Pete McMartin
Sun
Judy Graves is the housing advocate for the City of Vancouver, and she remembers the exact year it all started to happen.
It was 1995.
For the first time, she noticed people sleeping on the streets. They had begun to drift in to the city’s doorways, like leaves.
“Then, in 1996, I started to get calls from the media asking me how many homeless there were in Vancouver. I had no idea. So I started going out into the streets to find out for myself.”
She did this on her own time. She haunted street corners and back lanes. She did counts, like a birder. And she would try to talk to the people she saw. She was breaking through the stigma of homelessness, and all the easy generalizations that came with it, and trying to find the human being underneath.
“People say it’s a bunch of lazy bums who have addictions, but the actual equation to homelessness is really quite simple,” Graves said. “There will be an increase in property values and a decrease in incomes. So we would wind up with more people, especially young people, falling through the cracks.”
And often — to put it indelicately — they would be damaged goods. The sexually abused. The children of addicts. Trauma victims. Fetal alcohol syndrome sufferers. Schizophrenics. The grab-bag of dysfunction.
Graves noticed something else about them.
Most had little or no income. Few were availing themselves of welfare.
They didn’t go on welfare, they told Graves, because they couldn’t negotiate their way through the system.
For them, the system had become a barrier, not a hand up. To flush out the welfare fraud of the 1980s and early 1990s, the NDP provincial government of the day had tightened up the application process. Identification requirements became more stringent. Past employment records had to be produced.
When the Liberals came to power, the cuts continued. Several welfare offices were closed. Caseloads increased. Wait times, even for emergency cases, stretched to weeks.
The number of people applying for welfare plummeted — not because of the economy, Graves said, because by then the truly employable had already found jobs — but because the people who needed it most, that underclass she was seeing on the streets, did not have the skills to make their way through the system.
It was too confusing, too dependent on the strict observance of paperwork. Many were illiterate. Many had trouble keeping appointments because, living out on the streets, they had lost their sense of time.
Over-all, these people who were in chronic need, Graves said, were a very small percentage of the population. But a host of effects made them more and more visible — deinstitutionalization, a drug epidemic, less social housing, rising rents, fewer rooms. So when the people affected by these problems hit the welfare wall, they began to back up on to the streets.
So Graves came up with an idea.
She designed an outreach program.
Beginning in the spring of 2005, she went out early in the morning — before the homeless had roused themselves and moved on, Graves said — picked out someone on the street and asked that person if she could help him or her get welfare and a place to sleep.
She would then take the person to a welfare office at 8 a.m. — an hour before the official 9 a.m. opening and the daily rush — and with the help of a welfare worker who had volunteered to come in early, process a welfare application right then and there. Within the day, her client would have a welfare cheque and a room of his or her own.
The program, called the Vancouver Homeless Outreach Project, was a joint effort between the City and the province. It worked so well that this spring, the provincial government funded it with $300,000 more to keep it running for another year.
There are now 10 two-man teams around the province, with four of these teams in Vancouver — two in the Downtown Eastside, one in Downtown South and one in Mt. Pleasant. Each team brings in four people a week to be processed.
But there are large numbers of homeless, Graves said, in Kitsilano, Point Grey, the Commercial Drive and Joyce Street areas and in northeast Vancouver. The homeless there, she said, are essentially out of luck.
“In essence, a homeless person picked by one of the Outreach teams has won the lottery. And you have to ask yourself, why is that? Why is it that a homeless person has to depend on pure luck to get a welfare cheque and a safe place to sleep. Every human being, and I don’t care who they are, deserves a safe place to sleep.”
All of this reeks of a great irony, of course. In its continued funding of the outreach project, the provincial government has not only acknowledged the project’s effectiveness, it has tacitly recognized the dysfunction of its own welfare system. Otherwise, why would it need Graves’ program?
The welfare offices do have some outreach workers of their own — in hospitals, for example, and drug clinics — but not nearly so many that they can make a dent in the growing numbers of homeless.
If Judy Graves proved anything, it wasn’t that a single person could make a difference.
It was that an entire welfare system couldn’t make a difference, and that that system needs to be changed.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
