An inconvenient question: Will homeless plan work?

In 2008, the city of Calgary set a goal to end homelessness by 2018. The strategy revolves around the Housing First principle, which holds that the first priority for addressing homelessness is simply to get street people into stable, secure accommodation.

The Calgary Homeless Foundation has built about 500 supportive housing units, provided access to others, and says it will have housed 10,000 people between 2008 and the end of this year.

“Ten years, and 10,000 people. That’s something we can all be proud of,” the foundation says on its website.

But last year, a count of the homeless in Alberta’s biggest city showed there were 3,200 people without their own lodging. That number was down just 11 per cent from the number of homeless people in Calgary in 2008.

The Calgary experience should temper some of the high hopes surrounding Kelowna’s nearly-completed plan to tackle homelessness. At Monday’s city council meeting, there was a lot of praise from city councillors for the $47 million, five-year plan.

It was becoming a real love-in between councillors and Alina Turner, the Calgarybased consultant who’s been hired by the City of Kelowna to steer this community’s homelessness strategy known as the Journey Home. The plan here is basically the same plan as the one’s she’s touted in other cities — build housing for the homeless, and get the federal and provincial governments to pay for most of it.

Then Coun. Luke Stack raised an inconvenient question — will the plan work?

“It’s a very assertive plan and there’s a lot of money involved. But if we try and paint a picture and look five years down the road . . . and even if we implement this plan with some success, will our shelters still be full downtown and will we still be seeing people sleeping all over town?” Stack asked.

He noted that, a decade ago, there was a similar push to get homeless people into housing, with the city and province partnering to provide about 160 suites in various complexes.

“The goal was to house the people that really needed the supports and the wraparounds, and all the things you speak about. And we have, and those people are housed,” Stack said.

“But I look around the streets and see more (homeless) people out than I did 10 years ago,” Stack said. “That’s the part that leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling. The plan is good, because we should be doing all we can to help those who need the help, but is it really going to change much in the way we see our community look?”

Turner, who’d been soaking up the praise from other councillors and returning their compliments, didn’t immediately tell Stack he’d asked a really good question.

Instead, she referred to the plan’s goal of housing 2,100 people over the next five years, and said that that “absolutely” would make a difference in the size of the street population.

I’m sure that, in 2008, the architects of the Calgary homelessness plan were similarly confident. And they had the benefit of a then-booming economy, one that could provide both jobs to people interested in working and taxation revenue necessary to build the required new housing for those homeless people unable or unwilling to join the labour force.

In any event, those involved in development of Kelowna’s homelessness action plan may firmly believe the best solution is to provide hundreds of new housing units at enormous public expense. But there’s not necessarily similar public support for such a costly undertaking.

In fact, a majority (52 per cent) of the 501 people who responded to an online city survey in late winter actually said they were either satisfied or very satisfied with current efforts to address homelessness in Kelowna.

That was a revealing, if little noticed figure, since you’d expect most people who take the time to complete such a survey on homelessness would be probably be broadly sympathetic to new efforts to help street people.

A key premise of Housing First is that people can get into housing without necessarily agreeing to participate in any kind of treatment that might help them address whatever issues — addictions, mental health challenges, etc — that led them to be living on the streets.

If the survey had asked the blunt question: Should homeless people be given free housing regardless of whether they agree to get help?, a microscope would likely have been needed to find the number of Yes responses.

This may be the elite’s belief, but it’s not widely shared by the taxpaying public.

It is not cruel and unusual to expect the homeless to participate in their own journey home to respectability. To the contrary, it is demeaning and belittling to regard them as functionally incapable of making better choices, to see them as so profoundly different from the rest of us that they must be treated basically as children.

They are indeed, as the saying goes, our brothers, sisters, fathers, and mothers. And like any family member, they should be offered generous assistance that comes with firm expectations.

If the path to a life on the streets ends at free housing with no strings attached, we should hardly be surprised the bleak road will never be short of travellers.

Ron Seymour is a Daily Courier reporter. To contact the writer: ron.seymour@ok.bc.ca