Problems are fixed when people have a place to live
April 11, 2008

They call him Ishmael, and he’s OK with that. “Ishmael, the unwanted child,” he explains, pulling a Bible from his backpack as he tells the story of Abraham’s outcast son.
He picked up the nickname while living in Toronto’s infamous Tent City a few years ago. He liked that people found it easier to pronounce than his given name, and that they weren’t always asking him how to spell it. So “Ishmael” it was.
He built his house in Tent City for the grand total of $200, scrounging most of the materials out of other people’s garbage. As we chat in the coffee shop at the University of Victoria library, he brings out his laptop to show me photos of his little dream house from that period - a tidy, tiny structure complete with granite and marble floors, a woodstove, an outhouse, and a rosemary bush thriving in the front garden (photo above).
The media were reporting hundreds of people living in Tent City back in those days, but Ishmael figures it was actually about 80. The campers lived on the Toronto lakefront for three years on vacant property owned by Home Depot before being evicted in 2002.
Ishmael had moved in after finding himself out of rent money and in between jobs, and stayed for a year and a half. For him, it was the perfect situation, and in his opinion far more cost-effective than the “current idiocy” of spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of homelessness without ever solving the problems.
“When I was in Toronto, it cost $80 a night to keep me at the Salvation Army for two and a half years. That’s 1,000 nights - $80,000 in all - yet I was still as homeless on the day I left as when I arrived,” he says. “Here in Victoria, they’ve got a van that goes around at night handing out soup and sandwiches. But it costs [taxpayers] $12 a head for that soup and sandwich. I could buy the same thing at Quizno’s for half the price.”
These days, Ishmael spends virtually all of his daytime hours at the UVic library. He’s found a place to sleep in the Western Communities, but needs to keep a low profile so the property owner doesn’t spot him. So every day he hops a bus to the university and spends long hours browsing the library stacks.
“I don’t smoke, don’t do dope, don’t drink. You’ve got to occupy yourself somehow, so I’m doing this. And I am a bookworm, so it suits me,” says Ishmael, whose favourite writer is Thomas Jefferson. “I’ve got quite a book collection that I drag around with me, including some rare and hard-to-find volumes.”
He’s not sure why he lives like he does, but recognized years ago that he could no longer count on holding down a job long enough to pay his rent.
It wasn’t always that way. After immigrating to Canada from Germany in 1983, he landed a job quickly and was able to buy himself a house within a couple of years.
“But in 1990, I just kind of died,” he says. “They tell me I’m somebody who fell between the cracks. There’s a reason for every one of us to be on the street. A lot of us are really 12-year-old children in adult bodies.”
Ishmael jokes that he was a drifter throughout the 1990s, “then a new century started and I became a vagrant.” But he works when he can, and is currently making do on savings from the $7,000 he earned last year doing odd jobs. He refuses to go on welfare; socialism is “the philosophy of the parasite,” he tells me emphatically.
He’s 51 now, and no longer sure that his 2005 move to B.C. was a good idea. He’d ridden his bicycle from Toronto to Vancouver - a 44-day sojourn - after seeing televised images of the city and finding himself drawn to it.
But things haven’t worked out as planned. He built another tiny house in the woods of Metchosin, but that’s lost to him now. He swapped farm labour for a small wage and a place to live on the Peninsula for a time, but then he and the owner got into an argument and that was that. He’s thinking he might end up back in Toronto if he can find the bus fare, and get a room again at the Salvation Army.
I ask him what he’d suggest for readers wanting to know what part they can play in ending homelessness. Hire people, he says. (Call Cool Aid’s Community Casual Labour Pool at 388-9296 for more information.)
And if you’ve got a little bit of land where a wanderer might settle for a while, he’s all ears.

