The
home
stretch
Will Canada end homelessness for good? Pandemic response shows what really works
By Stephanie NolenAtkinson Fellow in Public Policy
July 31, 2021
Too many people lined up for meals and toilets and beds, packed together breathing in the same room, lots of them standing too close but much too edgy for him to be able to safely point that out. So he left the shelter and went to crash with a woman he’d been dating for a while, and then, when that relationship got sticky, he couchsurfed with her family. It was a short reprieve; as the COVID news grew more frightening, that option disappeared, too.
For three nights he slept outside in a chill spring rain, waking up to move to a new spot downtown every couple of hours, until a mat on the floor of a shelter called The Mustard Seed came open. It was warm and dry, if noisy and chaotic, and physical distancing was being assiduously enforced. But it was only a place to sleep; those who spent the night there were expected to leave by 7 a.m. Yet all of the other places that Young, who was then 29, had relied on in his three years of homelessness were now closed. He used to spend days searching job ads at the library, but its doors were locked. He couldn’t go sit at the mall, or drag out a coffee in a Tim Hortons. Critically, there was nowhere to go to the bathroom. “When you leave the shelters and go to the public places, that’s your time to breathe and catch yourself and escape that life and feel like you’re part of the general public,” he said. “It's a really weird position to be in, when everyone’s told to isolate at home but you have no home to go to.”
After a few weeks of this, Young, who is 29 and white, headed back to Edmonton, his hometown, figuring he would feel more secure in these strange days in a place he knew well. He found a place to sleep at Hope Mission, and spent his days in a temporary day refuge in the Expo Centre, where social service agencies were providing food and health services. There were housing outreach workers there, too; the line in front of their table was a couple of hours long.
Just as Young was moving into the Edmonton shelter system, Jerry McFeeters was leaving it.
He decided to head for the outdoors: McFeeters, 52, a member of Cold Lake First Nation, is a residential school survivor, and the child of survivors. He could not stand the rigid rules at institutional shelters. Instead, in late spring, he pitched a tent alongside a handful of others in Lighthorse Park. “I’d rather sleep outside … I don’t like people controlling me, white people yelling at me or talking down to me.” The encampment, when he moved there, lacked running water or any kind of toilet facility. McFeeters is a tidy and organized guy who likes a shirt with a crisp collar. Nevertheless the camp felt like a good choice: about three-quarters of the people living there were Indigenous. He could have a fire out in front of his tent, and he found that soothing. “It was all people trying to help each other.”
McFeeters and Young had each in their way been cycling through the options for homeless people in Alberta — large shelters, church basements, sleeping rough, encampments — for a number of years. Young, who is chatty and likes to feel useful, had become homeless in his mid-20s after a period of lousy money management and some stressful times as he was trying to build a career as a hip hop artist. McFeeters is a father of three who has worked as a counsellor and did outreach for a variety of social service agencies over the years. He is a natural and generous leader who makes fast, shrewd assessments and doesn’t mince words. He has an alcohol addiction that can sidetrack his life at times; he has danced a complicated pattern with his anger and pain and how much space they leave him to negotiate his way in the world.
But the pandemic had created upheaval in the homeless support system, in Edmonton and everywhere else across the country. The shelters that have been the ill-fitting Band-Aid on homelessness for decades were suddenly unviable. The response that was hastily cobbled together in their stead didn’t keep a roof over every head. But it markedly shifted the conversation: what if, actually, we just solved this problem for good?
The day the pandemic began to radically remake life in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addressed the nation.
He said Canada’s borders would be closed to international flights, that Canadians abroad should hurry home, and those in the country should avoid travel. And, he said, “Finally, all Canadians, as much as possible, should stay home.”
But there were at least 35,000 people experiencing homelessness that day: that’s how many appeared on the “by-name list” maintained in each community across the country, a real-time tally; and there were almost certainly others who had slipped through the cracks and were invisible to the system. They were among the quarter-million people who are homeless for some or all of each year in Canada. And for each one of those, there were an estimated 23 more who were precariously housed — couchsurfing, staying with relatives, teetering on the edge of eviction for rent they couldn’t pay — whose strategies quickly fell apart in the face of COVID.
