When latent poverty penetrates the suburbs
Peel and Halton regions are fighting their own battle with hidden homelessness
With its brown brick exterior and tidy garden, the 1970s bungalow on Mississauga’s Dixie Road appears unremarkable.
The home of Our Place Peel, a United Way-funded emergency shelter for youth in crisis, is a safe haven for 16- to 21-year-olds who have nowhere else to go.
It is also the only emergency youth shelter in the entire Peel region.
“We have to turn away a lot of kids on a nightly basis because we’re usually full,” says executive director Christy Upshall.
Last year, Our Place Peel, which houses 14 short-term and six transitional beds, had to send away more than 450 youth who were in need of a safe place to stay. Much like the nondescript building, the need for emergency shelters and housing in Toronto’s suburbs is one that could easily go unnoticed.
However, it’s a widespread problem — in 2015, 14,000 people in the Peel region accessed a shelter, 4,000 of whom were children or youths (up to age 21).
“Homelessness and poverty in the suburbs looks different — it’s not as obvious as it is in downtown urban centres like Toronto or Montreal, where you think about the person sleeping outside,” says Shelley White, president and CEO of United Way Peel.
Instead, she explains, it manifests itself in a very different way: the postsecondary student sleeping in his car; the senior citizen biding her time at the public library; or the teenager couch surfing.
According to White, the number of shelter beds and availability of affordable housing in Peel has not kept pace with the region’s population growth. Currently, Peel has one of the longest wait lists for affordable housing in Ontario, with approximately12,000 people waiting up to10 years for some place to call home.
Even for those youth and children who do have a bed to sleep in every night, poverty still takes a toll on their access to basic needs.
This was the case for Paul Taylor’s* kids. When the father of six was between jobs, healthy school lunches were simply no longer in the budget.
“We had Children’s Aid called on us because it wasn’t a nutritious lunch. You wouldn’t always able to get the proper stuff and the kids would eat it before they got to school,” recalls Taylor, who works full-time.
Thanks to Food for Life, a poverty- relief organization, Taylor was able to send his kids to school with wellrounded lunches.
Funded by United Way Oakville, Food for Life picks up and delivers surplus fresh food from wholesalers and retailers, before distributing it to community partners, housing devel- opments and non-profit residential homes.
It supplements the traditional nonperishable food bank offerings with dairy, meat and produce, often the first items cut from tight budgets.
Food for Life’s executive director, Brenda Hajdu, says that being pover- ty stricken or having a low income can have adverse effects on a person’s overall health and well-being.
“Social status is the No. 1 determinant of health, so we want to make sure that if someone is struggling, that they still have access to good quality food,” Hajdu says.
The program supports more than 80 different food programs in the Halton region, with 38,000 clients, 40 per cent of whom are children.
Hajdu talks about “invisible hunger,” where those struggling to make ends meet may not fit the stereotypical profile of being impoverished. In fact, 20 per cent of Food for Life’s recipients — including Paul Taylor — are employed full-time.
“Halton is looked at as an affluent region, and people don’t necessarily realize that these problems exist here, because they go on behind closed doors,” says Brad Park, CEO of United Way Oakville.
In reality, he says, one in eight people experience hunger in Oakville, with 112 hunger relief agencies operating in the Halton region.
However, much like homelessness in Toronto’s suburbs, Park points out that hunger is a complex issue.
“Food insecurity is certainly not an isolated issue; there are other factors taking place in people’s lives that lead to that,” says Park, citing a lack of affordable housing, mental illness and addiction issues.
The groups most vulnerable to poverty are also amongst the fastestgrowing segments of the population, including seniors, people with disabilities or mental illness, newcomers, visible minorities and single parents.
“These issues are not silos,” White says. “They’re completely integrated and we need integrated approaches to address homelessness, mental illness and poverty.”
While it invested $1.9 million into emergency and transitional housing in Peel in 2015, the United Way is also committed to seeking change at a policy level, including advocating for an additional youth shelter in Brampton.
For poverty-relief organizations such as Our Place Peel and Food for Life, this holistic approach and focus on sustainability is the strength of their relationship with United Way.
“They have been able to be out there meeting with the politicians to really educate them about homelessness,” Hajdu says.
“It’s not just about the funds. When somebody supports United Way, they’re really enabling a strategically aligned team.” *Name changed by request.