Medicine Hat eliminates homelessness

[Bunk]

Housing first - same model that's being deployed here, but the magnitude is much greater obviously in a big city.

However, we do need more dedicated money toward delivering the housing. The Resolve campaign is also a huge lift in the effort.

[Jets4Life]

Originally Posted by Bunk

Housing first - same model that's being deployed here, but the magnitude is much greater obviously in a big city.

However, we do need more dedicated money toward delivering the housing. The Resolve campaign is also a huge lift in the effort.

Doesn't Salt Lake City have a slightly larger metro area than Calgary?

[Locke]

Please tell me that they're housing their homeless in a comedically oversized hat.

[EldrickOnIce]

It's on matters like these that we hopefully now see some collaboration between provincial and civic governments.
As we now live in a socialist state, there better be some social initiatives that benefit us.

[OBCT]

[RedHot25]

Originally Posted by EldrickOnIce

It's on matters like these that we hopefully now see some collaboration between provincial and civic governments.
As we now live in a socialist state, there better be some social initiatives that benefit us.

Housing First has been a provincial - and I say provincial government, civic government, ngos, etc - focus generally for a while now: http://humanservices.alberta.ca/homelessness/15698.html

Alberta has a 10-year plan to end homelessness by 2019 I think it is. Medicine Hat is part of that. So is Calgary, as Bunk has referenced. More here: http://humanservices.alberta.ca/homelessness.html

More info on the plan here: http://humanservices.alberta.ca/homelessness/14601.html

[stampsx2]

I really really hope that housing the homeless here doesn't end up like the provincially funded manitoba housing program. It's a disaster, the buildings are awful. I've seen it. I don't even think the homeless want to live there anymore.

If calgary or alberta does a program to house the homeless then no problem but it must be done with accountability. If it starts going downhill there's no stopping it.

I'll admit, so far Calgary's done a fine job with what's there.

[Flash Walken]

In many cases, mental illness can’t be simplified down to a medical problem that even a perfect health-care system would solve. It’s also a social issue, tangled up in poverty, unemployment and family circumstance. People who are poor are about four times as likely to have a mental-health problem, and people who are mentally ill are more likely to become poor. Among the 200,000 people in Canada homeless every year, two-thirds have a history of mental illness or substance abuse. The country spends $7.7-billion for health care, social-service use and the justice system in connection with homelessness; the human cost of being trapped on the street in one of the wealthiest nations in the world is without measure.

This reality is more evidence for early intervention, for publicly funded comprehensive treatments – to tackle illness before it derails a patient’s life, and to invest in preventing relapse. But it also means that psychotherapy and well-managed drugs are only a partial remedy for many of the sickest patients who also need support finding jobs and affordable housing.

The support part is proving, in research, to be an essential ingredient – to keep people in their new apartments by bringing the social system to them and not requiring complete sobriety to enter or stay in the program. Housing first, as advocates like to say, but not housing only. This approach, credited to a Canadian psychologist, is now considered to be the best practice mental-health program to end homelessness. And it is being adopted all over the world, thanks, in part, to an unprecendented five-year study in Canadian cities that showed how well it worked.

Using the Housing First model, which has been endorsed by the Obama administration, cities such as New Orleans and the entire state of Utah are on the verge of declaring an end to chronic homelessness (in the United States, the first focus of the program is often on veterans). Medicine Hat claims it will have achieved this goal by the end of the year. Projects are launching in Europe’s largest cities. In 2013, Ottawa committed nearly $600-million over five years to Housing First projects (slightly less than the previous half-decade commitment), with provinces also contributing. The selling point was the five-city pilot project conducted by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, which found that spending $1 on Housing First saved $2 in costs for homeless people with the highest needs and the most severe mental illness. What’s more, they were no longer trapped in a hospital bed until they had somewhere to go, or sleeping in a parking garage or locked up in a jail cell, drifting between social supports and treatment plans. They were home.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...ick=sf_globefb

[Senator Clay Davis]

New York Times did a story on this

Kurt Remple, a toothless, unemployed, struggling alcoholic in this prairie town with the curious name is a success story of sorts. Five years ago, he was living under a bridge and surviving on free meals from charities.

Today, he lives in a small but tidy one-bedroom apartment in a stucco bungalow.

