I had a coffee in one hand and a fresh baked cookie in the other when a homeless friend stuffed a folded sheet of paper in my shirt pocket with a cryptic comment about retirement homes.

Emptying my pockets later at my habitation I found and unfolded the sheet, which turned out to be a page of ready-to-assemble wood storage and recreational building kits from a home improvement store.

Some were pretty spiffy looking and given the cost of housing these days, extremely attractive in price. Which may well explain the warning “before finalizing your purchase, always check with your local building code official for any requirements”.

With my friend currently residing in a tent under a bridge, I can certainly understand the buildings attraction for him. Spacious 8 X 10 foot floor space – with a floor yet – space to stand up, luxurious accommodation compared to his tent.

He raises an interesting point, or is that an interesting idea, to ponder.

We have hundreds of homeless currently on the streets of our cities, with more people becoming homeless as time passes. We have no housing, make that no housing affordable to the homeless and creating the needed affordable housing will take years once (or if?) we ever begin to address the growing need for housing people can afford.

We have decommissioned schools surrounded by open playing fields. What about putting up a community, a “subdivision” as it were, of ready-to-assemble kit buildings? The school building would provide washrooms, bathing facilities and lockers for safe storage of belongings.

The classrooms and offices would provide space that could be used for a wide variety of purposes by a wide variety of organizations and government agencies.

I acknowledge there would be problems, but I point out that our current situation is full of a growing number of problems.

It is an interesting idea, hearkening back to the soup lines and shanty towns that sprung up in city parks in the Great Depression.

I know many will not find this an interesting idea or think it has any value or should be considered. They can easily remove it from consideration by advancing good, practical, workable ideas.

Without practical, workable ideas we are going to fall back to soup lines and shanty towns in our parks and open spaces even though one would have thought we would have come up with better ideas and ways of addressing poverty and housing in the seventy years since then.