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City needs another major push to eliminate street homelessness by 2015

February 1st, 2011 · 10 Comments

The city and province have spent hundreds of millions to create supportive housing for the chronically homeless.

But the homelessness conveyor belt isn’t stopping. So, in spite of a the big push of the past few years, the city is projecting that homeless numbers will dip over the next two years but then start to rise again.

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  • Tiktaalik

    Not enough is being done. The amount of new units coming online is not going to be enough to make up for the amount that we are losing due to higher rents and SRO building closure.

    http://ccapvancouver.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/pushed-out-ccaps-new-report-on-hotels-in-the-dtes/

  • Gentle Bossanova

    “… there’s still a steady stream of people who come out of jails, foster homes, mental-health facilities and elsewhere every year and end up homeless.”

    Frances Bula, theglobeandmail

    I remember the routine from college: quote a source, give the source. I’ve tried five searches on the City website and come up empty. Maybe I should just stick to Google. But a link to the report here if not in the story itself would be greatly useful.

    Outputs & Inputs.

    We cannot help the homeless until we systematize the counting. “…jails, foster homes, and mental-health” sound like federal and provincial programs. We should pass them a bill quarterly. Likewise, with people we are taking care of arriving from other provinces.

    Do we know those numbers? Can we know them?

    Vancouver tax payers should not end up footing the bill for other programs. If corrections/judicial is putting people on the street, rather than mainstreaming them, then there is a problem there that needs to be fixed. Diddo with mental health. We may not be the ones to fix the system, however, quantification is a good first step.

    Besides, we cannot plan for housing unless we have data to base future projects.

  • Max

    First of all, when the Mayor was elected two years ago he promised to end ‘Homelessness’.

    Ending ‘Street Homelessness’ is the 2010 remake of the original version, which seem to pop up after he had the city conduct a homeless count ($75K in taxpayer dollars) and found homelessness was up 12%.

    And nothing is going to change until the allowed open drug market is stopped in the DTES. You will continue to have people flock here from right across Canada and the US.

    Next, a forensic audit needs to be done. It has been talked about, but never done. Last reports show we spend roughly $1M per day (I am sure this number is higher now) in supporting roughly 10,000 people in the DTES. 7,000 are needle users. (according to VANDU and Pivot websites)

    There are 177 groups involved in the poverty industry operating in the DTES – many get government funding and or private donor money. These could be easily culled to a dozen or so and the money given to those now defunct groups redistributed to beef up the exisiting or to go back into the community in other ways.

  • Tiktaalik

    lol “poverty industry.” Sounds like a good career. How much can I expect to make a year?

  • Gentle Bossanova

    It’s not the pay as much the “perks” that really make it attractive.

    Yet, Max makes an important point. We are at the end of a decades-long chain of federal government policies that dismantled mental health and social housing.

    It appears that this policy is not in line with the values of our community because every year and every budget we strain to plug another hole in the dike that was abandoned.

    Would it make sense to put the efforts under a single umbrella? Sure. And it would make sense to collect federally all the municipal experiences across the country to learn from one other and avoid duplicating efforts. That’s a jurisdictional leap over the provinces.

    Ending homelessness is the right goal. Getting there looks like what we have here today.

    PS

    CCAP a spreadsheet showing your numbers would make it a good “go to” source of information. Once it’s set up, adding one column for each of the three years reporting would be a snap.

  • Max

    @ Tikalik #4

    The Portland Housing Society, which runs/operates many of the SRO’s as well as staffs the HEAT shelters are unionized.

    If I remember correctly, staff make around $20/hour to start.

    When you read that is costs roughly $2,000 to house a homeless person in a shelter, a good portion of that money goes to wages.

    Food – depending on 1 or 3 meals a day will run between $1 and $3 per person per meal. $3 is on the high side. As well a lot of the groups get food donations from bakeries, retaurants etc, through Food Runners.

    I will also state it is not easy to house people that have addiction/behavioral problems. Many get kicked out repeatedly from various places for trashing the unit or causing other ongoing issues.

    Poverty in the DTES is a buisness and it is alive, well and flourishing.

