“Cold Comfort” by Wendy Banks appeared in the Globe and Mail on 06/12/08

Cold comfort

With an early blast of Ol’ Man Winter whipping through the city canyons this week, the tug-of-war over sleeping bags will begin afresh, reports Wendy Banks

WENDY BANKS

Special to The Globe and Mail

December 6, 2008

Joan Ruzsa’s client, a homeless man, woke up one morning last month to discover that his sleeping bag had been stolen. He went to a community health agency that had given him survival gear in the past, but he was turned away. “They told him that the city was no longer funding sleeping bags,” says Ms. Ruzsa, co-ordinator of Rittenhouse, an advocacy group.

As this weekend brings in an early blast of Arctic air to the Greater Toronto Area, nobody wants to see people sleeping rough – least of all the general manager of the City of Toronto’s shelter, support and housing administration, Phil Brown. “We invest in getting people off the streets and into housing,” he says, “particularly in the very cold days that we experience throughout the winter.”

He is talking about the city’s award-winning Streets to Homes program, built on a “housing-first” model, which, according to Mr. Brown, has housed about 2,200 of Toronto’s estimated 5,000 homeless people since its inception in February, 2005.

But as the chill air settles in over the city next week, the battle will heat up again on what to do about homeless people who refuse to go into shelters.

Shelters, Ian and Darren agree, are terrible.

“The bedbugs!” Ian says. “They’re brutal.”

“And they sell crack right in the front door. You go in there to try and better yourself,” Darren says. “But when it’s there, it’s so easy to just …”

So what do they do when it gets cold?

“Freeze!” Darren says. They burst out laughing. “Sometimes we’ll sit in the subway shelters, until they kick us out,” he continues.

“Then the ATM places, until they kick us out,” Ian says.

The two of them were sitting together cross-legged on a pale-blue sleeping bag in a Bloor Street doorway one cold evening recently. That night the temperature fell below zero – this Arctic front will bring in subzero temperatures – and Ian and Darren had no plans to visit a shelter. The only thing standing between them and hypothermia was their sleeping bag. It was newish, in good shape, relatively clean. Lined with grey polyester, it looked light – better than a skimpy summerweight version, but no match for a frigid Toronto night.

It came from Ve’ahavta, a Jewish humanitarian organization that works with homeless people, they explained. “They also have them down at the church …” Darren said, pointing west down Bloor.

Last year’s winter was brutal, and, according to Environment Canada’s senior climatologist, David Phillips, this one promises to be snowier than average as well. Add a sour economy to the bitter weather, and some might wonder if an exclusive housing-first model is the best policy right now.

“The whole housing-first thing is based on something that advocates have been saying for a long, long time,” says Michael Shapcott, director of community engagement at the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based think tank on urban health, “which is that housing is one of the most fundamental issues for successfully stabilizing people.”

But, as he sees it, the political realities of the program leave something to be desired.

When Streets to Homes was approved by city council, it was accompanied by a few provisos designed, he says, “to give people a bit of a nudge to get off the street” – for example, a bylaw making it illegal for anyone to camp in a municipal square, and withdrawal of support for agencies that distributed survival services such as mobile food programs and sleeping bags.

However, “not everybody who is on the street is going to be willing to go into housing,” says Lorne Opler, a project manager at Ve’ahavta. For one thing, he says, “the accumulated impact that [homelessness] takes on one’s mental health is indescribable.”

For another, past traumatic experiences in shelters might make some homeless people reluctant to live in close quarters with others. “Some people think, ‘Well, what if I wind up living with a roommate who can be no different from the kind of people I might have been with in the shelter?’ ” Mr. Opler’s program, Mobile Jewish Response to Homelessness, has found one answer: Its van delivers warm clothes and hygiene products to street people four days a week. He says there’s an advantage to being funded through private donations: “We’re able … to pursue what we want to do with our focus and our mission statement intact.”

For the time being, privately funded and faith-based groups are still providing homeless people with survival supports – for example, the Out of the Cold program offers meals and beds in 19 churches and synagogues throughout the city, and organizations like Ve’ahavta and Street Health are distributing private donations of sleeping bags and warm clothes this winter.

Improvements to Streets to Homes are on the horizon: In May, 2008, city council approved funding for 72 full-time housing follow-up and outreach workers, up from 24; and they’ll be extending services to marginally housed people – shelter users and couch surfers, for example – as well as people sleeping rough.

Ian and Darren have both been on the streets for years. But Darren is hoping to get into a Streets to Homes apartment soon; he’s met up with an outreach worker and done the initial paperwork. “I just did it a week ago. He said it’d take about two to three weeks,” he says. “I call him on a regular basis, at least once a week. I was supposed to meet with him today, but I was elsewhere. But he knows I’m around.” Some friends of his were housed by Streets to Homes in the summer.

“Now they’ve got a good place. They’re happy. It does work, yeah,” he says, nodding, his breath coming in white puffs. “It does work.”

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