| While Calgary’s homeless problem has increased dramatically over the last few years, a number of U.S. cities have made major reductions in homelessness due to effective 10-year plans.
The Calgary Committee to End Homelessness, comprised of private sector, non-profit and government representatives, is in the early stages of creating a 10-year plan for Calgary. The committee held a summit on April 23, which included presentations from homeless experts in the U.S.
Heather Lyons, homeless program manager in Portland, Oregon says in 2005 Portland had 2,355 people on the street, but after starting to implement its 10-year plan it has seen a 39 per cent reduction in just two years. The city has managed to move 1,039 chronically homeless people into housing.
She says Portland has adopted a "housing first" approach that has been used in many U.S. cities. Homeless people are immediately moved into permanent housing regardless of their circumstances and they are offered whatever supports are necessary to stay in the housing.
To get people off the street Portland has so far used a combination of private market housing where people get rental assistance and affordable housing. The city plans to create 2,200 new affordable housing units by 2015 and 600 of those units will be for the chronically homeless.
Portland has also made a commitment to try and prevent people getting discharged from hospitals, jails and the foster care system from ending up homeless by providing permanent housing for discharged individuals who need it.
Chronically homeless people are the number one priority for permanent housing. "The more problems you have, essentially the more we want to house you," says Lyons. "What we find is given a chance in a housing unit as opposed to a shelter people are going to be a lot more successful in ending homelessness and becoming healthier and engaging in a path of recovery from addictions and their problems."
Lyons says moving out of chronic homelessness also ends up being cheaper. Portland did a local study and found that it saved $15,000 for every chronically homeless person placed in permanent housing due to reduced emergency room visits, reduced need for mental health services and reduced incarceration.
Lyons says many cities in the U.S. are now confident they will be able to eliminate "institutionalized homelessness that is some kind of a permanent class. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to eliminate economic and financial crises that people experience that put them in a temporary homelessness, but I do think we can end the long-term homelessness and the unfortunate consequence of failed systems that cause people to live on the streets for years," she says.
Nan Roman, president of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, says about 300 cities in the U.S. have created or are working on 10-year plans to eliminate homelessness. Roman says the catalyst for coming up with effective 10-year plans in the States was the fact that homelessness became a growing crisis.
"Everybody was working so hard and doing so much and getting more and more sophisticated and spending more and more money and the numbers weren’t going down. They were going up," says Roman. "People just started to look around and say we’re spinning our wheels here…. Having people spend years on end in the shelter system has no good result for anyone."
Wayne Stewart, president of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, says Calgary can be successful if we can find the same "passion and commitment" as U.S. cities, but it will also require policy changes and money. |
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