Ending Homelessness in Victoria

by Chris Johnson

As a stand-alone document, the Mayor’s Task Force Report contained some challenging objectives for dealing with homelessness. As a blueprint for ending homelessness in ten years, it was woefully inadequate, to put it politely.

What’s missing from the Coalition’s efforts is a clear plan outlining it’s objectives, such as Calgary and Edmonton have.

The National Alliance to End Homelessness (down in the States), which started the trend in municipal ten year plans back in 2000 with it’s report “A Plan Not A Dream: How to End Homelessness in Ten Years” followed up on that report in 2006 with “A New Vision: What is in Community Plans to End Homelessness”. In the report the NAEH surveys some of the 350+ municipal Ten Year Plans that are now in existance.

The Housing First model is central to all of these plans, as it is in Victoria. Beyond that are objectives which address not only gaps in service provision, but systemic factors which cause homelessness. This includes streamlining and funding increases for all current services, early childhood education, strategies to help people transition from foster care, hospital and prison, increase in wages and income assistance, improved working conditions, expanded and improved health and public eduction systems, landlord/tenant education programs, a range of transitional housing including low-barrier shelters, detox and rehab centres, a ‘one-stop’ social service centre and case management, and a housing assistance centre, to name just the bare minimum needed to end one of societies most challenging problems.

Most, if not all of these programs and services need to be funded by the provincial and federal government, which are in no way currently committed to a poverty reduction strategy. If the coalition can draft strategies for each of these objectives, locate the funding, identify who will implement each of these steps and assist them with capacity building to do so, it may come close to ending homelessness. Even this approach is an oversimplified one however, given that poverty and inequality seem almost integral to the capitalist system.

To be further pessimistic about our chances here, the economic downturn has meant that many cities are well behind in the goals they set years ago, and no one has yet to show any sign of making a ten year plan work. That Coalition representatives acknowledge difficulty achieving their limited set of goals is also troubling, but may just mean we need to be realistic about what can be achieved in just ten years.

What the Coalition needs to do is outline some clear objectives and let the public know what it can do to help make these objectives happen. If we are truly going to achieve something as monumental as ending homelessness in ten years or even twenty, it will require as many people as possible utilizing as much knowledge as possible to create a vast range of solutions, and a large lobby of citizens, organizations and institutions pressuring the higher levels of government to pay for these solutions. It’s admirable that the Coalition members want to end homelessness, but we need to know how they plan to do it, and we need to be empowered to be a greater part of the solution.

Two Years, to What End?
By Jason Youmans, Monday magazine

Dusting off the Mayor’s Task Force Report on ending homelessness

Two years have passed since the October 2007 release of the Mayor’s Task Force Report on Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addiction and Homelessness in Victoria. The document marked the first comprehensive look at the causes of—and solutions to—homelessness in the region, both in its overt and hidden forms. Moreover, it marked the first concrete admission by local government that families living in cramped motel rooms, elderly people pushing shopping carts piled high with belongings and wan drug users shuffling ghostlike through downtown backstreets are our wealthy region’s moral shame.

Chief among the recommendations of former mayor Alan Lowe’s Task Force steering committee was the creation of a central agency that could coordinate efforts to tackle the region’s housing shortage—thus was born the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, a clearinghouse of sorts where all agencies and partners in ending homelessness now converge to plot strategy, share resources, and engage senior levels of government. And while many of the goals that emerged from the Task Force report have been incorporated into the strategic and business plans of the Coalition, others have slipped from the agenda.

Victoria city councillor Charlayne Thornton-Joe chaired the steering committee that compiled the Task Force report.

“If I reflect back two years ago and you ask, ‘Are we where I would like to be be?’ Absolutely not,” Thornton-Joe says. “Anything we saw back then as a large task is still a large task and we have a long way to go. But, am I happy with where we are right now? I am pleased with a lot of the accomplishments.”

To its credit, the Coalition wasted little time massaging the Task Force’s avowed goals and began the push to house those with the greatest impediments to keeping a roof over their heads. In its March 31, 2009, Report on Housing and Supports, the Coalition says it helped move 594 people from the streets to homes in its first 18 months. The March data said 400 of those were estimated to remain in the housing secured for them, for a 67 percent success rate.

