by JULIET WATERS

There's a West African proverb that goes, "The beginning of wisdom is to get you a roof." Read in the context of our affluent society, this sounds like one of those adorably insightful little folk sayings. Read in the context of Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown, it has a sharper edge. If there's one clear truth that emerges from Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's diary of his experiences living in Tent City, the Toronto shantytown demolished in 2002, it's what we are really denying the homeless.

They may always be able to count on our spare change to survive, but wisdom is not something you can throw into someone's hat. Usually you have to find your own way to it, and that's hard when there's nowhere to gather your thoughts. Bishop-Stall is a great case study of how someone with all the advantages of a middle-class upbringing, nice parents, a good education and apparently a functional level of sanity, can become astonishingly self destructive in a pretty short time, lacking a decent place to live.

A Concordia creative writing graduate, Bishop-Stall set out to mend a broken heart by setting himself one of those romantic neo-Kerouac kind of projects. He would move to Tent City, where, for a brief period at the turn of the millennium, a few dozen thieves, vagabonds, cons and ex-cons constructed an anarchic community out of whatever materials they could find, scam or beg.

As the place became more of a cause célèbre, Tent City was both supported and undone by the equally anarchic forces of whimsical charity. A perfect example, which happened before Bishop-Stall arrived, was this story of disastrous Christmas blessings. One Christmas, when the shantytown was still small, someone got the idea to leave a cooked turkey on the doorstep of each dwelling. Unfortunately, someone else had arranged for the residents to go on a trip for a few days. When they returned the turkeys were gone and Tent City was newly infested with rats.

By the time Bishop-Stall arrived, actual tents were no longer an option, a fact he discovered on the gruesome night he spent with an army of vermin crawling through his bedding. Housing, however, was not really the biggest problem. There were enough charity groups donating materials and labour. The most difficult challenge was mastering the politics of living in a community where violence, paranoia, crack and crime were intermittently relieved with the kind of fierce blood loyalties and generosity that inevitably arise when lives are in constant danger.

Bishop-Stall has been criticized by one activist for not being more conscious of his own privilege, since he always had the option of safe haven. Though he is guilty of romanticizing this experience from time to time, he manages to convince me, at least, that he soon experienced the kind of culture shock that would have made return difficult. He robbed a car of children's Christmas presents because he was terrified of the guy who put him up to it. It must have been hard to imagine one day telling this story to his old middle-class pals. Shame is an incredibly powerful and insidious prison, and if someone as privileged as Bishop-Stall can get trapped in it, imagine how difficult escape is for those without resources.

In the end it's the thing Bishop-Stall is wrong about that is actually his greatest discovery. He believed that the destruction of the shantytown would mean the destruction of its citizens. He's shocked at a later reunion to see how dramatically those who received subsidized housing have thrived and pulled their lives together.

Then again, maybe finding one's own roof, forming this community, and developing pride in having built something so threatening it had to be destroyed, was, ironically, the necessary foundation for eventual re-integration. This is one of those debatable questions that one can only hope people will care enough about to debate.

Down To This by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Random House, hc, 475pp, $24.95