We are writing in response to the series of disturbing articles about the downtown “warming centre”. These articles raised strong reactions from our members in the Poverty and Housing Advocacy Coalition, as some of us have lived experience of these conditions.
First of all, we felt outrage that people living in deep poverty, without homes, often with debilitating mental illness and/or addictions, were once again having their privacy violated and their personal misery put on public view without their knowledge or permission, even if their faces were blurred.
We felt sympathy and concern for the staff members who were being judged publicly without their prior consent. And we were also sensitive to the concerns of the anonymous outreach workers, most of them well-founded.
We know that all of these people care and are themselves stretched to their limits.
But the truth is that running a warming centre is an impossible job in impossible conditions. This is another example of cobbling together the bare minimum of public services for entire groups who are being abandoned by our society. Instead of good quality mental health care, multiple well-resourced addiction services, decent jobs at livable wages, income supports and affordable homes, people have to stand in line outside in -35 weather for a bit of warmth.
Despite the fact that they are over-policed themselves, people without homes are left on their own to navigate the streets, always vulnerable to violence, to hunger and the cold.
Our city’s answer is to offer them the possibility of a room to sit in with more than 30 other vulnerable people, just to keep from freezing to death. Where, of course, they are expected to “behave” and staff are expected to “manage” them. This is “social services” on the cheap: unstable, short term, inadequate funding.
The workers are not the problem. They are trying to hold this mess together, despite the lack of resources or suitable space, knowing that they are barely meeting the basic needs of people with many complex needs.
This is a duct-taped model that is built to fail everyone, including the workers. Grassroot, non-profit, underfunded organizations, already stretched to the limit, are expected to stretch even further to do the impossible.
Currently, the workers and volunteers are burning out very quickly, with no safety net to catch them when they do; this way of doing things is cruel for everyone. We could choose to do things differently.
For too many years, we have allowed our governments to shrink and starve our public services, to remove protections for workers, tenants and the poor … what we are seeing are the logical results of so much deliberate neglect.
We could stop sensationalizing people’s misery as poverty porn and condemning workers and non-profit agencies. We could instead look up and demand that all levels of government take these issues seriously and re-invest in our shattered social safety net with stable public services staffed by well trained and supported front-line workers. That would be a start.
This is the lesson we hope that your readers can take from these articles: that the true targets of our disgust and anger at these conditions are the governments who could do something, but who refuse to.
Tracy Gregory
Alison Wood
Laurie McGauley
Marie Pollock
On behalf of the Poverty and Housing Advocacy Coalition