Four Assertive Community Treatment teams composed of outreach workers, police and government service providers have been deployed. VIHA reports that the ACT teams mean fewer emergency room resources required to address the frequent health problems that face those without secure housing. Several purpose-built shelters and supportive housing units are under construction, and an announcement was made last week that the Coalition is taking a page from Toronto’s book and starting a Streets to Homes program in the city that will see social service providers work with private landlords to get people into market housing with the appropriate supports.

The Coalition has also attracted high level interest of the sort that can loosen purse strings. Vancouver Island Health Authority CEO Howard Waldner sits on the board, as does Shayne Ramsay, BC Housing CEO.

Missing pieces

But while most steering committee goals made the leap into the Coalition’s guiding documents, others have evaporated.

For example, the steering committee envisioned that within six months of the report’s release, VIHA would apply for a Section 56 Health Canada exemption to permit operation of a safe consumption site for intravenous drug users. Within one year, the report’s authors hoped to open a safe consumption site. Anyone familiar with the city’s ongoing needle exchange saga knows a safe consumption site is, for now, a non-starter.

So what happened to these lost goals from the steering committee’s report?

“We felt it was better to be too ambitious and try our hardest to reach those goals than not, but the reality is that when you’re actually trying to do the work, we realized that maybe we were trying to do too much too fast,” says Thornton-Joe.

Coalition to End Homelessness program manager Rob Mitchell says the goals of the mayor’s Task Force report have not been forgotten, but are being dealt with in order of pressing need.

“I think the spirit of the recommendations was to get out there, get some quick wins, create some action and create some housing. The spirit is very much intact, but I think some of the things in the mayors task force report—and there’s a bunch of them—have not been realized. Not because no one is working on them, but because the time frame wasn’t doable, and it was kind of seen early on not to be doable.”

After years of inaction on homelessness—a time when community agencies worked in relative isolation from one another and from government ministries that managed the health and welfare files of the poor—the flurry of activity following the release of the mayors task force report was cause for optimism. Now, as we enter a time of government cutbacks to be borne by the poor and the sick, what becomes of the Task Force’s long-term goals gets murky.

But Mitchell remains optimistic, saying that while the province is offering no new money for the moment, streamlining within government will make operations on the homelessness front more efficient.

Absent increased government funding (and Mitchell is still fuming that the federal stimulus packages did not include grants to housing and other projects to alleviate homelessness) now is the time, he says, to partner with private industry and get truly creative on finding homes for all our citizens.

You know it ain’t easy

Standing in front of Pandora Avenue’s Our Place drop-in centre as the usual crowd awaits the morning opening, it’s hard to imagine things are any better than when the Mayor’s Task Force issued its findings. The province’s minimum wage is now lowest in the country, social assistance rates are still woefully inadequate for the city’s rental market, pre-Olympic Vancouver street sweeps are said to be funneling more poor into the CRD and the federal government is still without a national housing strategy—although Bill C-304 could change that if it’s passed.

Norm Cholette, a self-described “student of life,” Our Place volunteer and current resident of the Salvation Army says that while the past two years have brought occasional success stories for the people he sees every day, only a small percentage are being reached.

“With the bureaucracy and studies, by the time something is put into motion, the problem has evolved,” says Cholette. “Maybe the drugs have changed, or there are more people. It’s impossible to keep up.”

And then, for those teetering on the edge, what help they do receive is often a temporary fix.

“People have to want to get out,” says Cholette. “Some of the people out there, if you offered them paradise, they wouldn’t take it. And many people are so fragile that it doesn’t take much to push them back over the edge.”

Reverend Harold Munn sits on the Coalition’s board. The basement of his St. John the Divine Church doubles as an emergency shelter and has been full most nights this month. While the Task Force and Coalition have created positive momentum, he’s still waiting for a wholesale buy-in from the public and government.

“Dealing with homelessness is to everyone’s benefit, in the sense that business people in the downtown will have better business, tourists will be happier, people that work in the downtown will be happier, and I’m puzzled as to why it isn’t crystal clear that this would be to everyone’s benefit”