Housing First program working toward ending homelessness
They show up in the emergency room and in the back seat of police cars. Sometimes they spend the night in a jail cell. The next day they might be holloweyed, hung-over and hanging onto a grocery cart or hanging out on Leon Street, waiting to be received at the Gospel Mission.
They are Kelowna’s homeless and how they got there is often complicated.
Broken homes and marriages; broken dreams and bank accounts; broken spirits and health, but make no mistake—we are all just one heartbreak away. Maybe it’s the son of your best friend or the friend of a friend. Maybe it’s your own circumstances. Homelessness is not something that touches “other people.” Homelessness affects us all.
The folks at the Kelowna branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) know this and have undertaken a bold, new initiative aimed at ending homelessness—by providing homes.
It’s called Housing First and a year in, statistics show it’s working.
A federally funded program, Housing First is modelled on the belief that housing is a human right and to end the cycle of chronic or episodic homelessness and go on to make meaningful changes in their lives, people must be housed first.
Then, with the help of a caseworker, they will be ready to access resources for health, address substance misuse, and learn to be thriving community members.
Participants are selected on the basis of their vulnerability. The highest users of emergency services such as Kelowna General Hospital, paramedics and the RCMP, those who have been homeless for at least a year, or those who are quite literally at risk of dying, are taken care of first. And that’s new.
“It’s usually first-come, first-served in the homeless system,” said CMHA Director of Service Delivery and Program Innovation, Mike Gawliuk. “Can you imagine if the ER worked that way? You’re having a heart attack, but someone in front of you has an ingrown toe nail … you’re in trouble!”
First-come, first-served tends to favour people with the most capacity to negotiate systems, and statistics show some 53 per cent of people on the streets suffer with a brain injury or have a developmental disability.
Many don’t learn from consequences, so insisting they complete a long list of mustdos before they can be housed is simply unrealistic.
“Even in the homeless system, there are rules,” said CMHA Executive Director, Shelagh Turner. “You can’t drink, you can’t have your spouse or your dog or your shopping cart … It’s all about what you can’t have, so it doesn’t fit peoples’ circumstances.”
“Few of us would be successful in that system,” Gawliuk points out. What if we couldn’t drink? If you have to jump through 15 hoops before you’re housed—if people could do that—they’d already be in a house.
The cure for homelessness is a home. It’s that seductively simple.”
“It’s common sense and it’s countercultural to how our system has worked,” added Turner.
The first participant in Kelowna was housed in July 2016 with another nine participants accepted over the next several months. Further funding promises another 10 spots over the next year.
Progress is being made and economically, it’s paying off. Participants receive subsidies to pay their rent, but in the long run, they cost the system less when they’re off the streets.
Take Bob. Housed in an apartment at a scattered site in the city (not a complex specifically allocated to transition people), he received a rent supplement from CMHA Kelowna and engaged weekly with a support worker who checked in, assisting in management of his new life. This included self and medical care, cooking, shopping, filling out forms, budgeting, and negotiating relationships with neighbours and his landlord, among other life skills.
Bob reported significant self-improvement in every domain of his life. He even spent his first Christmas in many years with his mother and sister, calling it the best holiday he remembers. Meanwhile, he hasn’t visited KGH once and has had zero contact with police, and that’s saying something.
A well-known user of emergency services, the folks in those organizations began questioning Bob’s whereabouts, fearful he might even be dead. Regularly discussed at Partners in Community Collaboration, as someone the system just didn’t know how to support, Bob’s case is not unusual. In fact, virtually all of the other participants reported similar outcomes.
Pre-intake, another participant we’ll call Simon, visited the ER 16 times in 2016, including five admissions, with some 55-plus visits to jail, including more than 100 hours in cells. Post-intake, between November 2016 and spring 2017, Simon had zero hospital visits and no legal issues.
It all sounds wonderful. People off the streets and into houses, no longer burdening services and generally becoming more self-sufficient, but in a city with a low vacancy rate to begin with, how do we find homes for the homeless? How does this help the community and don’t some people prefer to be homeless? Has the program been successful elsewhere and how can we be sure it’s the right thing to do? We’ll discuss that in the next column. Questions? Contact the CMHA at cmhakelowna.com.
Shannon Linden writes books, magazine articles, and grocery lists. Her health column runs every other weekend in The Okanagan Weekend. Contact her and sign up for her blog at shannonlinden.ca.