For some, walking away from living rough isn’t easy
Frank Welsh is proud of his home.
It lies down a wooded path, over a fallen tree and past a discarded shopping cart in an Edmonton river valley park.
“Sorry for the mess,” he said, pulling back a curtain, revealing a foyer beneath a faded orange tarp.
There’s enough room to stand, and there are two tents on either side for sleeping. He’s got a stove, room to store his bikes and trailers — which he repairs with parts he finds or buys around town — and enough space to put up other people who are living rough.
“I don’t like seeing anybody out there, and I’ve got lots of room,” he said one Tuesday morning after a rainstorm. “We just threw it together kind of, but it works. It keeps me dry — it’s kind of cosy.”
Welsh is one of the hundreds of people living rough in Edmonton’s river valley, a population that balloons during the summer months.
He likes living outside — he’s done it for years in both Alberta and British Columbia, sometimes by choice. But he knows it might be time for a more permanent home.
Giving Welsh and others like him the tools and support to make the shift will be key as Edmonton enters the final phase of its 10-year plan to end homelessness.
Doug Cooke and Jenelle Slywka, two social workers with Boyle Street Community Services, find Welsh early on in their daily tour of the city’s homeless camps.
Five days a week, the crew of nine outreach workers set out on foot from the downtown shelter to help homeless people. In some cases, that means bringing a nurse to look at an injury, or delivering clean “rigs” for drug users. In others, all they need is some water, granola bars and a few minutes of conversation about their lives and services that could help them.
Cooke estimates as many as 400 people could live in the river valley in the summer months.
Many of them set up camp to escape crowded shelters where thefts and violence are looming threats.
Edmonton had its first brush with the phenomena now known as homelessness in the 1910s, when thousands of young men arrived on new railroads, said local historian Shirley Lowe.
“There was a whole group of low-wage workers who lived in substandard housing. A lot of them were squatters,” she said.
Throughout the first half of the century, shanty towns were common along the North Saskatchewan River, and stories abound of people who lived in tents and caves along the riverbank.
In 2009, the city launched a 10year plan to end homelessness after three consecutive counts averaged eight per cent growth in the homeless population. At that rate, there would have been 6,500 homeless Edmontonians by 2018.
The plan — based on the “housing first” principle that jobs, addictions and mental-health treatment need not be prerequisites for housing — helped stave off that surge, coupled with provincial investment in supportive housing. The 2016 homeless count by Homeward Trust found 1,752 people experiencing some form of homelessness — a decline of more than 40 per cent since the start of the plan. Unsheltered homeless, including those living outside, are down to 22 per cent of the homeless population. Indigenous people accounted for more than half of those experiencing homelessness.
Tim Richter, president of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, said no other city in Canada has achieved reductions like Edmonton.
Actually ending homelessness will require buy-in from neighbourhoods willing to accept new supportive housing units, which has been called the last frontier in Edmonton’s fight against the problem. It will also hinge on dozens of small interactions, like those between the Boyle Street staff and Welsh.
Welsh lived in the bush in B.C., working as a logger for a time, and has been back and forth to Edmonton since the 1990s. He dreams of having a relationship with his children, who went to live with their mother in Saskatchewan and went to her parents after she died. Welsh was doing a stint in jail at the time and didn’t hear about her death for seven months. After that, “I kind of lost myself for a while,” he said.
Living rough got a lot harder two months ago when an accident with a bear banger cost Welsh a middle finger and thumb on his right hand. He was handling the bear banger — similar to non-lethal percussion grenades used by police — thinking it was a fire cracker. He fumbled it, and it went off in his hand.
“I just suck it up,” he said of the pain. But it takes him twice as long to set up camp, fix his bikes and pack loads of bottles when he’s binning.
Cooke offers to send someone the next morning to take him to breakfast and chat about housing paperwork. Welsh is amendable to the idea. He’s tired of having bikes stolen and his camps cleared away by the city when he’s not there.
Outreach workers returned a day later and started Welsh on the prescreening process for housing, and Slywka said the outlook is positive.
As Welsh recounted his injury outside the camp Tuesday, he looked down at his hand.
“It kind of opened my eyes to a lot — how easy it is to lose stuff,” he said.