Does everyone deserve a place to sleep? Photo courtesy of quinet

Nothing spoils Christmas like thought of dozens of people sleeping outside in cold, wet Vancouver weather. It’s been an ongoing struggle for years and isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

In 2008, shortly after the municipal election and right before the city was blanketed in dumps of snow, the city, province and non-profit housing leaders were able to open HEAT (Homeless Emergency Action Team) shelters to put the option of a roof over the head of some of the city’s most vulnerable individuals.

For the past three years, ground-zero for the emergency housing effort has been First United Church. Each winter night, Rev Ric Matthews, Sandra Severs and their church staff find beds (or pews) for hundreds of hard to house, hardcore, street homeless people. The shelter was hard to miss. A block east of Main off Hastings St, it is constantly surrounded by a gaggle of street people and their shopping carts full of belongings.

Mathews, Severs and their team were committed to housing anyone and everyone who needed help. No-one would be turned away, regardless of who they were, what they’d done in the past, where they were supposed to be living or how many people were trying to get in on a given night. You’d think such a commitment of open-armed acceptance would be welcomed by civic and provincial leaders looking to combat street homelessness. And it was, at least for the first few years.

But then complaints started to roll in. There were reports of sexual assaults by some shelter residents against others. It was evident that many of the government’s “best practices” weren’t being followed at First United. Then the city’s fire department got involved when it came to light that the fire code was being violated by the number of people sleeping in the shelter in a number of nights. The church leadership’s refusal to turn anyone out into the cold didn’t square with their insurance and liability contracts. The issue came to a head First United was forced to to turn away 27 people in one night due to fire safety bylaws. Matthews, Severs and another operational manager promptly resigned and a media uproar flared as the issue of shelter best practices vs. exclusion of the needy came to the forefront. Matthews summed it up aptly in a recent interview with the CBC:

We need a separate way of trying to deal with folk who fall through the cracks… The problem is that while that’s totally appropriate and necessary, there are folk who get excluded by that process. By the very definition of the word, there are folk who are seen to be a threat to others and who can’t be inside of that facility.

Now Matthews and his top lieutenants have resigned, BC Housing’s funding for the shelter has come to an end and First United will no longer be offering 200 shelter spaces to some of the city’s most marginalized citizens. Two new housing shelters have been announced by the province to replace First United’s stock of beds, but these will likely not be able to operate with the same “open-arms” approach of First United. Whether there will still be as many places for aggressive, criminal, alcoholic, or heavily drug addicted homeless folks remains to be seen.

One thing is certain, the demand for housing (especially as it gets colder) from this particular hard-to-house demographic is not likely to evaporate any time soon. The loss of an organization committed to housing and servicing this population could be a significant blow to the efforts of Vancouver and Victoria to deal with the Metro Vancouver homelessness crisis.

While it’s understandable that leaders in both the United Church, city and province would be uneasy with First United’s “no one will be turned away”, I wonder what will happen when dozens of these 200 street homeless people hit the streets, not beds, in the coming cold winter nights.

Photo courtesy of jmv