Who is ‘sleeping rough?’ What’s the best way to help?

Trinity United Church has sat empty in downtown Kitchener for more than a year, waiting to be torn down so that a 33-storey highrise can be built on its footprint.

It wasn’t long before homeless people found a way into the cold, dark building. A few weeks ago, a fire broke out. The YWCA homeless shelter next door was ready to evacuate.

“This abandoned church became a temporary home to some people, some of which our staff know,” shelter executive director Elizabeth Clarke wrote in an article for The Community Edition newspaper.

Among the half-dozen men and women who were “sleeping rough” in the empty church, Clarke said, were:

• An older woman and man in a relationship. Both are homeless, but in Kitchener-Waterloo there are no shelters that allow men and women to be together. Rather than be separated, they sleep outside together.

• A woman who is addicted to drugs and has overdosed many times. Although she had affordable housing, she left it. Her need for the drugs overcame her ability to pay rent and take on other tenant responsibilities.

• A pregnant woman with “serious” mental health and addiction challenges. Although social service agencies have tried to reach out to her, she doesn’t want anything to do with them. “No one knows very much about her,” Clarke said.

Clarke said there is a “surge” of homeless people in Waterloo Region like this. They travel often in small groups and spend the nights unsheltered, in a tent or building lobby or even in the bushes.

For a variety of reasons, they can’t or won’t live in shelters.

One reason is fear, Clarke said. Shelters are full, even overcrowded. “There’s people, there’s noise.”

For someone with anxiety, it’s too difficult to fall asleep so close to strangers. They can’t tolerate being there.

Other observations show a wide gulf between the middle-class expectations of most of us, and the daily lives of people on the street.

For example, some homeless people have animals that are terribly important to them as companions and protectors. These people won’t go into a shelter because the shelter won’t let the animal come with them. Even though there are vets who will board the animals of homeless people until they get back on their feet, the owner can’t bear to be separated.

Other homeless people aren’t welcome (“service restricted,” Clarke calls it) because they acted violently or illegally in the shelter and put others at risk.

Still others refuse to seek permanent housing, so they are asked to leave.

Why would they refuse? Perhaps because drug addiction has them in such a deep grip, they want to spend every available penny on that. Rent puts too big a hole in their budget. The addiction is so powerful, they choose to live outside even though it is dangerous and uncomfortable.

Part of the reason we’re noticing more people homeless and sleeping rough is that drug addiction has soared, and methamphetamines and opioids have taken the place of alcohol.

“It used to be an unusual thing to find a syringe” on the ground, Clarke said.

But now, needles are everywhere, and it’s bothering other people to find them in parks and on trails. Authorities are looking for people who are camped out in parks. Previously, those people were invisible. Clarke, who is a councillor for Waterloo Region as well as shelter director, heard of one man who lived in a tent in a conservation area for three years before he was discovered.

Meanwhile, inexpensive rental housing is harder and harder to find as land values rise. There isn’t enough housing that’s affordable for someone on social assistance. The wait can be eight years.

For some people, even getting a lowrent apartment doesn’t keep them inside.

“The life they knew is on the street and they go back to it,” she said.

Soon, Trinity United Church will come down in a shower of red bricks and debris. The people who took shelter there will have moved on.

They and others like them need a wide variety of responses. Not just free hot meals at soup kitchens and a bed in a shelter, but also a place they can go to get warm and take a nap at 3 a.m. Or a good sleeping bag to take with them.

It pains most of us to see people live in tents, surrounded by garbage.

We just want it to stop.

But unfortunately, there’s not an easy answer. “There’s not one solution,” Clarke said.

“It’s really, really complicated.”