When ONE is too many

The City of Edmonton's annual homeless count is today. Volunteers endeavor to find and count the homeless people in our city, and I always wonder how accurate their count is. Not very, I suspect.

Yesterday, I drove Lee to his place of work in the Research Park not far from the Anthony Henday ring road, and took Shadow-dog for a walk around the area. It's a lovely area with a couple of ponds and many well-placed trees, not far from South Edmonton Common, a major shopping centre. 

So I wasn't too surprised when I discovered a man with a shopping cart living among the trees in an unused corner of a parking lot. I'm guessing his chance of being counted today is pretty much nil.

The Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness (ECOHH) sent other volunteers out today with a handbill containing some of the info you'll read below. ECOHH wants to raise awareness of the fact that a count of the homeless population doesn't really do much to solve anything. However, the handbill did manage to shock a group of teenagers when they read that 222 people died on Edmonton's streets in 2021, compared to 132 in 2020. It's clear that serious issues for homeless people are increasing.

It's one thing to gather statistics on how many people are homeless, and another to solve the lack of non-market affordable housing. Homeward Trust, a local social service organization that has a program called Housing First, notes on its website homepage that 2,671 people are currently experiencing homelessness. Of them, 56% identify as Indigenous, 45% as female, and 18% as youth.

In a wealthy province and country called Alberta, Canada, even ONE homeless person is too many.

Even more shocking, it's estimated that more than a quarter million people in our country will experience homelessness at some point this year.

Edmonton City Council is doing what it can, but the real problem is that provincial and federal funding for affordable housing and support services has been completely inadequate since the 1980s. Adequate housing is a human right, one the 2,671 people known to Homeward Trust lack. And that number doesn't begin to address the tens of thousands of people who are living in unsafe, unhealthy, inadequate, or too expensive places, people who are in danger of becoming homeless themselves for any number of reasons.

So what do we do? For the moment, we can write Premier Jason Kenney (premier@gov.ab.ca) and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca) and tell them it's past time to invest in actually building desperately needed housing. They need to be reminded that it has been proven, time and again, that giving people a roof over their heads is more fiscally responsible than leaving them to fend for themselves on the streets. Otherwise, governments end up investing more taxpayer funds to care for homeless people than investments in housing and wrap-around care require.

Even one homeless person is too many. Especially when you come upon one who seems to be dying on the sidewalk before your eyes, as I did on Sunday morning.

If you are able, please click those email addresses and write to ask that federal and provincial governments invest in affordable housing and wrap-around care. If you're not from Alberta, it's easy to computer search your own politicians. 

It's time to #endhomelessnessyeg. And everywhere else, too.

December 5, 2021
There's a much longer line of tents now...