“It was November and it was getting cold when I met this worker at the Champion Center,” he said, referring to a local establishment that serves breakfast to the poor. “She said, ‘Come to my office and we’ll see if you can find a place.’ ”

Medicine Hat is on the leading edge of a countrywide effort to end homelessness through the “housing first” strategy, developed nearly 25 years ago by a Canadian in New York, that offers homes without preconditions for sobriety and other self-improvement that keep many people on the street elsewhere.

Alcoholic? Here’s a one-bedroom apartment where you can live — even if you’re still drinking. Drug addict? Here’s a studio with heat and hot water — even if you’re still getting high. Mentally ill? Here’s a place to feel safe and call your own — and where caseworkers can find you.

The theory is that only after people are in stable housing can they begin to address their other challenges.

As elsewhere in the world, Canada’s homelessness problem grew in recent decades as rising rents pushed the country’s most vulnerable citizens into the streets. The oil boom fed the real estate bubble in Alberta.

Calgary, the center of Alberta’s energy industry, had the worst homeless problem in the province. In 2006, the province gave the city money to test the housing first approach, which had been pioneered more than a decade earlier by a Canadian psychologist, Sam Tsemberis, while he was working in New York.

With parallel projects popping up in British Columbia and Ontario, the Mental Health Commission of Canada got involved, lobbying for federal money to study the strategy. The commission started a clinical trial in five cities across Canada — Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and Moncton — in which 2,200 homeless people with either mental illness or an addiction were randomly assigned to either housing first or treatment as usual.

The results were startling, validating the housing first model and demonstrating that the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.

“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official, said. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.

That kind of evidence persuaded the conservative government of former Prime Minister Steven Harper to pursue housing first as a national policy.

“This is where it went to a scale that I have not seen in any other country,” Dr. Tsemberis said in a telephone interview.

Under Canada’s subsequent Homeless Partnering Strategy, the federal government now distributes about 176 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $134, among 61 communities to fund services for the homeless. About 40 percent of those dollars must be spent on housing first interventions.

Seven Alberta cities — Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie, Red Deer, Wood Buffalo and Medicine Hat — formed a loose coalition and in 2007 each wrote their own 10-year plan to end homelessness. The province now spends more than 83 million Canadian dollars, or about $63 million, a year to carry out the plans, and came up with a 10-year plan of its own.

Progress has been promising. In 2014, when Alberta performed the country’s first “point in time” count — giving a snapshot of people who are homeless on a particular night — the total in the seven cities studied was 6,663. In 2016, the number had fallen nearly 20 percent, to 5,378.

Results in Medicine Hat were even more striking: The number of homeless counted fell by nearly half to 33 from 61. The number of participants in the housing first program, meanwhile, doubled to 120.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/w...orld&smtyp=cur

[REDVAN]

So Medicine Hat encouraged all homeless to migrate to Calgary.

Just like we encourage ours to migrate to BC. Win-win.

[Locke]

Really? Calgary had the worst 'homelessness problem' in the country?

I mean, to a certain degree it makes sense, housing in Calgary was impossible for a while.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

New York Times did a story on this

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/w...orld&smtyp=cur

Sorry I couldn't help myself

[East Coast Flame]

Originally Posted by Locke

Really? Calgary had the worst 'homelessness problem' in the country?

The article says worst homelessness problem in the province - I believe that's what you are referring to?

[CaptainYooh]

...the federal government now distributes about 176 million Canadian dollars a year, or about $134...

I know it's a silly misprint, but still very funny. I bet a few NY Times readers would take a mental note of a good exchange rate...

[Azure]

There was also an article recently about Medicine Hat having almost endless amounts of money due to being in control of the mineral rights the city land sits on. I'm sure that helps.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Azure

There was also an article recently about Medicine Hat having almost endless amounts of money due to being in control of the mineral rights the city land sits on. I'm sure that helps.

Maybe, but the article also says that it is cheaper to house them than to leave them homeless. So if they are saving money, isn't that just a smart move?

[Azure]

Obviously is a very smart move, and props to them for getting past the supposed 'outrage' of giving people free housing. A lot of people seem to think if you go work your ass off everything will fall into place and that is hardly ever the case.

My point was that Medicine Hat is a relatively wealthy city, so in general I would imagine they have less homeless people per capita, less crime, etc, etc but I could be completely wrong.

[Huntingwhale]

Eliminate the homeless, and you eliminate homelessness.