BETTER THAN A TENT CITY

Kathleen Wynne

Kathleen Wynne, John Milloy, Bryan Stortz, Jane Rounthwaite, and angels:  Marion Thompson Howell, Tony Stortz and Nadine Green.

I don’t really believe in angels until I meet one or two or a whole crowd of them. Which I did last week when I had the privilege of visiting a project in Waterloo Region called “A Better Tent City”.

A recent statistic on the number of people living on the streets of this country pegs the number at between 25,000 and 35,000 on any given night. The number of homeless people in a year in Canada is 150,000 to 300,000.  Nearly half of those people live in Ontario. The annual cost to society is estimated to be over $7 billion.

This is a hot topic of national concern—in the news, in our faces, on our streets, in our parks.

So while I don’t really believe in angels, I do believe in good people finding solutions to intractable problems. And so when my friend, Bryan Stortz invited me to come to Kitchener-Waterloo to ride the beautiful ION light rail transit train that our government had partnered with Waterloo Region to build, I was thrilled to go. But then he suggested I might want to visit the tiny house project “A Better Tent City”. Yes again. I have been curious about tiny houses, had heard mixed opinions and was excited to see for myself.

A Better Tent City is a community of 42 garden sheds nestled between the property of the Waterloo Region District School Board administration building and Highway 8. Fifty people who used to be homeless live in those 42 homes.

No one working, volunteering or living in the community thinks that garden sheds are an adequate solution to homelessness but what they do believe, in their words is that these homes are “a successful lifeboat”, that the project “lives at the intersection of the housing crisis and the opioid crisis” and that “even though they’re tiny houses, it’s a home”.

Nadine Green who is the live-in site co-ordinator lives in one of the tiny houses. She was one of the early drivers of the project who was housing people living on the street in her own store. She lives on site now because she believes that is the only way she can do the necessary work of building community. She says “It’s more than a shelter. It’s home and we all live together here and we’re close.”

This community is not pretty. All the problems the 50 residents brought with them to these tiny homes are on full display. People are addicted; they collect a lot of stuff that has to be cleared out on a regular basis to prevent fires; keys to bathrooms and showers have to be closely controlled so no one gets into trouble locking themselves in; sometimes there is violence. People overdose but they also care for one another.

There is food provided by foodbanks and churches and cooked by dedicated volunteers in the communal trailer.  It’s available all day and all night. There are washing machines and dryers. Residents work in the community—they clean; they are some of the key monitors and they look out for each other alerting staff if someone is in trouble.

In the video embedded above, residents talk about “a lot of freedom and a lot of forgiveness” and “this is my last hope”.

There is no federal, provincial or municipal politician in Canada, certainly in our urban centres, who has not encountered the troubling reality of constituents who are living without a home and often on the street. The reasons for homelessness are myriad and complex and for those of us who are blessed with good mental health, the privilege of enough money to live and freedom from addiction—particularly opioid addiction—those reasons can be very hard to grasp. I do not pretend to understand them. I do not pretend that I am even comfortable looking at the ravages of addiction and poverty.

But every single one of the people living on the streets of our country has a story of how they got there. Politicians on the right wing of the spectrum can rant about treatment as though it is a simple solution. Yes, we need way more and better treatment facilities. That is for sure. But people cannot be forced to be ready to enter treatment.

As Premier, I had the chance to visit a safe injection site in Toronto. One of the young men I met told me that he knew he needed treatment but that he wasn’t ready to search it out or undergo it at that point. The reason the safe injection site was important to him was that he knew when he was ready, he could find help there.

That is why the tiny house projects are important. They are part of a safety net and I believe, part of the solution to this critical challenge.

Tent encampments are no solution at all. They are dangerous, they rob our communities of park space and are dehumanizing for residents.  A Better Tent City is the opposite of those things. It is a conscientiously safe place. It is located on land that is not in productive use and is unwanted for other uses at least for a period of time. It provides the dignity of a home with a door that locks. “A lot of freedom and forgiveness” as the resident in the video says.

In the search for good public policy, we look for big answers. We very often allow the search for the “perfect” to block the adoption of “the good”.

I think we are out of time in our search for the big, perfect answer to homelessness in Canada. Mortgage rates, zoning by-laws and arguments about affordable versus attainable housing are irrelevant to the people sleeping in our parks. And there are tiny home projects like these trying to get off the ground in cities and towns across the country—one of the models in Toronto is called “Two Steps Home”. We need to support the volunteers and politicians who are trying to make these work.

I saw the angels at “A Better Tent City” creating community that is not perfect but is immeasurably better than a tent city.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kathleen Wynne - Kathleen Wynne was first elected to the Ontario legislature in 2003 as the MPP for Don Valley West. She was Ontario’s 25th Premier and leader of the Ontario Liberal Party from January 2013 to June 2018. Kathleen has dedicated her professional life to building a better province for the people of Ontario. She is guided by the values and principles that knit the province of Ontario together: fairness, diversity, collaboration and creativity.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Air Quotes Media. Read more opinion contributions via QUOTES from Air Quotes Media.