitative landlords and enforce legislation on greedy developers and to force AirBnB to operate under vastly stricter parameters, I don't see the point in using it.

[minoanmiss]

Another veteran of a different euphemism treadmill salutes!

[sabotabby]

*high fives but misses because I'm also really uncoordinated in ways that have nothing to do with disability*

[frenzy]

Im sure youve heard me rant before, but as someone that has worked at homeless shelters, "houselessness" is kind of a pet peeve of mine. Additionally, like, if someone doesnt have a /house/ (say, apartment) that doesnt mean they are houseless. Even though... yeah.

Just frustrating.

[sabotabby]

One of my beefs with euphemism is that it always feels like privileged people are making up their mind that marginalized people need a thing, and it's always the thing that's easy to fix, like language, rather than the hard thing, like economies.