FIGHTING HOMELESSNESS
Phoenix HOMES on the front lines
The walls in Caroline Little’s home are decorated with motivational phrases and photos of her kids. They hang over a small bike she keeps on hand for her daughter’s too-rare visits.
One day, she hopes to see her young children sleeping in the spare room just down the hall.
“I’m working toward getting them back,” she said.
That would have seemed scarcely possible just a year ago. Last summer, Little was homeless. She spent her nights sleeping at detox — or outside in the elements.
“I slept out there quite a few times,” she said. “That was really hard, especially at night when it would rain and stuff. You have no shelter.”
Now, she feels like “everything ’s starting to fall into place.” Little is one of the graduates of the Phoenix HOMES program. Her life has become stable enough that she no longer needs the intensive supports it provides.
But she doubts she’d be where she is without Phoenix.
“They definitely stopped me from becoming homeless again,” she said.
Two years after its official launch — and four years after it unofficially started housing Regina’s long-term homeless — the Phoenix HOMES program has found 53 people a place to live. According to its supervisor, Kendra Giles, only three of them have become homeless again.
A few have died. Others have graduated, like Little. Most are still getting daily visits from Phoenix workers to help them stay in their homes.
But there are more than 50 people still sitting on a waiting list, and some 30 others who have applied but not yet been approved. For Giles, that shows the continued need for so-called “Housing-first” programs like Phoenix HOMES.
Housing First means getting chronically homeless people into housing right away, Giles explains, and then hooking them up with the supports they need to stay there.
“There’s no prerequisites whatsoever,” she said. “They don’t have to go to treatment, they don’t have to go into shelters … That’s the very first thing: We look for housing.”
Giles said Regina’s plan to end homelessness, due for public release this fall, is a source of “momentum” to expand the model.
Staff at the YMCA, which is helping lead the plan to completion, seem to think so too. Its housingfirst co-ordinator, Pam Reimer, said organizers are looking at ways to use housing-first strategies to specifically target the needs of homeless youth, women and Indigenous people.
“We’re always open to expanding it and seeing how that might look,” she said. “Whether expanding it’s just one program or getting more programs on board so that maybe they might meet a different need.” She has no doubt that it works. “It’s made such a huge impact.” The walls of Les Giesbrecht’s home are covered with artwork, his pastel tones depicting eagles, feathers and dream catchers.
The same themes adorn the wall behind the front desk at Phoenix’s Osler Street building, and the offices of his favourite caseworkers. Giles took hers back home, where it livens up her son’s bedroom.
Giesbrecht gives his art to almost everyone he cares about.
“I’ve been drawing since I was about 18 years old,” he said. “It makes me feel good.”
He said it was tough doing his artwork in the big dorm at the Salvation Army, where he stayed — off and on — for seven or eight years. It was a bit easier when the shelter put him in a smaller room. But he lost all his supplies the last time he went to jail.
Now he’s back at work. He keeps his paintbrushes on a table in his dining room, inside the North Central-area house that Phoenix found for him, and churns out artwork on a daily basis.
For Mayor Michael Fougere, that’s one of the best things about Phoenix — it helps people reintegrate into the fabric of Regina life.
“They’re actually participating in things in the community,” he said. “So this works in a tremendously positive way.”
Before he found a place, Giesbrecht spent a lot of nights at detox. He racked up a bunch of public-intoxication tickets that took up police resources. Then there were the stints in jail — the latest one for failure to appear in court on matters related to his alcoholism.
All that costs money. Fougere lists off all the ways Phoenix has reduced costs by housing the hardest to house.
“They saved almost $2 million,” the mayor said. “And you can see it in terms of reducing detox visits by 93 per cent, emergency room visits by 75 per cent, days in the hospital reduced by 40 per cent, EMS trips down 66 per cent, policing by 87 per cent — about $2 million in total.”
Regina Police Chief Evan Bray said Phoenix HOMES has had a “profound and positive impact,” both on people’s lives and on his service’s bottom line. His officers spend countless hours dealing with chronically homeless people who haven’t committed serious crimes.
“That savings really equates to the saved time that our officers will not be spending interacting with someone who really doesn’t need to interact with the police, but just needs some support and services elsewhere in the community” he said.
“If we’re talking about bringing someone to cells and lodging them, for their safety or the safety of others, that may not be the best way to help them.”
He’s noticed massive drops in the amount of time his officers devote to some Phoenix HOMES clients — precisely those who counted among the biggest resource drains before. Bray remembers one man who once had nearly 300 interactions with police in a single year.
After Phoenix got him housed, that dropped to six.
“That is a huge success story,” Bray said. “And that’s just one of many.”
The walls at Ray Gravel’s place are mostly bare, so it’s hard to miss the reminder his friend Floyd has pinned up with a thumbtack. It notes the time and place of two important medical appointments.
On the duly appointed dates, a Phoenix worker swings by his North Central-area house and drives Gravel to the hospital.
Gravel said he has a lot of health problems. Just the other day, he fell down the stairs and hit his head. He’s been drinking — hard drinking — since his wife died about seven years ago, and possibly long before. More tragedy has followed. Months ago, his daughter, whom he says is addicted to drugs, told him that his son had been killed.
It’s all taken a toll. There’s a plastic bottle lying empty on Gravel’s living-room floor. These days, he and Floyd sit around drinking offbrand Listerine.
“It’s pretty popular nowadays, because it’s cheap,” said Gravel. “You can buy a bottle of Listerine for a little over three bucks.”
That’s why his worker, Ashley, has been asking Gravel whether he’d like to enter Phoenix’s managed alcohol program. He recently did a questionnaire, which will help determine if he’d benefit from measured alcohol deliveries to reduce his consumption of mouthwash.
Gravel isn’t sure if he’ll go for that, but he appreciates the help from Phoenix.
“They’re good people,” he said. “They help you out, give you a little bit of grub once in a while.”
They also manage his money, and dispense life advice. Gravel recently let two people into his house, ostensibly to use his microwave. They promptly robbed him of his bus pass and DVD player.
A Phoenix worker told him that maybe wasn’t such a good idea.
But the workers can’t be there all the time. They come by twice a day to — in Gravel’s words — make sure he’s “still alive.”
Between visits, that’s Floyd’s job. He’s crashing in Gravel’s place, on a bunch of couch cushions spread out on the floor. He helps his friend up the stairs, and keeps those medical-appointment reminders pinned to the wall.
“I think some of his struggles are living on his own,” Giles said of Gravel. “But if he had access to supports all the time it could make a significant difference for him.”
She thinks he really belongs in permanent supportive housing. She says it’s a serious gap in Regina — something Fougere also accepts.
But closing that gap will take an investment. The Phoenix HOMES program is running on $750,000 a year right now, a sum that also pays for another related program. Giles estimates that roughly $1.5 million more would be required to get everyone housed and connected with the right supports.
“I’m sure that it’s higher,” she said. “It’s a very conservative figure.”
Most of that should go to supportive housing, in Giles’s view. she thinks 15 to 20 beds would be required. The rest would fund a scaled-up Phoenix HOMES that could trim down the program’s long and growing wait list.
The investment might pay for itself. According to Bray, there’s still room for a lot more benefits — both in cost savings and improved lives.
“I think the sad reality is that the need outweighs the resourcing that we have in the city,” he said
“Let’s find ways that we can help house people and then really, from there, the ability for them to build their life just exponentially increases.
“To me, it’s the greatest argument for why we need to focus on this type of work in our community.”
I slept out there quite a few times. That was really hard, especially at night when it would rain and stuff. You have no shelter.
CAROLINE LITTLE