Yet even as more people needed homeless resources, there were dramatically fewer available. Congregate settings — large groups of people in a shared space — were suddenly a terrifying potential site of infection. Chronically homeless people were hypervulnerable, because so many of them had health already compromised by life on the streets and a lack of access to care.
the Pandemic diaries
Josiah ChalmersPart 1
April 2020
COVID kicked my ass right away. When the pandemic started, I was living in a shelter. I had been living there for a couple of months and I had just graduated to having ‘permanent resident’ status, which means I knew I would have a place to go every night. That was the most secure I had been in two years. In the fall of 2018, when I was 22, I had a job at Value Village and I was sharing an apartment. But it turned out that my roommate wasn’t paying the rent and she hid the notices until we got evicted. I started couchsurfing, staying with different friends, and then it turned out that one place I was crashing was a trap house. And I started using. I’m not a person who was using drugs and wound up homeless: I’m the opposite, I started using drugs because I was homeless. Finally, in July 2019 I went to rehab and I got sober. When I got out I was trying to figure out where to live. I spent a couple days with my parents but that was not a good scene. In August and September I backpacked around the province trying to pick a city and I wound up in London, which has lots of resources for homeless people. I was staying with a friend who was still using (drugs) and that wasn’t a great environment. So then, in January, I went to an LGBTQ-inclusive shelter called the Unity Project. And that was way better. And then the pandemic started and they had to close. And then I was homeless again.
The lockdown imposed in March seemed for most Canadians to come out of nowhere, but those who work with the homeless had been watching and worrying for weeks about what might be coming. Andrew Bond, who heads Toronto’s Inner City Health Associates, the largest homeless health support organization in the country, had been tracking this new virus since late December; he had seen other infectious illnesses sweep through the homeless population in the past and read the first news reports with a sense of dread.
A member of his team used an IT vendor with connections in Wuhan, China to make contact with public health officials there. “They said, ‘Yeah, it's a total disaster. We are seeing disproportionate cases (among the homeless).’” Alarmed, Bond and his colleagues began planning how they could conduct disease surveillance among the homeless, how they could isolate anyone who became infected, and how they could prevent infections in the first place. “We set up isolation centres at hotels, we made massive PPE requests, we lit a fire under Toronto,” he said. Bond also spoke with key homeless organizations across the country, and together they put pressure on the federal government.
Tim Richter
“I expected catastrophic loss of life — I expected it to be awful,” said Tim Richter, director of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (CAEH). “Andrew saw it coming and we started talking to the feds. And the government to its credit was very quick to act and to step in with money.” Ottawa disbursed $157 million in emergency funding for supports for the homeless by the start of April.
There was clearly a desire to protect vulnerable people, said Jeff Turnbull, a doctor who has worked with people experiencing homelessness for decades and heads Ottawa Inner City Health — but there was also concern that if the virus tore through this population, it could swamp the health-care system and put the whole population at greater risk.
People who are homeless fall roughly into two groups. About 85 per cent of people are homeless for only a short time. “They may have lost their job, or failed to make a rent payment, but they end up getting back on their feet pretty quickly: they come to an emergency shelter for a short stay and we often never see them again,” said Richter. The other 15 per cent are considered chronically homeless, unhoused for six months or longer. Often these are people who are “high acuity,” in the language of social services — with substance dependencies, or mental illness, or chronic health problems or, often, “trimorbid” with all three. It is these people who can find it most difficult to find new housing, or stay there, when they get there. They cycle through the shelters and time on the street.
the Pandemic diaries
TIM HORSMANPart 1
May 2020
I’ve spent about 20 years on the street. I just lived out 24/7 sometimes. I moved around a lot, different places. I had two little girls in 2002 but I lost custody and then I was on a cocaine trip for 15 or 20 years. Living on the street for so long, not having a permanent place to live, it really took a toll on me. I’m 60. When the pandemic started I was in Moncton. I was crashing at an emergency shelter and it closed. But the workers asked if I’d be interested in housing. I said, sure. And I ended up getting it. I wasn’t expecting it. And it was hard. All of a sudden being in an apartment alone. It made me feel like I was driving backwards. I stayed for a couple weeks, but it was making me really nervous. Then I just booted out and left everything and ran. And I thought, that’s it, I’m done, there’s no more housing for me.
