[homeles_ot-l] Pls read ATEH Letter to Editor: Supportive housing for some, access to affordable housing for others!

[Lynne Browne]

Hello all,

 

Please read below the Alliance to End Homelessness Letter to the Editor sent
yesterday in reference to the Ottawa Citizen, City Section Editorial Nov
19th, "Housing that makes sense" (also below). 

 

We clarified the time period for some of the data in the editorial and
discussed funding.  Mary-Martha has received a call about the letter so it
may be published.

 

Lynne

Lynne Browne 
Coordinator, Alliance to End Homelessness 
147 Besserer Street, Ottawa ON  K1N 6A7 
613-241-7913 x 205, lbrowne at ysb.on.ca 
www.endhomelessnessottawa.ca 

 

Letter to the Editor

 

Supportive housing for some, access to affordable housing for others!

 

The Alliance to End Homelessness agrees that supportive housing is ‘Housing
that makes sense’. Housing with supports so that community members are able
to stay housed is a key solution for some people who are homeless in our
city. We asked the City of Ottawa for clarification on the 859 single
adults; that number is a quarterly figure for the single men and women
between June and September 2007 who used emergency shelter services for over
sixty days. Once available, the numbers for the whole year may show the need
for supportive housing to be even greater. 

 

We do not think that funding for new supportive housing should be taken from
maintaining our existing social housing - one of Ottawa’s valuable
resources. Perhaps the desire to have a zero tax increase should be
re-assessed so that we can maintain housing that currently exists and take
action to address the homelessness crisis our community is experiencing. And
of course, provincial and federal governments should be challenged to do
much more to help. 

 

If 30% of the single homeless population in the shelters for those months
needs supportive housing, it still remains that 70% also need to be able to
access affordable and appropriate housing. 

 

At the end of the day, we can’t walk away from solutions to end homelessness
or simply shift funds to one type of housing at the expense of another
within the current resources. Supportive housing and truly affordable
housing are both a good investment for our community.

 

Mary-Martha Hale, Chair of the Alliance to End Homelessness

 

 

Editorial

OUR VIEWS

Housing that makes sense

OTTAWA CITIZEN 

 

Ottawa’s shortage of supportive housing doesn’t just smack of a lack of
charity. It makes no financial sense, either. The city is moving toward
fixing the problem, with a long-term study trying to put a dollar figure on
the social costs of true homelessness. This is even harder than it sounds,
because our definition of “homelessness” is so vague and so badly abused for
political gain.

So far, the study has found that 859 people used Ottawa’s emergency shelters
for more than 60 days each in the past year. Those 859 people are Ottawa’s
genuinely homeless.

They’re overwhelmingly singles; the study found that chronic homelessness is
not a noticeable problem in shelters that take in families.

Most of these 859 people are likely living with major mental illnesses or
addictions or both, or who grew up in such chaotic families that they never
learned basic life skills. Troubled people bouncing in and out of shelters
get physically sick in the cold and the damp, eating poorly and perhaps
abusing drugs. They turn up in emergency rooms with routine problems run
riot. They commit petty crimes and occupy the police.

Supportive housing, with social workers and nurses and psychologists in
teams ready to provide the help such people need, is extremely expensive,
but it’s not as expensive as leaving to fend for themselves people who need
safe and stable places to sleep before they can start working on their other
problems.

The researchers are to nail the details down in the next phase of their
work, but existing figures for other Canadian cities show that a year’s
worth of institutionalization, whether it’s in a jail or a hospital, costs
governments between $66,000 and $120,000 a person; a year’s worth of
supportive housing costs $13,000 to $18,000.

We had 806 units of supportive housing functioning in Ottawa last year,
according to Ottawa’s Alliance to End Homelessness, and 2,630 people waiting
for spaces. Even if that number is inflated somehow, there’s a visible gap.
We’re taking a needless risk by maintaining a gap that large.

This is emphatically not a broad argument for building enough
general-purpose social housing to clear the 10,000 or so names off Ottawa’s
waiting list for subsidized apartments. A shortage of inexpensive housing
for people who don’t make much money is a very different problem.

Indeed, the money to build more supportive housing might come from some of
the $90 million or so the city spends each year to maintain its
general-purpose social housing. Certainly the provincial and federal
governments, which have to shoulder some of the health and policing and
other costs of true chronic homelessness, should be paying a lot more.

Regardless where the money comes from, it’s increasingly clear that
supportive housing is a good investment — one that pays returns not only in
human dignity and happiness, but in cash as well.

 

 


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