    Last summer the Bosman Hotel on Howe Street was renovated and opened up to 100 persons, supportive housing. I have yet to read/see/hear any stats on whether the units are full or what is going on with it. Kerry Jang should be able to provide info as it is his ‘baby’. Again, an experiement.

    We have also not had the latest updae on numbers surrounding the social housing at the Olympic Village. It was reported before Christmas that people were moving in and the news profiled 2 persons with disabilities in their new units. But, what about the other units? It is costing taxpayers 100’s of thousands of dollars in (additional) lost revnue by not having them filled.

  • Ternes

    If I’m reading this right, it seems that one of the big problems with the “homelessness conveyor belt” is essentially social mobility. People fill up the various social and low-income housing available and then they stay there, presumably because they can’t earn enough money to afford anything else (and conversely also that there is little else that is affordable). This lack of social mobility then becomes a source of homelessness in itself, because it decreases the availability of affordable housing, blocking people from moving in off the streets.

    This is all perhaps completely obvious to anyone who’s dealt with homelessness for a long time but I had never really thought about how direct a problem social mobility is in dealing with homelessness. And I do definitely feel like not nearly the same amount of emphasis and effort is targeted towards helping the formerly homeless get jobs and become self-sufficient and independent. Please correct me if I’m wrong! But I wonder if there could be a bigger impact made here…it’s clearly not enough to keep building more social housing if no one can ever afford to move out of them.

  • mezzanine

    @Ternes,

    true that.

    “A woman called me out of the blue last week and told me her self-sufficiency counselor had suggested she get in touch with me. She had moved from a $25,000 a year job to a $35,000 a year job, and suddenly she couldn’t make ends meet any more. I told her I didn’t know what I could do for her, but agreed to meet with her. She showed me all her pay stubs, etc. She really did come out behind by several hundred dollars a month. She lost free health insurance and instead had to pay $230 a month for her employer-provided health insurance. Her rent associated with her section 8 voucher went up by 30% of the income gain (which is the rule). She lost the ($280 a month) subsidized child care voucher she had for after-school care for her child. She lost around $1600 a year of the EITC. She paid payroll tax on the additional income. Finally, the new job was in Boston, and she lived in a suburb. So now she has $300 a month of additional gas and parking charges. She asked me if she should go back to earning $25,000.”

    http://www.urbanophile.com/2010/03/30/megan-cottrell-dont-fall-in-the-poverty-trap-you-may-never-get-out/

    I don’t have a clear answer for the problems, but I worry about this lack of social mobility as well. To this end, IMO further change to the DTES is important. Certainly preserve what we have in the DTES, but estabilsh housing options in other areas of the city and the metro area.

    I am unsure if we can ever build a system that will be flawless. That being said, Ms. Bula’s quote states a lot:

    “But the homelessness conveyor belt isn’t stopping.”

  • Max

    On another note:

    There were 3 SRO’s in the DTES, that were caught up in a drug sweep last week.

    According to the police, management in some cases new that drugs were being sold out of the hotels and looked the otehr way.

    I am curious to know the names of the SRO’s and if any are run by the PHS.

  • Gentle Bossanova

    “… If I’m reading this right, it seems that one of the big problems with the “homelessness conveyor belt” is essentially social mobility. People fill up the various social and low-income housing available and then they stay there”

    Ternes 7/Mezzanine 8

    Frances linked the power point with the numbers, so we can hava a look. I think what we’re talking about here is the OUTPUTS side of the system.

    Are we graduating people out of the social housing to the neighbourhood mainstream. I am not an expert here, but in cases of addiction and mental health, the likely answer is no.

    I have a personal connection to a heroin addiction done a few decades ago. Researchers found that about half the group could get of heroin and onto methodone, but no one kicked methodone. There may be newer methods, but I wonder if the underlying result stays the same.

    “When you read that is costs roughly $2,000 to house a homeless person in a shelter, a good portion of that money goes to wages.”

    Max 6

    I think you have it right, Max. The numbers may change, but the essence of the picture is right. Ending homelessness means dealing with poverty, addiction, mental illness and sometimes tow-out-of-three and sometimes three-out-of-three. It’s not just housing, its also “staffing” typically referred to as “supports”.

    That’s exactly why it’s expensive. Shelter alone does not get the job done. It has to be “housing with supports”.