Homelessness must be priority
A couple of years ago when I came to work at the shelter where I was employed, there was a man and his dog sleeping out front.
Seeing a man sleeping outside the shelter is not what I wanted to see, especially when the spring night was extremely cool and I found out that he was sick. The issue that blocked his housing was the dog. He would rather sleep outside and get sicker than to come inside without his companion of 17 years.
I called the SPCA and made arrangements to board the dog, but he wouldn’t give up the animal and kept getting sicker each day. Now, this animal wasn’t just a dog. It was a toothless halfcoyote. Despite my reservations, we decided to let both of them stay. There was some controversy over letting the dog inside the building, but I calmly explained that it’s “toothless and part coyote,” so we should be OK.
The response from other service agencies was sur- prising. When they heard what we had done, someone brought in a collar, matching bandana, leash and soft dog food. Another agency brought over one of those baby carriers that you pull behind a mountain bike, so that the dog could ride in style.
The reception of the men in the shelter was just as over the top. While the dog had been well taken care of, it was doted upon every moment of the day by the shelter residents. It reminded me of the crowds at the Calgary Zoo when it brought in the largely stationary pandas. They never moved, but the crowds loved to watch them anyway.
Sadly, the dog owner’s illness wasn’t because of the cold weather or from being homeless. He came in one day after seeing a doctor, told us he had cancer and went home to deal with it. We never saw him or the dog again.
Looking back at a lot of the unique cases that come across my desk each year, not all are as easy to solve as housing a toothless old dog. Some rules can be bent or ignored, and no one gets hurt.
I haven’t always shown the creativity and problem solving skills spontaneously to make a situation work. However, the biggest problem is a lack of a next step, which means that whatever solution you come up with as a shelter provider is one that you will have to live with for a long time.
According to the 2010 Homeless Individuals and Families Information System (HIFIS) report card, more than 40 per cent of Saskatoon shelter stays are three months or longer, and those are the difficult ones. First, that’s a lot of money tied up in keeping people in emergency housing. Second, there are some national studies in England that show that the longer persons remain in the shelter system, the worse they do, and the harder it is for them to leave. Anecdotally, the problem I have seen involving many clients is that the longer they are in the system, the more frustrated and hopeless they become.
The lack of individual space and privacy, and even being deprived a good night’s sleep from being in a congregate setting all contribute to the issues. Even police curfew checks, when officers are making sure that offenders are where they should be, is disruptive to the sleeping patterns of everyone else in the dorm. While each of the factors is small and can be inconsistent, there’s cumulative effect that starts to take a toll on people.
The solution is to drastically shorten the time people spend in emergency shelters. You are never going to solve homelessness in any city, but Calgary’s goal has been to drastically shorten stays in emergency shelters and keep the time between entering a shelter and leaving to seven days. The goal is that by 2018 no individual or family will stay in an emergency shelter or sleep outside for any longer than a week before moving into their own housing that they can sustain.
When you know that you are getting out, it provides a lot of options on both sides. Shelter providers know how much dog food to carry, and as a resident you know that sacrifices to your freedom will be short lived. In other words everyone knows that while this is a tough situation, it is temporary.
Until we decide to make homelessness a community priority, 40 per cent of those heading into shelters will be there for three months or more. It’s hard to make any progress as individuals or as a system when you don’t know where you are going.