Housing the unhoused during the pandemic
HOMELESSNESS AND LACK OF SUPPORTIVE HOUSING HAS CREATED A CRISIS AMONG TORONTO’S MOST VULNERABLE
“I am safe at home.” It’s been a prevalent message throughout COVID-19 as people have tried to put pandemic anxiety into perspective. But for Toronto’s unhoused community, that maxim has been cold comfort, given that a lack of housing has put them at increased danger throughout the pandemic.
Registered nurse Leigh Chapman doesn’t mince words. She says homelessness has created a crisis among Toronto’s most vulnerable people during COVID-19.
Chapman is the director of clinical services with the Inner City Health Associates (ICHA), a group of 200 nurses and physicians providing critical care for Toronto’s homeless. Chapman was part of a team that repurposed a hotel into a clinical space, known as the COVID-19 recovery site, for unhoused people to self-isolate from COVID-19 exposure and illness — a luxury (if you can call it that) many of us take for granted.
“In the first wave it was frightening (for the unhoused) because everything was shut down,” Chapman says. “People who panhandle for their survival or warm up in Tim Hortons to use a bathroom (couldn’t) do that. They felt unsafe in congregate living. That meant they were sleeping in encampments or stairwells or couch surfing, but that’s really hard to do (during) COVID.”
In April alone, 20 shelters in Toronto were facing COVID-19 outbreaks, infecting more than 320 people — with nowhere to go. One resident died. The Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario (RNAO) has been pushing the province for more vaccines for registered nurses and shelter workers to curb the spread of illness among the city’s vulnerable people and the staff who support them.
There’s also been a profound lack of resources such as proper PPE and adequate infection control practices, says Roxie Danielson, a registered nurse at Inner City Family Health Team, who also works alongside the health-care team at ICHA.
“I have witnessed several of my clients becoming ill from COVID-19 due to shelter outbreaks,” Danielson says. “I have had clients shuffled between shelters and isolation sites and back again. I have clients who had to sleep on the streets because there was no more room within the system.”
Humanizing unhoused people — by learning about the inequities that led them to their situation — is a necessary step to finding adequate solutions and support, according to Gill Kennedy, a registered nurse who works at the COVID-19 recovery site.
“When people think of a homeless individual, their first thought is someone we might see on the street panhandling, but we’ve had moms with brand new babies, we’ve had senior citizens and refugees. It’s a wide variety of human beings who wind up in this situation, and they are all vulnerable for different reasons. But at the same time, the one thing that’s been consistent across all of our clients is just their resilience.”
Kennedy recalls one family — a father and two children — who came to the recovery site from a COVID-19 assessment centre.
“I admitted them toward the end of the day and brought them up to their room, and I could just see the exhaustion on the dad’s face. They were refugees from Yemen. The daughter said, ‘Wow, is this room all ours? And there’s a TV and we get our own bathroom?’ Not only had she had such a terrible day, but also the months and years before that had been so traumatizing, and she just couldn’t wait to have a bath in the bathtub and watch TV and go back to doing math virtually. It was just so lovely to see.” Chapman echoes Kennedy’s sentiment. “Even though COVID is obviously a terrible thing to acquire, many people have had a positive experience (at the recovery site) because of the integration. We’ve knit together all these services: health care, harm reduction, peer support and shelter. People sometimes leave after a two-week stay more stable than they came in. And that … speaks to the gaps in our system. If we had a health-care system that was able to care for people experiencing homelessness, we wouldn’t have had to create an isolation hotel. And what’s the lesson from this?”
For Danielson, the answer lies — in part — in the imperative to build more social housing and supportive housing, while continuing to fund low-barrier safe shelter options, including those with harm reduction services that allow for supervised drug consumption onsite.
“Housing is a human right, and housing is a huge determinant of someone’s health,” she says. “As a citizen, you can write to your elected officials and demand change. You can also follow activists on social media and in the news and join advocacy groups to learn more on how to be actively involved and to stay in the know.
Canadians value our right to health care, adds Chapman, but we don’t place the same value on the right to housing. And too often the response to an individual’s vulnerability is to blame them.
“They are regular people who have experienced adversity, and that adversity at the moment just means they are unhoused,” she says. “It’s so easy to turn away from them. We need to be turning toward them. To me, that’s the biggest lesson.”