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1/ While local politicians love blaming provincial and federal governments for intimate partner violence, #Brampton & #Peel are complicit in women being beaten and killed. My family sheltered a woman fleeing intimate partner violence, & this is what I learned from it. https://twitter.com/patrickbrownont/status/1290386579446542336
2/ The shelters are full in #Peel, both for intimate partner violence, and for women experiencing homelessness. This has become "normal". Do you know why they are full? Partially it is that space hasn't kept up with population, but a bigger factor is the housing shortage.
3/ People who experienced physical or psychological abuse are generally also victims of financial abuse, so when they escape, & try to restart their lives, they need something affordable. In #Brampton, Affordable Housing doesn't really exist, because #Peel doesn't want to fund it
4/ The #Peel Housing Plan is a cruel joke, it talks big, but there isn't funding, see @PointerBrampton. Certain members of Regional Council will talk about Black Lives Matter, or addressing the route causes of violence, but they only want to pay for cops, not fixing the problem.
5/ Decades of bad planning are how we got here, but there has been a whole bunch of bad planning recently, too. See, #Brampton has focused on approving new single family homes, and didn't want to approve affordable smaller units, which lower income people need.
6/ Even #Brampton's incredibly poor handling of student housing is exacerbating the intimate partner violence issue. Overcrowding pushes people into relationships to reduce costs, and it keeps them trapped in bad relationships.
7/ The only places that would be in the budget of someone fleeing an abusive situation with kids is something like renting part of a housing, which in #Brampton is often very difficult to have legally allowed. Subdividing a house is generally the cheapest way to add new housing.
8/ Why is this stuff banned? Often its copied and pasted from other municipalities. A number of similar rules to what Brampton has were struck down as unconstitutional, for example, by-laws preventing unrelated people from living together was struck down as unconstitutional.
9/ Brampton also has laws that have been found to be illegal in other municipalities, for example Kitchener had its face kicked in at the Ontario Municipal Board by the Ontario Human Right Commission, because separation distances for lodging houses is blatantly discriminatory.
10/ Why do I bring up lodging houses? They are as cheap as housing gets for a single person and in Brampton, they are de facto banned, using separation distances. Want to subdivide a house in a way other than a basement apartment? Good luck with that.
11/ Why did rules blocking subdividing houses get put in place? Italians and Portuguese people were buying up houses, subdividing them, and renting out portions so they could afford to own them. In case you are wondering, over time those apartments did get deconverted into SFHs.
12/ Furthermore, other rules such as one's requiring households to be related by blood also existed, and were struck down as illegal. See @CheryllCase's article on zoning and women https://thewalrus.ca/how-neighbourhoods-are-built-to-keep-out-single-women/
13/ #Brampton building a city on the core principles of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" has resulted in extremely negative consequences for society. The US is having a reckoning about how it's system of land use planning is racist, we need to also
14/ Land use planning gets copied and pasted all over the place uncritically, including by Canadian cities. If you plagiarize chunks of racial segregation and implement it in a city, is it still racist? What if you copy and paste patriarchal rules without understanding them?
15/ Brampton's zoning by-laws are racist and misogynistic, at least in outcomes, if not in intent. It is creating a worsening violence crisis, both in term of gang violence, and violence against women, and the City is doing very little. A fish rots from the head down.
16/ Judge people based on their actions, not their words. If they claim to want to address the root causes of violence, check their actions. What did they vote to fund in the budget. If they wanted to increase funding to police, but not social services, there is a problem.
17/ if someone really wants to fix a problem, they'd actually investigate it & trace the issues that create or exacerbate it. I have seen no evidence that Brampton is even taking a serious look into the root causes of intimate partner violence, let alone doing anything.
