I Heart Edmonton

10 Year Plan to End Homelessness By Emil Tiedemann For most Edmontonians, downtown is a place for weekend drinks and dancing, for dinner at high-end restaurants, coffee at trendy cafes, gleaming office and condo towers, or markets with fresh produce and locally-made crafts.  For others, downtown is despair and discouragement. It means sleeping on park benches and in alleyways, dragging their things around in abandoned shopping carts, belittled by passersby and threatened by others who are also so far below the poverty line that we couldn’t possibly imagine putting ourselves in their worn-out shoes.    Joanne. Photo by Jerry Cordeiro ( Humans of Edmonton Experience ). Many of the people who we see on the streets in these conditions have or have had problems with drugs, alcohol, gambling, or all three, though not everyone who is considered “homeless” in Edmonton has substance abuse issues.  Some are folks who have recently moved to the city and couldn’t ...

e H OMELESSNESS is a dilemma that faces every major city in the world, and Edmonton is by no means the exception. It's an epidemic that has, believe it or not, increased 125% since 2000, and it's a problem that faces people from all walks of life. In addition to the personal pains of homeless individuals and the stigmatism that tags along, homelessness costs as much as $135,000 per person (according to Calgary stats). I took the photos below four years ago, in November 2005, when I headed downtown with one intention in mind: to capture the problem on film. The first displaced person I came into contact with was Joanne . She wore frayed garments too big for her battered frame, and men's work boots that looked like they would come off her feet with every step. When I asked Joanne if I could take a few snapshots of her, she said yes before I could even finish the question, as though this was nothing new for her. She immediately sat against the wall of the old Army & Navy b...