There is a sense, among housed city dwellers who veer automatically around the inert figure in the sleeping bag near the Tim Hortons, that there have always been homeless people in Canada and that the issue is to some degree intractable: that some people simply can’t or won’t be housed. But in fact the problem is barely 50 years old: until the mid-1980s, the federal government typically added about 20,000 units per year of subsidized housing to support those who could not pay market rates for rent. That program was cut; the recession of the early 1990s and austerity-driven reductions to social support exacerbated the problem. “Mass homelessness” — whole communities of people without safe, stable, permanent housing — became normalized, especially in the largest cities. At present Canada spends about $7 billion a year supporting people experiencing homelessness, on everything from shelters to emergency rooms to justice system resources, dealing with those who are criminalized for their use of public space.
For just as long, of course, there has been public debate about how to respond; individual communities have been drafting 10-year plans to end homelessness for decades. Thinking evolved about what worked best (today the consensus is a “housing first” approach that gets people into a home and then tries to tackle other issues such as addiction). But advocates say fundamentally the problem endures because the resources available have never been commensurate with the scale of the problem. Federal and provincial spending on affordable housing each year has been enough to counter, at best, what is lost in the private rental market; it does little to provide homes for the existing pool of unhoused people.
In 2017, the Trudeau government released a national housing strategy, and two years later, launched an updated program called ‘Reaching Home.’
The new program doubled the amount of funding directed to communities with the goal of reducing chronic homelessness by half. It was a significant sea change in the perceived role of government — while many of the key drivers of homelessness stem from issues that require federal policy (such as wages and income levels) or provincial (access to mental health care), it is cities that are often expected to manage the actual provision of support to the homeless, creating a multi-layered bureaucratic snarl.
It was progress, said Richter, but it wasn’t nearly enough to solve the problem. The CAEH puts the price tag at ending it all together at $55 billion over a decade, for a mix of new housing units, rent subsidies and support programs.
the Pandemic diaries
Mark HartwellPart 1
June 2020
I had a nervous breakdown in 2000 and I developed severe anxiety. When I have attacks it puts me out of action for seven days at a time. I’m an engineer but I haven’t been able to work since then. I’m 62. When I became homeless in 2019, it was the first time. I sold a house, I lost a lot of money, I went to stay in a buddy’s outside of London that had no heat or hot water. And when I had no cash left, I was homeless. I had no concept of the system. I had no idea where to get food. I got into a short-term shelter, but I couldn’t get into a long-term one. The pandemic was just hitting and I was staying in a mammoth shelter with 200 people, six people to a room. You couldn’t get any news there, all of those people were totally cut off. Then I got moved into a single room, it was $160 a month. I paid for it with my disability payments. After a month in that room they started to move us into hotels. It was nice, it had an office desk, I had a big screen monitor, I was exercising and eating extremely well. I was ecstatic.
And then COVID created both a massive new sense of urgency and a new understanding of just how much money the government could move — and how quickly.
Just as Andrew Bond and others like him in cities across the country were scrambling to try to space out shelters, conference centres, arenas and hotels were suddenly empty. Municipal governments and support agencies rented out the huge spaces for new shelters, and they began to rent out floors of Travelodges and Best Westerns, and even whole hotels, by the month. They moved people out of shelters, and out of ravines, and off the streets. “We did it in a week, when we hadn’t been able to do for decades,” said Turnbull.
