Homeless struggle for shelter from coming cold
While many Canadians are buying warmer parkas and adding insulation to their houses to prepare for what is expected to be a tougher-than-usual winter, an estimated 300,000 residents of this land don't even have a place they can call home.
The homeless, especially in Canada's largest city, are increasing in numbers as well as kinds of people, observes David Adcock, associate executive director of Toronto's Yonge Street Mission.
While many Canadians are buying warmer parkas and adding insulation to their houses to prepare for what is expected to be a tougher-than-usual winter, an estimated 300,000 residents of this land don't even have a place they can call home.
The homeless, especially in Canada's largest city, are increasing in numbers as well as kinds of people, observes David Adcock, associate executive director of Toronto's Yonge Street Mission.
"One of the growing concerns is young parents without any fixed address," says Adcock. "We see increasing numbers of young mothers with children who are inadequately housed." A recent study indicates that of 26,000 people who sometimes use hostels in Toronto, 5,300 are children under 16. In addition, there are at least several thousand street kids in Toronto alone. Another 4,500 people are chronic hostel users.
The shortage of adequate housing is so critical in Toronto that a city study projects that if 2,000 units of housing were added every year for the next 10 years, it would only keep pace with the problem.
Life in a stairwell
Theresa Doucette, now 30, has lived at Yonge Street's Genesis housing project for four years. Before that, she spent about a dozen years on and off the street, and recalls her experiences with mixed feelings.
"At one point we had a stairwell that was really cool," she remembers. "They didn't find us for about four months." She and her friends could get money to eat by panhandling, and for blankets they would raid the linen closets of downtown hotels. Then one of the squatters left the stairwell in the middle of the night and ran into a security guard.
"We were all thrown back onto the street."
Living on the street
Doucette, the mother of a two-and-a-half year-old daughter and pregnant with her third child (the first was given up for adoption 10 years ago), plans to get married next year. She just finished high school and hopes to become a chef.
She has already come a long way since she started prostituting at 14. She left home at 15 because of an abusive stepfather and ended up, like many other young people, doing drugs on the streets of Toronto.
Living on the street with your friends, she explains, is easier than taking abuse from people who are supposed to love you and care for you.
"Having nowhere to live is different from having no home," she adds. When she was with her friends, they would look out for each other, "and that's like a home."
Elsewhere in Canada, Christian ministries are preparing for the winter's influx of cold, hungry people as best as they can. Some churches in Vancouver are following Toronto's lead by establishing an "Out of the Cold" program, offering their basements as shelter on a rotating basis.
In from the cold
In Montreal, the Welcome Hall Mission can accommodate 40 to 45 men in its emergency shelter, says director Edward Raddatz. But the shelter is already full to capacity and the mission is hoping to receive a grant soon so it can convert single beds to bunk beds. "We have people sleeping on the floor right now," says Raddatz.
When the mission is full, staff refer people to other shelters, including that run by The Salvation Army. "There's enough provision," says Raddatz, "so people shouldn't have to sleep in alleyways."
In Winnipeg, where the temperature can sink to minus 30C and stay there for days on end, mission staff cruise the streets at night looking for anyone left out in the cold. The Salvation Army's Weetamah Centre, which offers an assortment of activities for young people, has been stockpiling hats and mitts since last year's mild winter.
"We have four or five garbage bags [of toques and mitts] ready to go," says Weetamah director Mark Young.
The homeless crisis has been garnering much media attention lately, and some activists have asked for the government to declare the situation a national disaster. Yonge Street's Adcock sees the crisis as an opportunity. While the government has a responsibility to provide infrastructure for better and more housing, that infrastructure provides the setting for people of faith to work compassionately.
"We go about it in a sense of relationship," he explains.
"If we as people of faith can respond to the people that are in those situations rather than just to the media attention, we do have the opportunity to demonstrate in clear ways that people who love God love people."
Theresa Doucette is grateful to be living in a place where she knows she won't be evicted if she forgets to pay the rent one month or can't quite make the payment. "I think there's a lot of buildings in Toronto that can be turned into housing for people who still need help in life to get along," she adds.
"The street is an easy escape from life because you have no responsibilities there, no one telling you what to do," she says.
"The problem is you're never going to be happy if you're living on the street."
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