7 months, still looking for a home
Woman left with few options after stay at emergency shelter
There is a long list of plans that Brenda Murdoch has made for her future, but first she needs to find a home.
“I would like a place to live, that I could sustain, so that I can get my hip replaced, recover, go back to school, my volunteer work, feel productive and, you know, just have a life,” she says.
Murdoch, 53, has stayed for more than seven months at a coed shelter in Mississauga run by the Salvation Army. She relies on the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) because of severe rheumatoid arthritis.
She is on a wait list for subsidized housing and has applied for a rent supplement, through a new program for people who have experienced more than one episode of homelessness.
But Murdoch, who does not want to go to a group home, doesn’t have a lot of options. In the region’s tight rental market, for a woman with a physical disability and low income, who is not old enough to access seniors’ services, there are very few places to go.
The average stay at a Mississauga emergency shelter for a single person is about five days and it’s about four in Brampton, according to Peel Region staff. Families average about 20 days.
Recently, Murdoch was told to leave for a few days after she broke shelter rules, but she’s been in the emergency system for close to a year.
Leslie Moreau, manager of human services for Peel, says every effort has been made to help Murdoch find housing, but she has rejected several options and cannot stay indefinitely. “Usually something comes through. I hope that is what happens. They’ve got her on all the right lists. They have got the right agencies involved to support her,” says Moreau, who had Murdoch’s permission to speak about her case.
Murdoch was back on the streets over the Canada Day long weekend. She had been drinking, was told to go to the hospital and when she came back was discharged, she told the Star. For about three days, she says she was on the street, at one point sitting on her walker outside a bar. She also tried to get a room at a hotel but couldn’t because she didn’t have a credit card. She ended up taking a taxi back to the shelter late Tuesday night.
Her removal is being reviewed. Moreau says nobody is turned out without first being presented with options of other places to go and appropriate shelter would be found for anybody who called the shelter or any Peel Region emergency housing lines.
Complicating Murdoch’s shelter stay and longer-term housing search is arthritis.
“Kids called me ‘ rigor mortis case,’ ” she says, describing her childhood with the debilitating illness. Murdoch has her own room at the shelter, with an accessible bathroom.
She needs a walker, devices to help her dress, a bath seat and uses a stack of pillows to support her while she sleeps. She wants to stay in Brampton, near her doctors, support workers, friends and accessible transit.
“I don’t need a group home. I can cook for myself. I can do things for myself. I just need a reasonably priced place to stay . . . I am 53 years old, for heaven’s sake. I am not mentally deficient. I am not an old person.”
Canada’s National Housing Strategy will include targeted supports for people with disabilities, though no one has said what precisely it will mean for people like Murdoch.
In Peel, a one-bedroom apartment costs about $1,100 and just 1.3 per cent were vacant in 2016, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Murdoch, who receives $1,139 each month while renting, says she was evicted from her last place in November 2015, because her ODSP barely covered rent and she fell behind.
She also lived in a group home where she says her bed was a curtained-off portion of the living room and at one point moved in with a man who she says abused her. She has even slept in a cemetery.
“Just here and there, sleeping in the graveyard, the hospital, that stupid group home. I hooked up with this frigging idiot guy who beat me up and stole my money. Got to go to court for that still,” she says, letting out a long sigh.
“Just beside any old tombstone,” says Murdoch, when asked where she would sleep in the cemetery.
The next stop was a family shelter, then into the sole accessible room in the Mississauga shelter, which she says she waited a year to get.
The Peel men’s shelter has two accessible beds, and the family shelter has two units.
Moreau says if those spots are full, workers call across the GTA and find people suitable places to stay.
During the early months of Murdoch’s stay in the shelter, the focus was on getting her healthy and then facilitating access to support services including housing, Moreau says.
Private listings have not worked out because either the landlord or Murdoch says they weren’t the right fit, largely because of her mobility issues.
They applied to a Brampton se- niors’ residence with rent-geared-to-income units. Murdoch says she would have gone, but she isn’t old enough. She also declined to visit a private group facility in Brampton. Murdoch says there were stairs.
She has twice been given a deadline to leave.
“Unless she is blatantly refusing to move forward, we are not going to discharge her to the street. We want to work with her, but we need her engaged,” Moreau says, explaining the deadline is more of a tool and not a promise to remove somebody.
Most of Peel Region shelters — including those for men, youth and families — are overflowing, or have run out of regular beds. In those cases they use cots and sometimes hotels for families.
The coed shelter where Murdoch stays has 119 beds. In June, it was 85 per cent full.
The region is three years into a Housing and Homelessness Plan and is working to address barriers to housing, including accessibility. It is trying to cut shelter times by shifting to a housing-first model of care.
“Now it is one-on-one case management to get you out of a shelter as quickly as you can into safe permanent housing in the community and then wrap supports around you,” Moreau says.
York University and the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness are expected to release recommendations on Peel services by fall, she says.
“We know we need to do things differently,” Moreau says. “We are hoping that the research will tell us a little bit about how to make that shift.”
Murdoch says she wants to work and go back to school.
“I’m not disposable. I am languishing. I have lots to offer, but I can’t do it from here.”
“I’m not disposable. I am languishing. I have lots to offer, but I can’t do it from here.” BRENDA MURDOCH WHO HAS STAYED FOR MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS AT A COED SHELTER