There was almost instantly a visible change in the well-being of the people who were moved into hotels, said Chantal Perry, who until recently ran homeless services for the municipality of Chatham-Kent in southern Ontario. Waking up knowing that they would have that same bed to fall asleep in again that night, that they had access to a washroom whenever they needed it — “just the simple dignity of a door, it made a world of difference.”
Naheed Dosani
“It sounds ridiculous when you say it like this, but the key to addressing homelessness is to give homeless people a home,” said Naheed Dosani, a palliative care physician who works with homeless people and who has served as medical director of the COVID-19 Isolation and Homeless Program for Peel Region outside Toronto. “When people are in a home, you can do all the other things: medical care, mental health care, all the other services.”
The new approach had an impact across the country. The rapid shift in approach opened up a whole new conversation, said Greg Bishop, who oversees homeless services for New Brunswick’s Human Development Council. It wasn’t news to anyone in his field that shelters were a poor solution, he said — but now they had solid evidence to show how much more effective it is to get people into housing. “It’s also cheaper: it costs $1,000 a month less to house someone than it does to have them in a shelter.”
And that helped bolster the idea that this was the moment for a permanent change in how Canada accepts, and engages with, homelessness. “The temporary housing has helped to establish a new normal,” Dosani said. “It’s not going to be possible to say, ‘everyone’s vaccinated, now, as you were: back to the street.’”
The first wave of COVID passed without the mass death that Bond and others had feared, but as the weather warmed, many homeless people joined encampments in parks, under overpasses and in other public spaces.
Overdose deaths in Canada since 2016
SOURCE: Statistics Canada
Some encampments, such as Strathcona in Vancouver and Trinity Bellwoods in Toronto, quickly grew to house several hundred people.
There were also clusters of five or 10 or 15 tents in parks and patches of land in small towns in the Maritimes, and a sprawling collection of more than 400 tents in the Saskatchewan River Valley in Edmonton. Communities that had never before had encampments suddenly saw them spring up, and agencies struggled with how to deliver services. Some encampments were more heavily populated in the days, because all other options were closed, and people went back to shelters to sleep at night. Some neighbours responded with deliveries of food, bottled water and other necessities; others resented the loss of public outdoor space at a time when it was at a premium and lobbied for evictions. Police ticketed residents, harassed them and slashed tents with knives.
the Pandemic diaries
Josiah ChalmersPart 2
October 2020
When the shelter closed in March of 2020 I ended up relapsing. I started using again and crashing in crack houses. After three months I thought, ‘I just don't want to live this way.’ I slept outside for the summer, off on the side of a park. But I was calling the office of homeless services all the time, being super persistent, saying, ‘You have to help me.’ The waitlists for housing ranged from one year to six years. I had no plan for the fall. Then on Aug. 20 I got a call saying I was going to be housed. I’d heard that before. But this time, I signed a lease within a week. It was a building where the organization that was helping me, Youth Opportunities Unlimited (Y.O.U.), had a relationship with the landlord and they would be paying the rent directly, so they were willing to rent to me. I moved into a bachelor apartment on Sept. 1. I get Ontario Works which is $400 – they deduct 30 per cent for my rent. Y.O.U. pays the rest. The apartment is a bachelor and it’s really small and it’s in a really sketchy building in a sketchy neighbourhood. I use food banks. But when you've been living on nothing, then $400 seems like a lot.
Meanwhile the moratorium on eviction was lifting in many places, creating fear of a new wave of people left unhoused. Some hotels, hoping for regular business as restrictions eased, were reclaiming their space. Shelter staff, who are poorly paid, serving a frightened population, and constantly at risk themselves, were burnt out. By early fall, the fear of a second wave haunted Andrew Bond and other service providers. “What if it’s the majority of people needing isolation, or a high level of care?” Bond worried. “We’re already going as hard as we can, so what happens?” The federal government disbursed another $230 million, to maintain shelter spaces and buy more PPE. And in September there was a signal that a more permanent solution was also in the works.
