Calgary’s Plan to End Homelessness

On Jan. 29, Calgary’s ten-year plan to end homelessness came to an end, with many Calgarians still on the street.

“Well, we are at 10 years, and we still have a lot of homeless folks,” said Sarah Parsons, an employee at Calgary’s Inn from the Cold shelter.

“In some ways it was a raging success, and in some ways I’m proud of what we’ve done. In others we’ve seen the cracks.”

Parsons said the Inn from the Cold shelter is the only one in Calgary that will accept single fathers.

“So we know that we were part of the 10-year plan to end homelessness, but when we look at family homelessness in Calgary, that’s the one area that wasn’t really scathed through the whole 10-year plan,” said Parsons.

“It focused on everybody, but it seemed to be more focused on the singles.”

David Sacerich, the chaplin of Calgary’s downtown Mustard Seed shelter, also saw a problem with the plan.

“The goal was to end homelessness, which sounds great, but unfortunately I can’t imagine it would ever completely be ended,” said Sacerich.

However, despite this negative outlook on the 10-year plan, Kevin McNichol, vice president of strategy for the Calgary Homeless Foundation, retained his positive view of the situation.

“The original goals were quite aspirational, and they set us on our paths of what we achieved,” said McNichol.

McNichol said that with the plan having ended on Jan. 29, 2018, he considers it a success.

McNichol said that over the course of 10 years, 8,700 people were housed, and 500 new units of permanent housing were built.

The goal of the plan was that, at the end of the time period, nobody would be staying at homeless shelters for more than 7-14 days, and they would only be staying there in cases of economic hardship.

McNichol said that even though this is not the case, the plan was successful in that homelessness would normally double every two years, but instead, there has been a net decrease of 26%.

McNichol also said the plan has helped lower costs on the health care system and on the police, as fewer homeless people are out on the street becoming ill or causing trouble for the police to deal with.

The next step for the Calgary Homeless Foundation is to collect data until the end of 2018, at which point they will put together a report detailing the results of the 10-year plan.

However, Sacerich does not believe the results of these reports can be as accurate as the Calgary Homeless Foundation might hope.

“What I noticed early on was that people would come here, especially at the Mustard Seed, because of our initiative to end homelessness,” said Sacerich.

“People would come from other provinces, and show up at our doorstep with absolutely no plan. That makes it difficult to end homelessness, when new homeless people are coming into the city,” explained Sacerich.

Another employee of the Mustard Seed, Luke Wahl, saw a flaw in the plan.

“I don’t know if it’s possible to end homelessness when we enable them to stay homeless,” said Wahl.

“When people are able to get the free resources and get free room and board and all these things, especially if they are struggling with addictions, then there’s not a lot of incentive to leave homelessness.”

Parsons from Inn from the Cold had an opposite outlook to Wahl.

“Imagine if your life fell apart and you had to pick it up in 30 days,” said Parsons.

“I haven’t seen it done yet. They just end up back at the shelter.”

Inn from the Cold is the only shelter in Calgary that allows people to stay as long as needed.

The shelter offers three meals each day on-site, and as the shelter is dedicated solely to families, it also sends lunches to school with the kids.

All clothing donated for the kids are new, so the kids can go to school and not feel less than other kids just because they are homeless.

“I hope for more understanding of all facets of homelessness, not just those singles out on the streets rough sleeping,” said Parsons.

“I want to see more care and consideration to youth, to families, to people who are couch surfing. I want them to truly know what homeless is, versus what they think it is.”