Thanks for the great feedback on homeless issues!
April 4, 2008

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my column last week speculating whether my stories from Victoria’s streets were wearing thin on readers. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I can’t tell you how nice it was to read so many inspiring and heartfelt stories about people’s own thoughts and experiences around homelessness.
All told, I got 226 e-mails, seven letters and a couple of phone calls. That’s easily 20 times the response I’d normally get even for a column that really struck a chord with readers, so the abundance of feedback alone was immensely heartening.
Only nine readers wanted me to give up the issue altogether, and I classified another nine as “not sure.” So that leaves 218 who urged me to carry on, all of whom were obviously very passionate about the issue themselves. (Of course, let’s acknowledge the inherent flaws of a poll asking whether people are still reading, in which only those who still are would even know to take part!)
It was wonderful to hear what people in our community are already doing to bring an end to this heap of problems we call homelessness.
They’re organizing study groups. Launching church initiatives. Volunteering at street-serving agencies. Giving money. Writing letters to government. Renting their suites to somebody who really needs it, even if the new tenant is a bit of a pain in the neck sometimes. Reading up on the issues, and raising the consciousness of friends and family.
They passed along terrific suggestions on ways for me to keep writing about the issues without turning readers off. Here are a few key ones, all of which I’ll be heeding:
Keep up the stories, but give us some successes once in a while. I hadn’t intended to be a downer every week, but somehow it happened. I’ve always been a bit of a gloomy thing in terms of what attracts me as a writer, and that has understandably turned out to be a bit of a bummer for readers.
So I’m going to work harder at including more columns on what’s working out there, as opposed to what’s not.
Don’t expect typical success stories - ones in which the person finds a great place to live, recovers fully from an addiction, stabilizes in his mental illness, gets a job, reconnects with his family and lives happily ever after. But at the very least I’ll bring you more happy-for-now stories.
I also want to be more attentive to all sides of the issue, and include the stories of people like the frustrated downtown merchant who’s replacing her store’s plate-glass window for the third time in four months.
Mix it up a little. People encouraged me to keep a focus on street issues, but to write about other things from time to time - maybe even something light-hearted once in a while. Great advice. More variety in my topics will keep things fresh, both for readers and me.
One reader suggested I’d gotten too close to the issue to maintain journalistic objectivity. Could be, as the issues dominate my volunteer life as well and I sometimes feel like all I ever talk about is homelessness, addiction and the sex trade. It’s probably not healthy.
Dump the “homeless” label. Readers rightly noted that “homelessness” is in fact just one characteristic of a wide variety of problems, the vast majority of which are much more complex than the mere need to house people (although that would certainly be a heck of a good start).
The streets are Ground Zero for problems as diverse as mental health, cognitive ability, criminal behaviour, physical injury, work injury, trauma, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, hippie-kid syndrome, and bad luck. Solutions need to fit the problems, and that requires knowing exactly what those problems are.
Tell us how to help. This was hands-down the most common request. There’s clearly a lot of energy and urgency in our community for making things happen, but people need help in figuring out how to connect to the issue.
I’ll put some serious thought into that in the next while. And if you’ve already found a meaningful way to make a difference, please feel free to pass along what you’re doing so I can share those ideas with other readers. But do remember that while individual effort is a powerful thing, we still need to keep the pressure on all levels of government to restore public health, civil order and human dignity in our communities.
I was particularly touched by readers’ concern for me, and whether I was losing heart. One elderly woman unfamiliar with e-mail got her daughter in Vancouver to send me a message on her behalf to cheer me up.
Believe me, I’m cheered. Thanks so much for your kind words and big hearts.