Advocates for the homeless were watching the Sept. 23 Speech from the Throne for a renewed commitment to the issue, and when it came, it was in a very short phrase that spoke volumes. “The Government is now focused on entirely eliminating chronic homelessness in Canada,” Governor General Julie Payette read in the speech. Not decreasing, not lowering — ending. That commitment was backed with an initial pledge of an additional $1 billion.
The funds were earmarked for a Rapid Housing Initiative to create up to 3,000 new permanent, affordable housing units across the country.
SOURCE: FEDERAL BUDGET
Advocates praised the plan for prioritizing speed, recognizing the critical need for vastly more affordable housing, and channelling funding not just to provinces but directly to municipalities, many of which had taken the lead on the issue in recent years.
But they expressed concern about the emphasis on physical infrastructure, without concomitant funding for social infrastructure: the kind of wrap-around support, of on-site addictions and mental health and other assistance that is key to helping high-acuity, chronically homeless people stay housed. “It’s no use having the building if you don’t have the money to pay for the staffing,” said Perry.
And there was little in the program targeted specifically at Indigenous homelessness, even though First Nations people make up a disproportionately large number of the unhoused in every community. People who identify as Indigenous represent just five per cent of the total population, but 30 per cent of shelter users. “Two elections ago, the federal government promised a national Indigenous housing plan,” said Steve Teekens, the director of the housing and support organization Native Men’s Residence (NaMeRes) in Toronto. But there was no sign of it yet. Meanwhile, there was a new national plan, and his organization would be pitching projects alongside every other municipality and provider. “Now we are competing. How does it address inequities if we have to compete with the mainstream?”
Ben Young continued to sleep in shelters through the summer and fall.
He was trying to scrape together the money to get an apartment, but it was difficult to raise the funds. Young grew up middle class; his hip hop group toured nationally before he fell out with his creative partners and his life got messy. Now he tried to pick up shifts with a moving company, but he had to beg bus drivers to let him on the bus without fare, until he got paid. If he left the shelter early in the morning and got back late, he’d miss the chance at free meals, but couldn’t afford to buy food. “After four days in a row of working like that, you’re dead exhausted and you miss a day and then — you're fired.” He didn’t have a way to wash clothes, didn’t have a place to store his stuff when he went to work. And now he was looking at a much tighter job market. “And the general public, they’re more cautious of you now — everyone assumes you’re COVID-ridden when you’re on the streets and no one is going to take a chance to help you out,” he said. “Hiding homelessness is very hard: if you don’t have any options for storage, you’re constantly carrying everything you own with you which is an immediate, obvious red flag.”
Young was trying to navigate the bureaucracy to register for Alberta Supports (welfare) which would give him a core benefit of $415 a month and a couple of hundred bucks for housing, depending on what kind he found. Yet the average rental price of a bachelor apartment in Edmonton in 2019 was $879. And the waitlist for subsidized housing was two-and-a-half years. This is a problem across the country: rental prices in nearly every market are far higher than many people can pay; demand for rent-geared-to-income housing far outstrips supply and the amount available has steadily declined over the past 15 years. Toronto has more than 90,000 people on a waiting list for social housing, and a 12-year wait for a one-bedroom apartment. Nationally, there is an estimated shortage of 370,000 affordable housing units. Between 2011 and 2016 the number of private rental units affordable to households earning less than $30,000 per year (which means rents below $750 per month) declined by 322,600 units. Where do they go? Simply put, they become assets: investors, ranging from individuals to large capital funds, buy them to capitalize on rising rents. The pandemic accelerated all of these problems, driving renovictions and the acquisition of older properties that had lower rents, for new development.
One October night, Jerry McFeeters was helping another resident of the encampment move a pile of stuff when he fell, hard.
He broke four ribs: not a fatal injury but a miserable one. He woke up the next morning immobilized and concluded this was a sign. He took the last beer in his tent, placed it in the fire and watched it burn. And then he went to the hospital. The pain in his ribs was bad, the cold turkey sobriety was worse. When he was discharged, he went to crash with a woman he’d been dating, a volunteer he had met at the encampment. He was too debilitated for a tent.
