No Trespassing

Stopping homelessness at the source

Kimberly Squirrel was released from Pine Grove Correctional Centre in Prince Albert in January, 2021, with inadequate winter clothing and no place to stay. Her frozen body was found on the streets of Saskatoon three days later. People leaving correctional institutions, hospitals, mental health and addictions facilities, foster care, military service and other life transitions are at high risk of becoming homeless and of suffering the often deadly consequences of life on the street.

A sentence caught my eye in a recent article by Doug Saunders in the Globe and Mail on London’s success in eliminating homelessness in the early 2000s.

“The RSU (Rough Sleepers Unit) worked directly with the major sources of homelessness – the military, the penal system and the care-home system, as well as the usual mental-health and addiction bodies – to ensure that troubled people who left those institutions would be given places to stay and wouldn’t end up in the street.”

In Regina, Saskatchewan, there is a fence around City Hall with a No Trespassing sign. This message of unwelcome follows the clearing of a tent camp outside the civic building. It’s not the first time the city has seen a camp of homeless people. In 2021, over a hundred people were living in Camp Marjorie, later renamed Camp Hope, in Regina’s Pepsi Park. Housing shortages and changes to the province’s social assistance funding had led to a spike in homelessness. A forty-bed shelter was briefly opened in the city and then closed a few months later, despite ongoing problems with homelessness.

Photo Larissa Kurz, Regina Leader Post, July 31, 2023

People gather in tent camps for safety and community - sharing resources and responding to dangers of violence and toxic drugs - and to send a message to the public and the government about just how bad things are. This year that message was louder, with people camping outside City Hall for over forty days. Volunteers supporting the people staying there wrote in the Regina Leader-Post that the camp saved lives. Police cleared the camp and arrested eleven people at the end of July.

In Toronto, refugees camped for weeks outside the shelter intake office. A lack of shelter space left hundreds of asylum speakers sleeping outside. These recent stories highlight what has become a problem in every major centre: more people are living on the street, unable to afford shelter. Between 150,000 and 300,000 Canadians are living in homelessness and those numbers are rising. Many more are struggling to pay their rent or find an affordable place to stay.

Treating Homelessness as an Emergency

People who live in shelters or on the street are sicker and they die sooner. A 2014 study showed that the life expectancy of those living in homelessness in British Columbia half that of the general population. This inequity has led Dr. Naheed Dosani, founder of the Palliative Education and Care for the Homeless (PEACH) program in Toronto, to describe homelessness as a “terminal illness.”

The housing crisis in Canada is not new. In 2016, I wrote an article with Tim Richter, Executive Director of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, titled “Canada’s housing crisis is a pubic health emergency.” We wrote about housing needs present as a spectrum, from shelter to ownership, and how in order to address the crisis we needed to “take a page from medicine and triage.”

The most pressing problem - finding stable housing for those who are homeless or at risk for homelessness - can be solved. Start by collecting real-time, person-specific data on homelessness and expand supportive housing for individuals with greater challenges. Housing First, an evidence-based approach to ending homelessness, provides direct access to permanent housing and support. Add to this better co-ordination in local planning, targeted investment in affordable rental housing and a national housing benefit, and homelessness in Canada could become rare, brief and non-recurring.

The point stands. We are still not identifying clearly who is homeless and mobilizing the resources to get them off the street and into safe housing effectively.  London’s Rough Sleepers, described in the Saunders article referenced at the beginning of this post, “sent out hundreds of staff and volunteers every day to have one-on-one meetings with rough sleepers, focused on one question: What would it take to get you off the street? They were expected to have same-day responses, in the form of a wide array of shelters, hostels, alcohol-permitting “wet spaces,” shelter-to-home transition facilities, residential hotels and more permanent accommodations.” This kind of immediate response with real-time data collection and individualized support would be aided by the near upstream work Saunders describes. By identifying where people are coming from into homelessness, we can develop better transitional supports that keep them from hitting the streets in the first place.

Stemming the Flow

The community-based care movements of the latter half of the twentieth century took people out of stigmatizing, isolating and often abusive institutions. Unfortunately, those institutions haven’t been replaced with the robust network of community care needed to keep people safe and off the streets.

For two years at the peak of the pandemic I worked regular shifts at the Lighthouse in Saskatoon, then the province’s largest homeless shelter. Many of the people we saw there had just been discharged from hospital or released from prison. Nearly all were struggling with major mental and physical health problems. Shelters like the Lighthouse or the Saskatoon Tribal Council’s Emergency Wellness Centre are part of the response that can help ease transitions, but their capacity is limited and they often face backlash for being too visible in the community. There is a need for a more systematic approach to identifying who is likely to fall into homelessness and to prevent that fall.

Canada’s housing crisis - and its worst manifestation, people living on the streets in a country as wealthy as ours - is not insurmountable. There are solutions available, solutions that follow from a clear-eyed look at the problem and at successful responses around the world. The longer-term solutions lie further upstream, with efforts to reduce inequality and poverty and provide greater opportunities for people to succeed, but there are things we can do to help those who are in trouble today.

Instead of a No Trespassing sign, people who are without homes need a welcome and a helping hand. One simple rule to start: no one should be discharged from hospital or prison into homelessness. Establishing the clear obligation for the health and justice system to ensure people have somewhere to go would mean fewer people entering homelessness and more resources to get people off the streets and into safe housing.