TOUGH LOVE FOR HARD CASES

Why, a reader of last week's column asks, are there so many more
people on the streets who are hard, or even impossible to house in any
conventional sense?

There used to be places for these men (and they are mostly men).
Places like bush camps where illiteracy and anti-social tendencies
were commonplace. The proceeds of dirty, low-skill and dangerous jobs
were often squandered in a few days or weeks, and then it was back to
the bush. Their lives were less visible, and shorter.

There are few low-skill jobs left now. They're done by machines or
have migrated overseas. The people have migrated from the margins to
urban areas.

The mentally ill were locked up, for society's good if not their own.
Their drugs were prescribed, for control as much as treatment.

So how many homeless people are there in B.C. today? According to
Jenny Kwan, the NDP's critic for homelessness, addiction and mental
health, it's around 10,000 to 15,000. She points to B.C. Liberal cuts
to social programs dating back to 2002, including operating funds for
peer support groups like the B.C. Schizophrenia Society, now at risk
of shutting down.

Rich Coleman, minister of housing and social development, says the
number is closer to 5,000. The NDP is using a collection of local
estimates, but "we do counts," he says, although he admits they aren't
precise because some of society's outsiders hide from all
institutional intervention.

Coleman says he's doing what Kwan is calling for, outreach programs to
bring people into housing with support workers to help keep them
there. At some of the inner city hotels he bought in Vancouver, police
officers are now assigned, trying to break the cycle of drugs and crime.

The hardest cases, he says, are 200 to 300 severely mentally ill drug
addicts who cycle from jail to hospital to the streets at huge cost to
us all. They are the focus of B.C.'s latest project, the long-awaited
"community court."

That court needs someplace to send people before it can function. Step
one is the former Willingdon youth jail in Burnaby, a secure custody
treatment centre which early next year should have all 100 beds open.

The message from the court will be, "you'll either go to jail or
you'll go here, and you'll go here until you're well," Coleman says.
Once the addiction settles down, the mental illness still leaves them
unable to live independently, so a group home for the rest of their
lives is the best outcome.

Clearly 100 beds isn't enough. An assessment was done of one of the
unused Riverview Hospital buildings, but Coleman said that would have
cost too much and taken too long. Negotiations are underway on another
property somewhere in the Fraser Valley that can be opened sooner, at
less cost.

Where in the Fraser Valley? That's confidential for now. "If we get a
chance to close on it, you'll know."

And speaking of Riverview, what's become of Coleman's controversial
plan to develop that provincial property into a mix of supportive and
market housing?

That's got "a lot of emotional pieces" attached to it, he says. It
will require an "extensive public process," and nothing will happen
until next fall, when the priorities mentioned above are further along.

NDP housing critic Diane Thorne, a former Coquitlam councillor, says
the community favours supportive and transitional housing for mental
illness and addiction. But too much of the site has already been sold
off for development.

"My feeling is that nothing will be said until after the election and
I find that very scary."

Olympic Housing

In October, the B.C. government announced a deal with the Vancouver
Olympic organizing committee to reconfigure 320 temporary modular
housing units from the Olympic village in Whistler.

They are to be combined into 156 permanent homes, to be located in
Sechelt, Chetwynd, Chilliwack, Enderby, Saanich and Surrey, at an
estimated cost of $43.6 million including land contributed by
municipalities.

At least one reader wasn't impressed. "Doing the math, that's about
$279,000 per trailer. This is what the B.C. Liberals call affordable
housing to the poor. How about a nice house in Port Hardy with a view
of the bay?"

Small Towns Affordable

At the recent B.C. Liberal convention in Whistler, a discussion of
high housing costs prompted one delegate to shout out an invitation
for people to check out Merritt for affordable housing.

I passed this tip on to an anonymous reader who called to chastise me
for my comments about Victoria's celebrity homeless guy David Arthur
Johnston, who camps out at parks and city hall with his Starbucks and
smokes.

Was the suggestion of moving to our country music capital met with
interest? Well, no. It went over about as well as my previous idea
that perhaps springtime panhandlers could pitch in with the daffodil
harvest and, you know, earn some money.