“I was confined to the house and I couldn’t really go anywhere,” he said. “And I had to go through all my grief and trauma, all that shit I was going through in my withdrawal. That was the worst part of my transition. It was ground zero again and I was dreading it.” He hunkered down, grateful to have a place to sleep out of the cold, but gnawed by the lack of privacy and space of his own.
At about the same time, Ben Young, who was living in an emergency shelter at the Convention Centre, was flagged as a “close contact” of someone who had COVID — an imperfect system shelter staff used to try to keep track of who might be most at risk.
Young was moved over to the isolation side of the shelter, to sleep on a cot in a row with others who had been similarly identified as exposed. COVID tests were in short supply, he was told, so he would get no confirmation if he actually had the virus, but he would have to be in the isolation zone for two weeks regardless.
But the next day he woke up with sniffles. He told a shelter staffer, who backed away in alarm, and before he knew it he was in an ambulance being transported to a hotel. He was tested as soon as he arrived, and four hours later, it was confirmed: he had COVID. Given how careful he had tried to be, he said, if he got infected, then the whole shelter must be rife with the virus. “I’d be shocked if all 400 people who were in there didn’t have it.”
the Pandemic diaries
Mark HartwellPart 2
February 2021
After three months in the hotel, the housing coordinator found me a nice large apartment downtown. I’m planning to stay here a long, long time. Rent takes $139 out of my disability (payment). The apartment costs $900. I get $672 in cash in the bank every month. I pay for the TV and web, that's $170. With the rest I have to pay for food, clothing and transport. I’m still relying on church meals four times a week. I’d like to be working but I'm not able to do it yet, but I’m getting there. I used to have a whole other lifestyle, but it’s all gone. When you’re on the streets your mind just goes numb. One extremely cold night can send you into a panic. I remember walking and walking through the rain and I just kept on going. When you have shelter you have time to inhale and plan ahead.
The next few days were nerve-wracking.
“You don’t know if tomorrow you’re going to be super sick or if you will be in that small per cent that dies. But the symptoms never came and after a few days I was like ‘Hey, like, I’m gonna get through this fine probably’.” Relieved of that fear, he was able to take stock of his situation. “It’s not a motel with all the regular amenities, it’s not regular hotel sheets and pillows. All the pictures and mirrors are removed. The phone is removed. The lock for your room is removed and the window is boarded shut. So you can only open it a little bit. But you have three meals, those meals-on-wheels sized-meals, brought to your door, with some snacks here and there: not a whole lot of food but not starving, right. But you’ve got a TV in there. You’re inside, you get a bed, you get a pillow, you get a blanket. You can go to the bathroom whenever you want.” It was a major upgrade in his circumstances.
Meanwhile, a housing case worker from a support agency called Homeward Trust, whom Young had met at the shelter, had doubled down on finding him a place to live. He got Young registered for a year-long housing subsidy program (the Trust subsidizes the rent of more than 1,000 people in Edmonton), and was emailing him apartment listings. When Young was released at the end of the two weeks, he slept for three nights at a Salvation Army shelter, and then the case worker handed him the keys to a furnished one-bedroom basement apartment. The utilities were connected. There was food in the fridge, a real pillow on the bed, and a lock on the door.
Young benefitted from a shift in focus that had come with the pandemic: homeless agencies were pouring resources into diversion, and into getting people housed. Diversion includes steps such as emergency rent payments, financial planning and help with negotiations, to keep people from falling into the homeless system. Pre-pandemic, diversion might have used 10 per cent of an agency budget; now it was half. The aggressive push to get people into permanent housing meant an expansion into the private rental market, negotiating with landlords, committing to cover the rent for clients or guarantee their leases.
Homeward Trust was laser-focused on getting people housed, director Susan McGee said, but also on making sure they could stay in their new homes. That means a full slate of supports such as access to therapy, life skills coaching, connections with health care, and dozens of small interventions that recognize that the transition from the street or shelters to living, usually alone, in permanent housing can be enormously challenging, emotionally, and require skills people do not have or have not used in years.
