SSW106: Homelessness in BC and Canada

Homelessness in Canada

Streets Of Plenty - 1 of 7 - Vancouver Homeless Doc

The Completely Obvious Way To Solve Homelessness

@home: Housing First - Solution to End Homelessness

This video features Mark Horvath from Invisible People and Dr. Sam Tsemberis, who pioneered the housing first model along with the organization Pathways to Housing in New York City. 

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Report Card on Housing & Homelessness in Vancouver

The 2012 report card on the City’s Housing and Homelessness strategy shows Vancouver is currently exceeding all of its short-term targets for protecting and expanding affordable rental housing, building new supportive housing, and ending street homelessness. Vancouver has already met and exceeded its 2015 target for new secured rental housing, achieved 84% of the 2015 goal for new supportive housing units, and is on track to meet or exceed the 2015 targets for new secondary rental units and new social housing. Street homelessness is also down 62% since 2008, from 811 individuals to 306 in 2012.

Youth Homelessness in Canada: Implications for Policy and Practice 

Youth homelessness is a seemingly intractable problem in Canada. In communities across the country, people are increasingly aware of the sight of young people who are without a home, sleeping in parks, sitting on sidewalks or asking for money. What do we know about these young people, and what should we do? 

This report aims to fill a gap in the information available on homelessness by providing an accessible collection of the best Canadian research and policy analysis in the field. In this book, leading Canadian scholars present key findings from their research on youth homelessness. In an effort to make this research accessible as well as relevant to decision-makers and practitioners, contributing authors have been asked to address the 'so whatness' of their research; to make clear the policy and practice implications of their research so as to better inform the efforts of those working to address youth homelessness.

LBGT youth make up chunk of ‘invisible’ homeless numbers 
Thuncher, J. (2013). Vancouver Courier. 

Kicked out of his family home at 17 for being transgendered, Eireann Day struggled to find a stable place to live and dropped out of high school.

He spent time homeless and battling schizophrenia on the streets of Vancouver. All he wanted was a place to stay where he would be accepted but found that hard to come by.

“For a trans guy like myself if I were to access a shelter [… ]I would be forced into a woman’s room and I would be really uncomfortable and they face a lot of violence and bullying in regular shelters,” said Day.

According to Aaron Munro, manager of community development at RainCity Housing and Support Society, Day’s experience is not uncommon. “Studies in the U.S. and Canada have found that LGBTQ2S+ youth make up 30 to 50 percent of homeless youth in major urban centres, that is significant when research also tells us that people who identify as LGBTQ2S+ only represent 10 percent of the general population,” Munro told the Courier by email.

Judy Graves, the longtime City of Vancouver homeless advocate who recently retired, will also be on the Invisible Night panel. She recalls a time when youth homelessness wasn’t a big issue in this city.

“In 1967 it was very easy to find housing if you were young because for a quarter of minimum wage you could rent a housekeeping room in the West End or Kitsilano or Commercial Drive area,” she said.

She blames the cost of land and zoning restrictions that favour single-family homes for locking youth out of the rental housing market.  

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The rental-housing shortage is now a national disaster. It needs Ottawa’s help

Balkissoon, D. (2013). The Globe and Mail. 

What would a Canadian rental-housing disaster look like?

Would it look like 42 per cent of young adults between 20 and 29 living with their parents, up 10 per cent from the early 1990s?

Would it look like 156,358 people waiting for affordable housing in Ontario? Or Vancouver seniors on $1,200 monthly pensions trying to afford that city’s average one-bedroom rent of $982?

... a full third of Canadians are renters, many of them students and newcomers whose journey to stability is made difficult by crowded living situations and constant moving.

Those who follow the rental market daily don’t hesitate to call the situation disastrous. Vacancy rates are dismal across the country. Only 10 per cent of the shiny new buildings that have gone up during the past decade’s housing boom were built expressly to house renters. Many older rental buildings have been demolished in favour of condominiums, while those that still stand have often been left to crumble.

Arguing that housing is a human right doesn’t get much traction with the federal government. Neither, it seems, do economic facts, like the usefulness of a mobile labour force not tied down by mortgages and heavy household debt. Also pointless is linking traffic congestion to the inability of workers to find housing they can afford close to their jobs. “The incremental nature of the problem is what stops us from seeing it as a crisis,” says Steve Pomeroy, a senior research fellow at the University of Ottawa Centre on Governance.

In 2011, Regina instituted a bold five-year, 100 per cent tax exemption for new rental developments. Since 2007, any builder wanting to demolish rental housing in Toronto must include the same number of rental units in a new project, contributing to a slower rate of rental erosion than in Calgary.

These initiatives are well-meaning and they may have success, but without broad, federal action, they’re merely stop-gaps. This is a country-wide problem that goes back decades: purpose-built rental housing delivers a measly return to investors, and tiny tax breaks don’t shield landlords from ever-shifting rules and laws. This impasse isn’t for lack of ideas, since everyone from builders to academics to actual renters have ideas about tax incentives, the best use of capital cost allowances and inclusionary zoning. There just isn’t any interest at the national level at finding a solution.

It seems that we won’t act on Canada’s rental disaster until it’s really ugly, and in our faces. Thirtysomethings who hate their roommates or seniors eating canned food in basement apartments just don’t make a dramatic enough story.

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Study Details Canada's 'Perfect Storm' Housing Problem

Eroding incomes and plunging rental stock leave 380,600 households in 'severe' need.

By David P. Ball, 20 Jun 2013, The Tyee. 

New research into Canada's housing crisis has yielded some disturbing conclusions, including findings that 200,000 Canadians experience homelessness every year, and three-quarters of that group is forced to stay in shelters at some point.

Researchers released their State of Homelessness in Canada 2013 report yesterday, billing it as the first comprehensive look at a growing problem on a national scale. The document also concludes that 380,600 Canadian households are in "severe housing need," and that on any given night there are 30,000 homeless across the country.

The crisis is particularly acute for aboriginal people, as well as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth, the report found.

"The worrying thing is, the numbers may actually be a lot higher than we're estimating... You see eroding incomes for the poorest Canadians, and 10 per cent of households living in poverty. That's very worrying. Homelessness is a lot bigger than who shows up in the shelters and on the streets."

According to The Economist magazine, Vancouver is the most unaffordable city in North America and one of the most expensive in the world. But homelessness, compounded by declining incomes, is "plaguing" cities across Canada.

"The building industry has shifted from building apartments to building condos. We've seen that across the country," he said. "The supply of low-cost rental housing has diminished at the same time that incomes have diminished. It's the perfect storm."

One ongoing problem the report identifies is the increasing reliance on emergency shelters as a solution to homelessness. Those temporary services were never intended as a long-term fix to the problem, Gaetz said. In the end, shelters wind up costing significantly more in services such as health care, mental health and policing.

That's why one of the report's key recommendations is to expand the Housing First approach, which has been tested successfully in Vancouver, Gaetz said.

Such a strategy has proven successful, because when an at-risk person "touches the system" -- for instance, by accessing an emergency shelter, being released from hospital, or interacting with police -- the whole system responds, rather than having that person just move from shelter to shelter, he said. Housing First's integrated systems can work in any community, Gaetz argued.

"If you take most chronic, hardcore homeless person with complex issues, and give them housing and the supports they need -- there's an investment there -- then their health improves, as well as their engagement with the community. That's a strategy we know works... but it needs to be scaled up and accompanied by investment in expanding the affordable housing supply."

"At the end of the day, we're not going to get anywhere without significant new investment in market rental housing and social housing," he added. "There is a fairly serious housing crisis in our country. The economics show it doesn't make financial sense for our country to ignore that problem."