Banging my head on the homeless wall
March 28, 2008

For the 12 years I’ve been a columnist, I’ve worked at trying to keep my topics diverse. I put a lot of importance on variety, having always figured readers tire quickly of a one-trick pony.
So it hasn’t been an easy choice to settle exclusively on homelessness these past five months. I’m still not sure what I hoped to accomplish by doing it, or whether anything will change as a result. That last part is probably what worries me the most.
What I hoped would happen was that the stories I told would somehow play a part in moving things along around street issues - that people would read them and come to understand how 1,500 people have ended up living on our streets, and how little of it has to do with them being too lazy to get a job.
But are people reading? Are the unconvinced being swayed? Has anything changed? Such are the questions that keep a columnist up at night.
Those who share my passion for the issue would presumably agree with my current column focus. But if you’re writing about an issue as an activist, the real challenge is to convince the unconvinced. That hinges on getting people to read what you have to say - no small feat when you’re writing regularly about something they didn’t want to hear about in the first place.
I figured I’d try to write about homelessness for a year, starting with the series I did for the Times-Colonist last November. But I’ve already heard from some readers that I’ve become “boring.” Feedback is dwindling, and so are the hits to my blog. If readers are shutting down around me, what is that telling me?
And yet I really am completely on fire about the issues. I continue to believe that in Victoria and any number of other B.C. communities grappling with the same issues, we’re dangerously close to losing the fight. I’m heartened by the work coming out of the mayor’s task force on homelessness, but by God, these are disturbing times.
If you saw disaster coming, wouldn’t you want to get the word out? As someone blessed with the privilege of a high-profile weekly platform in the daily paper, shouldn’t I be doing what I can do to keep homelessness in the public eye?
But it all comes back to whether anyone’s listening. If they’re not, then it’s all just words into the wind.
A journalist friend of mine tells a haunting light-bulb joke that plays into one of my great fears:
Q. How many journalists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. None. Journalists have never changed anything.
Ouch. It’s not really true, of course: I’ve seen any number of stories featured in the media that brought about positive change. And when the media decide to focus their intense gaze on an issue, the impact can be dramatic. Just look at what CanWest Global Communications’ national focus on literacy these past six years has done to raise awareness and funds for that issue.
But can you sustain change around less appealing social causes just by keeping them in the news? With many years invested to trying to effect change through the media, I’d obviously like to think it’s possible.
But then a hot potato surfaces - the relocation of the needle exchange being a recent example - and it’s all out the window. And it gets me wondering what’s gained by years of sophisticated discussions around the importance of, say, needle exchanges, if we still fall apart the moment we try to figure out where to put one.
So here I sit, betwixt and between on whether writing about homelessness every week is actually enlightening readers and advancing the cause, or just pushing me and my pet issue into the land of the never-read.
I even got into a big argument with a homeless guy a while ago over this issue. He stopped me on the street and told me I was just another cog in the “big machine” making money off the homeless without doing anything to actually change things.
I was wounded, and asked what he thought would happen if everybody just quit writing about homelessness. “Nothing ,” he said, “which is exactly what’s happening anyway.” Point taken.
My passion for the issue will keep me active behind the scenes no matter what, but I’d like to have a better sense of whether my writing about it every week is helping or hurting the cause. I’d love to hear from you either way - send me an e-mail at patersoncommunications@gmail.com.

Setting the record straight: I made a mistake in my column last week about a family grappling with addiction. The cost for a month of addiction treatment at a private facility here on the Island was $10,000, not $37,000. My apologies - I misheard the number.

Family devastated by late-life addiction
March 21, 2008

We pull up kitchen chairs in her little bachelor suite, and she apologizes for not being able to offer a more comfortable seat. It’s a tight fit for two in the tiny seniors’ apartment.
She’ll soon be 77, and up until a couple years ago believed that she’d reached a point in her life where things had more or less settled out. With her seven kids grown up with lives of their own, she was looking forward to an uneventful old age.
Her first sense that she might be wrong about that was at the family’s annual campout in 2005. Her 46-year-old son, always a bit of a hothead, flew into a fit of temper of grand proportions. Another son told her the problem was cocaine.
She didn’t believe it at first. But then relatives came from Australia to visit that same year, and her son showed up looking sick in a way that really alarmed her. “That’s when I started to wonder,” she acknowledges now.
As it turned out, her son had developed a severe addiction to crack cocaine. She doesn’t know when or why he started using the drug, but by that summer his problems were frighteningly obvious.
It’s been a hard ride down ever since. In short order, the man lost his wife, his four kids, and his job. He lost his house - sold off as part of the divorce - then blew every cent of his share of the proceeds on crack.
He hasn’t yet fallen to the streets. But that’s only because one of his sisters simply won’t let that happen, even if it means going down to Centennial Square herself time and again to bring her exhausted, sick brother home to her house.
Desperate to help him, the family scrounged up $37,000 for a month of treatment at a private addiction facility. He was a “star” participant while in the program, says his mom, but relapsed shortly after getting out.
She knows there has to be an explanation for how her otherwise straight-arrow son fell headlong into the abyss. He was working too hard, she suspects. He’s got some ghosts from childhood that she only recently found out about.
Still, she admits she didn’t see any of it coming.
“Of all of us, he’s always been the one who drinks the least,” she says. “I can’t understand why he ever would have tried crack - he doesn’t even smoke.”
“All his life, he’s held down a job, and sometimes another small job on the side, too. He’s a bright, intelligent man - even now, we’ll meet for lunch and I can’t believe how quick and bright he is. And he’s a wonderful father.”
She’s heard conflicting advice from friends and family about how to handle her son’s addiction. Some have told her that she’s “enabling” him by giving him money and rescuing him from the streets. Their theory is that addicts need to hit bottom before they get well, and that she’s preventing her son from doing that.
But she can’t imagine withdrawing her support. “You remember that old saying from the ‘70s about how if you loved someone, you’d set them free?” she asks. “I think for addicts, if you love them, you never set them free.”
Her other children are sharply divided over how much support their brother deserves, and upset at the chaos and stress his addiction has caused within the family. The annual family campout hasn’t happened since that fateful summer when her son lost his temper.
“Nobody can possibly understand how addiction impacts a family until it’s them,” says the woman, who has dipped heavily into her retirement savings in an attempt to help her son.
“You can’t imagine the sleepless nights I have. I’ll lie in bed thinking of all the things that could be happening to him. To know he’s out there, where bad things are happening all the time - I just don’t know what to do.”
So she holds on, hoping against hope that a mother’s full-on love will be enough.
She tells a story of her daughter going down to the streets one morning to rescue her brother yet again, and of how long it took to rouse him from his deep, dark sleep. The people he was with - all in the grips of their own addictions - watched in silence as his sister repeatedly called his name.
“Nobody said anything,” the mother recalls, “but my daughter was struck by the feeling that all of them wished they had somebody to come for them, too. All these men out there, so lost.”

