It’s the night of Jan. 21. Toronto’s temperature has dipped below -15 degrees Celsius without the wind chill, and an extreme cold weather alert is in effect. It’s so cold that the wind feels like it’s tearing through the skin of anyone brave enough to weather the city’s frigid streetscape.Sanctuary Ministries of Toronto street pastor Doug Johnson Hatlem is one of those people.
Johnson Hatlem and street nurse Anne Marie Batten are out working to get Toronto’s homeless off the streets. The city’s Shelter, Support and Housing Administration has followed policy and announced that 172 emergency shelter beds are available tonight across Toronto shelters. Johnson Hatlem and Batten have a list provided by the Assessment and Referral Centre that details how these beds will be divided up.
On nights like this, the city’s homeless people trek to the referral centre at 129 Peter St. to be directed to the closest shelter with an available bed. But when the street pastor passes by the centre late at night, he sees nine people sleeping in the lobby’s chairs and on the floor. Outraged, he marches to the front desk and asks employees what happened to the 172 extra beds.
“[They] laughed at me and said: ‘Not 172 beds, we haven’t heard anything about that,’” says Johnson Hatlem.
This incident only confirms what Johnson Hatlem has long suspected about the city’s emergency shelter beds.
“They’re magical beds, because no one gets to sleep in them, yet the City often says they’re full.”
City officials say their protocol is to open up to 172 emergency beds, but contradicting reports from Johnson Hatlem, an informal survey conducted by The Grid, and a report requested by councillors Kristyn Wong-Tam and Joe Mihevc suggest otherwise.
“There are conflicting reports about what the City says to me and what street workers tell me,” says Wong-Tam. “I’m talking to the homeless and they say that there are times when they have to go to five different shelters in one night to find a bed.”
Frustrated by this confusion, Wong-Tam and Mihevc brought the issue up in committee meetings and asked Phillip Abrahams, acting general manager of the Shelter, Support and Housing Administration, to investigate and file a report, which was released on March 4. The report is being considered today by Toronto’s Community Development and Recreation Committee.
The Shelter, Support and Housing Administration adamantly reasserts the notion that up to 172 beds (the figure varies based on the day of the week) are always opened during an extreme cold weather alert, but states that there are reports of clients having difficulty finding beds and being told that none are available.
In not finding any evidence of a lack of beds, the report puts the blame on frontline workers operating at both the referral centre and shelters across the city.
The availability of beds is monitored through the Shelter Management information System (SMIS), a web-based management system that tracks admissions and discharges as they occur. The intake process involves clients signing up with their name, birthdate, gender, and personal information, such as where they’ve lived in the previous 12 months.
Shelter workers are required to update the SMIS, but the report states there is frequently a lag between the time a client checks out and the moment a bed is made available on the system. To ensure accuracy, shelter staff must mark the vacant bed as empty, but other responsibilities, like the need to restore sanitary conditions for new clients, mean they often fail to do so.
A total of over 1,000 people work at Toronto’s shelters on rotating shifts each week. As a result, there is little consistency with this practice. It’s suggested in the report that frontline workers may be failing to do intakes when clients call to look for beds because of the amount of work that it takes to file one in the system.
The report even states that it’s possible some frontline workers are incorrectly informing potential clients that all beds are full when there is space available.
“Maybe somebody doesn’t know how to count,” says Wong-Tam. “It makes no sense to say that there are 172 beds to pull out when I heard conflicting reports from frontline partners saying that they didn’t know.”
On Jan. 23, the same extreme cold weather alert was still in effect. A day later, we contacted all 17 shelters listed on the referral centre’s list to confirm the number of beds available during the extreme cold weather alert on Jan. 21. Of the nine that replied, two shelters failed to open 12 beds between them. Eva’s Satellite only opened one bed when the referral centre’s list says the shelter was supposed to open 11. Hope Shelter opened twelve, two short of the 14 stated on the list.
Patricia Anderson, a manager of partnership development at the Shelter, Support and Housing Administration, insists that 172 beds are always opened but never filled.
“On [Jan. 21.] only 59 of the additional beds were used,” says Anderson.
This would mean that 103 beds were left unused, since protocol is to open 162 beds on Monday nights.
Tadeusz May, 56, has been homeless on and off for 15 years and often struggles to find a bed during an extreme cold weather alert. May says he was one of about a dozen people who slept at the referral centre because a bed couldn’t be found for them.
