‘I FEEL UNDER SIEGE’
Blodwen Reitz looks out the front-door window of her downtown Windsor residence. She says that with so many homeless people in her neighbourhood, she sometimes feels like a prisoner inside her own home, Anne Jarvis writes.
Blodwen Reitz came to know him as John. He lives on the street. He started showing up on the front porch of her two-storey brick house on Montrose Avenue downtown last spring. He stored his stuff there. His clothes were strewn everywhere.
You can’t put your things on my porch, she told him, respectfully but firmly.
So he shoved them under her porch.
One day, she found a new satellite dish, still in a box, under her porch.
She called the police.
Take this away, she told them. It’s not mine. It’s stolen. Then she planted a rose bush — with big thorns — next to her porch “so no one could put anything under there.”
John left his shopping cart at the side of her house. She pushed it to the sidewalk. Another homeless person took it.
She caught him jumping over her fence one day. He wanted to use her hose.
“I needed a drink of water,” he told her.
One night, he banged on her side door at three o’clock in the morning. When she didn’t answer, he banged on the front door.
Her eight-year-old grandson found a needle on her porch and another in her yard. The one on her porch had blood in it. One day, Reitz glanced out her window and saw someone lying on her porch. It was John, and he wasn’t moving.
“Oh, he’s dead!” she thought, alarmed. “He died on my porch!” She called the police again. They came and roused him. Reitz never yelled at John. She talked to him. She listened to him.
Now, she feels overwhelmed. Don’t go out, the police advised her. Lock your doors.
“I feel trapped in my house,” she said. “I feel under siege.” How bad is the homelessness, mental illness and addiction downtown?
“It’s really bad,” said Reitz. “It’s awful.”
She has lived in her home for almost 46 years.
“I can remember when I didn’t even lock my door,” she said. “I’m pretty tough.”
Reitz is the former manager of the main library downtown. When she retired, she became the manager of Ready-Set-Go, which helps families with young children living downtown who are facing hardship. She only really retired last year. She’ll be 80 next month.
But her son has cancer. She can’t care for him and handle the people showing up at her house. “What I’m talking about — it’s not only happening to me,” she said. “It’s happening to other people.
“You’ve got to have a plan that’s going to work,” she said of the city.
One day, a woman showed up. Reitz came to know her as Paula. She was a friend of John. She said she didn’t have a place to live, either. Reitz offered to speak to housing officials for her. She drove her to a shelter.
But Paula returned. She asked to use the bathroom. No, Reitz said. She asked to do her laundry. No, Reitz said.
Reitz found Paula’s bike in her yard. Then another bike appeared next to it.
Reitz found a small portable barbecue with charcoal in it on her porch. She thinks Paula was using it to keep warm at night. Paula was warned that if she returns, she’ll be charged with trespassing. Reitz doesn’t think that will accomplish much. Paula needs help.
“But at that point,” she said, “I just wanted it out of my hands.” A third person banged on her door recently.
“I was wondering ...,” he began. “I don’t know you,” she cut him off. “Go away.”
How bad is it downtown? A woman approached a colleague on Ouellette Avenue this week. “Excuse me,” said the woman, who explained she was staying at a hotel downtown for several days.
“Is it always like this?” she asked, referring to the number of dishevelled people wandering the streets.
On the grass, steps from the sidewalk along busy University Avenue, and in the bushes along the riverfront trail are sleeping bags, blankets and clothes. They’re people’s bedrooms. A woman wandered, unseeing, along the sidewalk and out onto University Avenue in what appeared to be pyjama bottoms and bare feet one morning on my way to the office. On the way home that evening, a man marched down the middle of the same road singing incoherently. A man striding along Ouellette Avenue shouting a stream of profanity, a naked man wandering along University, a woman sitting on a bench on Ouellette, resting against her rolled up sleeping bag, arguing with herself.
All these people, their lives unravelling on our streets.