How COVID crisis is acting as ‘catalyst for change’
HOW COVID-19 HELPED B.C.’S HOMELESS When the pandemic arrived, some of the province’s most vulnerable people were moved into motel rooms. Many think the program should become permanent
Years into her battle with homelessness and addiction, Becky Bird was pregnant and hobbled by an arthritic hip when she was told in May that bulldozers would raze the Abbotsford encampment where she and her partner had lived in a tent for months.
“She was seven months pregnant and we had no money, not really much anyways. Things were looking pretty scary,” said Bird’s partner, Brad Wernicke.
“I felt kind of hopeless, kind of desperate. By the time the police officers came and we were given the notice that we had to vacate, well, where were we supposed to go?”
Bird, who gave birth to baby Elijah on July 12 and is awaiting hip replacement surgery, remembered staying uncharacteristically calm through the ordeal.
“’You shouldn’t worry. I have faith in God,’ I said, ‘that it is all going to work out and that we’ll be OK.’ I was even surprised that it was coming out of my mouth because I’m sure a worry-wort … freaking out about what we were going to do. And then two days later we ended up here.”
“Here” is an Abbotsford motel where the non-profit Phoenix Society joined with the Fraser Health Authority and used provincial funding to open 18 rooms in midApril as a shelter for homeless people with COVID-19 symptoms.
Residents are get three meals a day and wraparound services for addiction, health care, housing and some mental illness needs. It has been a brilliant success for people like Bird and Wernicke, who are much healthier living in their hotel room, are on replacement drug therapies, and hope one day to have a home with Elijah, who remains for now in the Abbotsford hospital’s neo-natal intensive care unit.
Just before the bulldozers arrived, outreach workers offered a space in the hotel to the couple, and police officers drove them there.
“We didn’t really believe it at first, right? We were told that we could be in a hotel and that we would be taken care of,” said Wernicke.
“It was really amazing that we were able to get help because we were really not knowing what the hell we were going to do. I would not have forgiven myself if, God forbid, things had not worked out. If the baby’s health had been jeopardized or her’s.
“And thank God, the baby is healthy.”
But here’s the thing. Bird and Wernicke never had COVID-19. And neither have the 58 other people who Phoenix has helped in the motel since April.
The Abbotsford motel is one of more than 100 “self-isolation sites” that have opened across B.C. since April in response to the pandemic, either to help vulnerable people with COVID-19 symptoms or to offer spaces to those discharged from hospitals so they have a safe place to recover.
Together, these facilities created 3,000 beds that came with wraparound health services.
And while the rooms were opened to response to COVID -19, what they have really done is start to fill a huge need that has existed in
B.C. for many, many years: supported housing for a growing number of homeless people in the midst of an overdose crisis that is killing six people a day.
“If anything good has come out of this COVID pandemic, it has been that finally there’s been more attention paid to these folks who are living with no shelter.
And it brought more to the forefront what kind of great things can happen if you just put a roof over their head, food in their stomachs and the medical care they need all in one place,” said Kari Hackett, Phoenix’s program director for the Fraser-east area.
NO COVID-19, BUT BURNS, CANCER, DEMENTIA
Hackett, who was executive director of Positive Living Fraser Valley for eight years before that non-profit merged with Phoenix this spring, said some of the untreated medical conditions discovered by her staff and Fraser Health workers at the hotel include severe burns, cancer, bad infections, wounds requiring surgery, dementia and three pregnancies.
“We had a mandate, obviously, to support people who were symptomatic or COVID-positive, but suddenly we had these really complex cases that we couldn’t let go of,” said Keir Macdonald, Phoenix’s CEO.
Back in April, when the Abbotsford facility first opened, once people got a negative COVID result, the Phoenix staff generally arranged to transfer them to other shelters or to connect them with hard-to-find housing.
But then the workers started to lobby to keep some of the people longer term, often because their serious health issues couldn’t be accommodated in a standard shelter.
Macdonald, who has been involved in shelter operations for more than a decade, said there was unprecedented co-operation among the provincial government, B.C. Housing, the health authorities and non-profits to get the isolation centres running.
“In a way, it is has actually taken COVID for housing to work with health, to provide the services that people need to get well,” he said.
Since mid-April, B.C. Housing has financed 3,000 extra rooms in 118 sites, including hotels, community centres and keeping winter-only shelters open. The names of the hotels, including the one run by Phoenix in Abbotsford, are being kept secret to protect the privacy of the people staying there.
The locations are scattered throughout the province, with 849 of the rooms in the Vancouver Coastal Health region, 749 in the Interior Health Region, 682 on Vancouver Island, 544 in the Fraser Health Region and 141 in Northern Health. They exist in big cities with major homeless populations, such as Vancouver and Victoria, but also in smaller towns where shelter spaces are limited.
The arrival of the pandemic forced emergency conversations among the provincially funded B.C. Housing and the province’s five health authorities: How would they minimize the risk of COVID-19 among the province’s homeless population, which in a 2018 count numbered nearly 8,000 people, many of whom were also endangered by the deadly overdose crisis?