“All the [beds designated for males] were full,” says May. “There aren’t enough for everyone.”
Anderson says that Toronto’s Streets to Homes outreach teams were out overnight throughout the week offering to take the homeless to shelters or to the referral centre.
“Streets to Homes teams were out overnight and report encountering 38 people in the downtown core. One person took them up on their offer of assistance.”
Johnson Hatlem says that many of Toronto’s homeless simply do not wish to sleep in shelter beds and prefer to test their luck in the cold instead.
“Some people without homes refuse to stay in shelters because of overcrowding, bedbugs, lack of privacy, or fear of assault or abuse from staff or other shelter users.”
Seaton House, or “Satan’s House,” as May likes to call it, opens 53 additional beds during an extreme cold weather alert, the most granted to a single shelter in the city. Though the Shelter, Support and Housing Administration’s report states that beds are set up to grant 37.7 square feet of space to each person, the report says homeless people refuse to go to shelters like Seaton House because the beds are placed in a single dormitory occupied by 40 people. May says this means clients aren’t granted enough living space, and conflict ensues as a result.
The cold isn’t the only weather that the homeless have to decide to fight or flee from.
On Oct. 30, Toronto was preparing to be bombarded by the relentless rain and gusty winds of Hurricane Sandy. Services such as Out of the Cold, a faith-based volunteer program designed to help the homeless by providing them with shelter at local churches and synagogues, would only start up again in November. At the time, Batten was preparing for foot surgery, but she made calls to Wong-Tam and other outreach workers to ensure there would be enough beds for the homeless.
When Batten awoke from her surgery, she connected with Johnson Hatlem and other contacts through Twitter and Facebook, and was shocked to discover that only 40 emergency beds had been opened.
“It truly broke my heart. People fell through the cracks,” she says.
Johnson Hatlem was on the frontlines, and says he counted 47 people at the referral centre, City Hall, and at a nearby Tim Hortons who were all in need of a bed.
“People were dying out there. There was flying metal debris and mailboxes,” he says.
Johnson Hatlem illustrates the result of leaving the homeless on the street by recalling the story of Robert Maurice. Maurice was a homeless First Nations citizen of Toronto when Johnson Hatlem got to know him.
“He was a soft-spoken guy who loved to make wry kind of jokes. He never told you his real name. He [said] his name was ‘Rob Banks,’ and would look at you to see if you would catch the joke.”
Johnson Hatlem says he accompanied Maurice, who had been battling a broken leg and sporting a full cast, to an appointment at St. Michael’s Hospital in December 2007. Everything seemed to be fine.
The next time that Johnson Hatlem saw Maurice, he was frozen to death at the bottom of a staircase. Maurice’s body temperature was measured at 30 degrees Celsius, seven degrees below the average human temperature and five degrees below the point that hypothermia begins to set in.
“It’s a pretty undignified way to die,” says Johnson Hatlem.
Toronto citizens are beginning to become aware of the issue.
On Feb. 15, roughly 50 demonstrators from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), along with several members of the homeless community, set up a makeshift shelter in front of Mayor Rob Ford’s office to protest the lack of shelter beds.
Mayor Ford, not present in his office at the time, told reporters that there are “more than enough shelter beds” and that there is space that is left unfilled.
On March 7, OCAP protestors marched into Metro Hall at 11 a.m. and stayed until 10 p.m., when they were escorted out of the building by police officers. Those who chose to remain shouted, “No more deaths! No more deaths!”
Mayor Ford responded at a scrum held at City Hall, where he again claimed that beds are in abundance and referred to OCAP’s protest as “a cheap publicity stunt.”
City council voted on Jan. 16 to cut the emergency shelter bed budget by 2.9 per cent, which will result in a loss of 41,000 shelter beds per year and 110 per night.
“We were already 110-125 beds short [before the cuts], now we’re going to be close to 225-250 short,” says Johnson Hatlem.
Wong-Tam says it’s these kinds of decisions that allow the issue to continue to grow.
“I’m really hoping the mayor will wake up and realize we have a crisis on our hands,” says Wong-Tam. “If we miss the opportunities to fix this because of poor political leadership, then yes, the situation will become more gloom and perhaps destined for doom.”
Original Article
Source: thegridto.com
Author: Victor Ferreira
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