“There are definitely aspects of the life on the streets that you miss,” Young said, when he’d been housed for a couple of months. “I prided myself on being a helper. I developed a reputation where people could talk to me for help, when something got stolen, or I would help people who are overdosing. At the end of the day I could hold my head high. I’d feel, I’m strong because I made it through all this shit today. And then to go from an environment where you’re constantly having to prove to yourself how strong you are to an environment where you don’t have to overcome anything — I feel a loss of importance.”
And he had another source of anxiety: Young was paying his $925 rent with a combination of a shelter allowance through Alberta Works, and a $595 subsidy from Homeward Trust. But the subsidy was only for a year. He had been sending out resumes, but not getting calls, and he worried about the gap in employment on his CV that was steadily getting longer. “What happens if I just have to go back to the street?”
When millions of people were suddenly out of work at the start of the pandemic, the federal government responded with the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, an income support program that was rolled out swiftly and with a minimum of bureaucracy. Homeless support organizations believe it kept many people housed. But the CERB, at $2,000 per month, was a marked contrast to pre-pandemic income support programs: welfare in Nova Scotia pays a single person $508 per month, for example; in Ontario the rate is $733. Disability support in Ontario is $896, while it’s $600 in Saskatchewan. Old Age Security is a maximum of $626.49.
“Anyone in receipt of welfare or Ontario Disability or seniors’ OAS really cannot afford housing,” said Chantal Perry, bluntly. NaMeRes in Toronto operates 35 units across three houses in Toronto; they offer a $464 bachelor and a $560 one-bedroom. “On paper, 80 per cent of the average market rate is deemed to be ‘affordable,’” Teekens said. “That would put a bachelor at over $1,000 a month. That is not affordable on disability or welfare.” But for most chronically homeless people, this is what they have to spend: a pot of money that puts virtually all private rentals out of reach.
the Pandemic diaries
Josiah ChalmersPart 3
May 2021
My first apartment got broken into so I moved to a bigger unit, it’s a big bachelor in a better area. And I will move again next year, I just have to be here long enough to have a good reference from a landlord. I’ve been struggling with getting work because of the lockdown. And really because now that I have a door, I just want to hide away. Maybe I can work when I feel able to be around more people. But I’ve been sober for a year and a half now. My worker from Y.O.U. helps me keep track of appointments and make food bank trips, keeping me solid. I’m doing advocacy around youth homelessness. I want to pay it forward.
McGee called it the missing piece in the discussion about ending homelessness: the money people had to live on. “You can have an individual who, in terms of their personal change and recovery, has gone from A to D — but they still can’t afford their unit. And they’re going to go right back to A if we can’t address that gap,” she said.
Income support and disability benefits are set provincially. Some provinces have raised their rates over the course of the pandemic; none approach the $2,000 per month rate of the CERB. In April, the federal budget committed an additional $567 million over two years to Reaching Home, beginning in 2022-23, and put another $1.5 billion into the Rapid Housing Initiative. But there was still no earmarked funding for social infrastructure. And as the weather warmed, encampments began to grow again. Almost as quickly, police began forcibly to disperse them.
In June, Ben Young got a full-time job with a moving company, and right away started working long days.
He was delighted to have money coming in, and started talking to Homeward Trust about ending his subsidy early. All the support he had from the agency was helpful, he said, but ultimately the thing that got him housed was that subsidy. “I needed a chance to get my shit together, a little bit of a grace period to catch my breath and get my feet back under me. When I was unemployed, I was backed into a corner and I couldn’t escape, through my own best efforts.”
After a couple of months, however, he started to struggle with mental health issues he had been doing his best to ignore — a not uncommon experience for people who are newly securely housed after a long period spent just focused on survival. He had a conflict at work and lost his job in July. He began to sit with the idea that the road out might not be as smooth as he had hoped.
Jerry McFeeters spent the second pandemic spring couch-surfing, and working frantically to find a place of his own.