Lessons from Mexico on homelessness
March 14, 2008

Mexico has had my heart for the better part of 10 years now, so I’m no longer surprised at a feeling of coming “home” any time I holiday there.
But given my current fascination with all things homeless, my most recent holiday down south also brought to my attention the dramatic differences in the way our two countries handle poverty issues.
Mexico is on its way up economically, but it’s got a long way to go before its citizens have it as good as a typical Canadian. While the babies aren’t dying as often and people are living much longer, Mexico remains a country with considerable problems.
Still, there are lessons to be learned from Mexico around managing homelessness. When a region as privileged as ours has more visible evidence of poverty than a developing nation like Mexico, that’s a sign that something’s seriously amiss.
Life is no holiday for a lot of Mexicans, so I want to be careful not to come across as a Pollyanna type waxing on about a “poor but happy” nation that cares deeply about its people.
The gross national income is a meagre $7,310 a year in Mexico, for instance, compared to $32,600 in Canada. Infant mortality rates are much improved over the last three decades, but Mexican children are still more than four times as likely to die before their fifth birthday as are Canadian children.
Child labour is common. I’ve seen kids as young as three trailing their moms along a hot tourist beach hawking jewellery to holidayers. In fact, UNICEF estimates that 16 per cent of Mexican kids age five to 14 are in the workforce.
The water supply is unstable, and often undrinkable. The roads are beautiful wherever the tourists and rich people are, and rough and unpredictable everywhere else. Poverty is so widespread that it’s essentially the rule rather than the exception; five per cent of Mexicans live on less than $1 a day.
And yet you can still walk down the street - any street - without seeing a single person sleeping in a doorway. Panhandlers are scarce, and their ranks generally limited to the most disabled. In terms of drugs and alcohol, it’s tourists rather than locals who you’re most likely to see intoxicated on the street.
There’d be any number of reasons for all of that, so I’ll avoid romanticizing on that front as well. But to me the primary difference is that in Mexico, poor people are at least given the freedom to figure their own way out of homelessness.
In Mexico, people living in the most extreme poverty can always find some wreck of a shed somewhere to squat in. If they can scratch up enough money for a few concrete blocks and a piece of tin for the roof, there’s always someplace in town where they’re able to set it up.
If they can figure out a way to make a few pesos, they’re free to do so. Some end up selling gum and bobble-headed toy turtles to tourists. Others hawk homemade tamales on local buses, with little fear of being turned in for a FoodSafe violation.
Here in Greater Victoria, we’ve taken the opposite approach. We’ve flushed everyone onto the streets where we can see them and left them to be beggars.
With the best of intentions, we’ve rid the city of disreputable rooming houses and slum motels. We’ve cracked down on shacks under the bridge and makeshift camps in our parks. We’ve torn down tired old apartments and replaced them with million-dollar condos.
We’ve rousted people from every cubbyhole. Shut down the beach campers. Gentrified the neighbourhoods. Torn apart every cardboard shack. Nobody in Victoria would ever get away with trying to make a few bucks selling sandwiches out of their sports bag; even the squeegee guy trying to clean a few car windows for change soon finds himself arrested.
The result: Our social failings have been laid bare for all to see, and street-level enterprise extinguished. Mexico is the truly poorer nation, but it’s our sparkling little city by the sea that wears its poverty most openly.
The court case over camping in our public parks speaks to the heart of the issue. Do we have the legal right to deny people a home in our parks when we aren’t offering them any alternatives? I’ve never seen people camping in Mexican parks, but I suspect that’s because they don’t have to.
I’m counting on our community to end homelessness in coming years. But for the time being we need strategies for living with it, cardboard shacks and all.