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

[Susan Garvey]

Mary Martha (and Lynne too),
     Very good letter. Thanks for doing that on behalf of all of us. I'm glad you took a position that it's not either supportive housing or affordable housing that are needed but both.
Sue Garvey
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Lynne Browne 
  To: listserv 
  Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 2:55 PM
  Subject: [homeles_ot-l] Pls read ATEH Letter to Editor: Supportive housingfor some, access to affordable housing for others!


  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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