Re: Paul Ayotte's letter of July 24. Because life has been relatively kind to some of us does not make our life the standard for judging others' lives. My own life to date may resemble Mr. Ayotte's but that is because I was not sexually abused by my father from age 3, nor diagnosed with a learning disability, nor left orphaned and homeless at age 13, nor given shelter by a biker gang where I was introduced to drugs, nor employed in an industry that gave me silicosis, nor left with severe PTSD from horrifying experiences as a police informant which was the only way I could maybe make something positive out of my life.

This is typical of the kind of lives of houseless people. There are endless circumstances behind every person we meet that should keep us from ever judging them from the standpoint of our own personal experiences and good fortune. Respect is not "earned." It is the first response of one human being recognizing another.

Housing crises like this current one are complex because human lives are complex, and because in the mid-1990s, senior governments abandoned rent-geared-to-income as the model for funding our social responsibility for housing as a human service, like health. They essentially turned it over to the private sector, downloading to municipalities whatever small funding or other perks councils could find to sweeten the pot of private sector developers' profit-taking from a public sector responsibility - caring for those most in need.

Until housing as a human right appears in public policy and is understood by us all as what we do as Canadians for each other from our compassion and sense of justice, we will continue to fall into more housing crises. This one is not Peterborough's first, just the first to have a tent city. Judging others' lives will worsen the social - and yes, I'll say it, class - divisions in our community, just when we most need to come together for the climate crisis and its economic destruction which will hit the under-resourced hardest.

The current collaborative response among city councillors, staff and community service agencies is the right response and the only one available to cover the immediate crisis. Even if new "affordable" housing units appeared overnight, that would not solve the real crisis - that of making housing a human right because we are a community of compassionate people.