“One thing COVID really did was it enhanced a lot of the dialogue and partnership on the ground. Because It really made us make the phone calls and connections with the health system,” said Dominic Flanagan, B.C. Housing ’s executive director of supportive housing programs.
Two of the first facilities to open in April were in Vancouver’s Roundhouse and Coal Harbour community centres, where rows and rows of beds were spaced two metres apart in the main event rooms. They opened as COVID -19 facilities, but eventually morphed into shelters. Half of the tenants came after being discharged from a hospital and they received health and wraparound support services before most of them were moved to hotels with more private rooms. Before the centres closed at the end of June, as more rented hotels became available, they had taken in a combined 186 people who stayed an average of 35 days each.
“What the COVID issue has done, is allowed us to identify the pathway to address the issues around homelessness. And we could argue that we should have done that anyway, but I think what happened was the COVID issue was that catalyst for change,” Flanagan said.
Finally there’s been more attention paid to these folks who are living with no shelter.”
“If you want to really address homeless, it’s got to be a cross government approach, and its got to be about housing, health, poverty (groups) and municipalities working together. And I think we’ve been saying that all along, but then suddenly COVID came along, and showed us a pathway for how to do it.”
How long the sites will operate depends on several factors, including what happens with COVID -19 in the fall, the need in each community, and the willingness of private owners to continue to rent out their hotels.
How much this has cost is still being tallied. In March, $43 million was earmarked to support vulnerable residents in existing B.C. Housing or non-profit managed buildings. Another $14 million went toward “thinning” out existing shelters, which suddenly had to keep residents two metres apart. An additional $105 million was spent buying four hotels, two in Vancouver and two in Victoria, to house homeless people.
The province is also picking up the tab for renting the hotel rooms, although B.C. Housing says it is paying below market rates.
‘WE CAN END HOMELESSNESS’
Julie Roberts, executive director of the non-profit Community Builders Group, believes the pandemic shelters are worth the investment and could be a model for the future for how to finally end homelessness in B.C.
“I’ve been doing work with housing and homelessness prevention for 15 years and I’ve never seen a response this efficiency and this quickly with all levels of government and non-profits working together,” Roberts said.
“I think that the lesson out of this is it is achievable, we can end homelessness. ... I think if there is the will for everyone to work together, it’s possible.”
Community Builders ran the Coal Harbour emergency response centre and two others that are still open: a Vancouver hotel that is taking in COVID patients and a local hostel that switched from a COVID facility to one that housed campers forced to leave Oppenheimer Park.
“I think there is a sense of optimism that through these difficult times a positive way forward and future change can happen,” Roberts said.
Bird and Wernicke, who are both 36, hope they are on the cusp of future change.
“Being here has opened up so many doors for us. I have to just say having the baby and being healthy, and her being able to have the baby with some dignity and being somewhat comfortable, that is so important, right? The fact that she actually has a bathroom and a shower and clean clothes,” Wernicke said.
Without the roof overhead and the support from Phoenix staff, an emotional Bird can’t talk about how different their lives might be right now. “I actually don’t even want to think about where we would be if we were still outside, and where Elijah would be.”
They visit the baby in the hospital most days, and have a stack of baby clothes and other supplies in anticipation of his discharge. “We are looking forward to him coming home. He is doing wonderfully. He is just such a precious little guy. He is the most beautiful baby ever,” Wernicke said.
Bird, who has rheumatoid arthritis in her right hip, relies on a crutch to get around and is in constant pain. She has needed surgery for a long time, but was never approved for it because she didn’t have a home in which to recuperate. That has changed now.
In addition, about three weeks after moving into the hotel, the couple went on methadone, and say their cravings for opioids is gone.
‘THE SKY’S THE LIMIT’
Hackett, with the Phoenix Society, said nearly all of the 60 people who have been at the Abbotsford motel have now gone on some type of drug replacement therapy. Not only does that ensure better health and stability, but it means they aren’t committing crimes to support their habits, she added.
There is a tent at the hotel for people to smoke drugs outside, and those who use in their rooms are asked to alert staff first so they can be monitored. There has not been one overdose in the four months since the hotel opened.
“We have a huge overdose crisis going on right now. All of our staff is trained and they can respond, but we hadn’t had one,” Hackett said proudly.
Roughly half of the rooms overseen by Phoenix at the Abbotsford hotel are now used for housing instead of COVID -19 isolation. Once people are stable Hackett and her staff try to find them alternative places to live. After all, she has a wait-list of homeless people who would like to move in, including two more pregnant women.
The lease for the rooms was supposed to expire in June, then was extended to September, and now until the end of December. Hackett would like to the funding to last even longer. “It surprised us, even, how successful it’s been,” she said.
The short-term plan is for Elijah to move into Wernicke’s mother’s small apartment, but the couple is desperately looking for a larger, affordable place where the four of them can all live together.
“We weren’t sure what was going to happen but at some point we decided to do our very best, and our damnedest, to stand up on our feet and to change so we could be parents. I also knew realistically that people don’t often go from being street entrenched to a stable lifestyle overnight,” Wernicke said.
“But if we can get from where we were to here, then the sky’s the limit, right? We can be stable parents living with a baby in a pure home. Maybe have a good job and do the things that I should be doing.”