The money will go to a St. Michael's Hospital research centre, as well as non-profit United Way Greater Toronto, to establish the Slaight Family Housing Lab a program that aims to put roofs over people's heads while providing wraparound services.
The organization began in 1997, when Amy Lemley and Deanne Pearn, two graduate students at Berkeley, realized that young people transitioning out of foster care had little in the way of public support. They were literally dropped off on a corner or at a homeless shelter with a garbage bag of belongings, and that was it, said Jayme Catalano, First Place for Youth's communications director.
"This project has been in development since 2018, when our former Chancellor, Carol Christ, really took the initiative to create a new vision and future for People's Park," UC Berkeley spokesperson Kyle Gibson said. "Through an extensive amount of community engagement and planning, [we] put together a very comprehensive plan to really meet the needs of the community. The nonprofit developer will now finalize the project's plans and will present them to the university."
Eighteen months ago, I moved into Oak Lawn Place, an apartment building for low-income, 55 and over, predominantly LGBTQIA+ elders in Dallas, Texas. There are 125 people currently living here (with 81 one-bedroom and three two-bedroom units) with a core group of 40, myself included, that are active in community events.Just yesterday I looked around the community room at tables of people eating lunch, and I was amazed at how people who used to be strangers now felt like a community - my community.
Nurse Julianne Vidal takes vitals for Brandon Radford, 80, in his room at Oak Days, a permanent supportive housing program in a former hotel in Oakland, on May 22, 2024. Advocates for people experiencing homelessness fear this kind of housing could lose funding under federal guidelines released this month. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
The idea is simple, and supported by decades of research and data: It's almost impossible to address addiction issues if you're living on the streets. Requiring total sobriety as a condition of housing just makes the homeless crisis worse. As Dorsey freely admits, many people facing addiction issues relapse, and require multiple efforts to reach sobriety. That's much easier to handle when you have a roof over your head.
"If you know you need to get off of and away from drugs, you shouldn't be forced into housing where drug use is allowed and where recovery is not supported," he said. "Some folks won't go into housing because they know that it actually is dangerous for them because they're still experiencing an addiction. ... This isn't about having zero tolerance to drug use. It's about having environments where recovery is explicitly supported, and that is the goal."
He was a perfect example of what health officials have long called "frequent flyers": patients, usually homeless, who visit the emergency department or get admitted to hospital an inordinate number of times. When Dr. Andrew Boozary and his team at Toronto's University Health Network looked deeper into the issue, they discovered that about 100 patients accounted for more than 4,500 emergency department visits in one year.
