The cost benefit analysis for urban living in North America is no longer supportable. Homeless encampments are turning downtowns into open toilets. This will eventually drive away the businesses that pay taxes to fund social and mental health services. People won't shop or bring their families to neighbourhoods where crazy people are screaming and swinging baseball bats and machetes.

Last week I chased a homeless guy out of my complex who was helping himself to whatever wasn't nailed down in my neighbours' garages. I don't accept that poverty, mental health or addiction gives you the right to violate people's sense of security. The fact that I had to have this nearly violent confrontation has violated my sense of boundary. As all of us have some family members suffering mental health maladies, I am not unsympathetic but no cohort of the population has the right to defile public space as is happening today in North American cities.

I don't put much faith in political will to act on urban decay. The cities will come close to being lost before they can be redeemed.