But it went badly. He scoured the ads each day, emailed dozens of landlords, walked miles because he could not afford bus fare. He would copy down numbers from windows he passed, but then by the time he could raise the money to buy more cellphone minutes, the place would be taken. Over the winter, rents had climbed, he found. Apartments that before the pandemic were $700 were now closer to $900.
When someone did call him back about a place, he would go to visit and find apartments that were dilapidated to the point of being safety hazards, bleak and dirty, in dangerous neighbourhoods rife with open drug use that he knew would threaten his sobriety and his mental wellbeing. When he told landlords that his source of income was Alberta Works, they quickly concluded he would not be able to pay rent. That, and his skin colour, stood in the way, he said: “The moment they see me, they instantly make that face.”
the Pandemic diaries
Tim HorsmanPart 2
March 2021
In February the outreach team (from the John Howard Society) came across me. I was really in dire straits. I was (panhandling). I slept in porta-potties, I was getting high. They told me about Housing First (the program) and I said OK, I’d be up for that. On March 2, I moved in. I got a one bedroom in Fredericton with appliances and everything. I have COPD, I was fighting for each breath. I got a puffer from the downtown clinic. I paid $90 for two puffers. My whole cheques are spoken for. I get $530 a month (in welfare). Phone and electric is 80 bucks. I haven’t had a TV in 30 years. I'd like to be working, but I have all these health problems. I've been a temporary labourer, I worked in warehouses, I do lawn care and snow removal and driveway-sealing. I’m adjusting better than I did in Moncton. I have some of the same feelings here, too, but I think what will be different this time is that I have the support I need. I'm seeing a social worker every two weeks. They're looking after my medical needs. I've been trying to get therapy on the phone. I’ve been off drugs and booze for four or five months. It’s hard. It’s emotional. Every day is up and down. But I don’t think I would have made it through one more winter out there.
Homeless support agencies were focused on getting people housed, but the wrap-around support didn’t catch everyone.
One Edmonton agency promised McFeeters the cash for first- and last- and damage-deposit, but no one was helping him find a place he could afford, or a landlord who would accept him. Regardless, some days he was optimistic. “I’ve got to keep going because I know eventually I’ll hit something, I know it,” he said. “I just don't know how long it’s going to take. And I’m already beyond tired. But I’m keeping going.”
Then in May news coverage began of the unmarked graves found buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School, and it churned up the anger and fear from his youth. Everything felt more difficult, and he had a growing level of anxiety about his situation, still shuffling between friends’ couches, reliant on the whims and kindness of people who themselves were struggling. “I’ve got healing to do,” he said. “Because I still get mad. These guys need to understand what it’s like to be so sad and broken all the time. And then be criticized for that.” He could manage his anger and frustration when he had a place to stay, he said. “It’s easy to do that with my own space, where I can have my medicines, I have my altar.” Without it — then the anger just felt huge.
Talk of reconciliation with Indigenous people dominated the news, and yet the thing that would make the difference, the basic thing, wasn’t part of the discussion, he said. Everyone he knew on the streets was a residential school survivor or the child of one. And what they needed was a place to live. “You know what people need at this point. None of this is going to happen without funding.” It means paying the rent. “Start by helping us individually. So we can grow together as a people, or as a nation.”
About the Series
What COVID Reveals is the 2020-21 Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy series on the COVID-19 crisis and inequality.
The Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy awards a seasoned Canadian journalist the opportunity to pursue a year-long investigation into a current policy issue. The fellowship is a collaborative project of the Atkinson Foundation, the Honderich family, and the Toronto Star.
In What Covid Reveals, award-winning journalist Stephanie Nolen tells the stories of people in Canada who were vulnerable to COVID-19, or made newly vulnerable by the virus, and how public policy shaped their pandemic experience. Nolen followed working women, migrant workers and asylum seekers, and those who had no place to "just stay home" as the virus surged. Through the story of their pandemic year, she charts what COVID showed us, and what we've chosen to do about it.
Read the full series at thestar.com/whatcovidreveals
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