When Steven first became homeless in late 2022, he didn’t know who to call for help finding a temporary place to stay.
“The first place I called was the Rock Bay shelter and they were like, you don’t want to be here — it’s one of the wet shelters.”
A “wet” shelter, unlike a “dry” one, allows drugs and alcohol.
Steven, now 37 — who asked to be identified only by his middle name because of the stigma associated with living in a shelter — had come to the realization that he could no longer afford his two-bedroom apartment in Vic West.
Just a few months before, in the summer of 2022, he had moved back to his childhood home of Victoria from Vancouver to settle down with his then-fiancée.
“We had a [wedding] reservation at the Empress, we had deposits down … but the relationship didn’t end up working out.”
After his ex-fiancée returned to the U.S., he could no longer afford the $3,000 monthly rent. At the time, the office manager wasn’t regularly working because of a bike injury that had shattered his upper left arm.
He couldn’t get a roommate because his ex-fiancée wouldn’t let him transfer their jointly held lease, and he couldn’t find other units in the area that he could afford, Steven said.
At the time, in October 2022, a vacant one-bedroom unit in Greater Victoria was renting for $1,767 a month on average, according to a Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation rental market report.
Average rents— even accounting for existing rent-controlled units — increased by 7.7 per cent from 2021 to 2022, the biggest annual increase seen in the capital region since 1991, the report said.
So Steven gave as much notice as he could, packed his belongings in a storage unit, and moved into a shelter in downtown Victoria.
He was surprised to find out that, for his category of shelter — called “transitional housing” — he had to pay about $600 in monthly program fees, which included a bed in a dorm and three meals a day, along with support services.
“I didn’t realize you had to pay to be in a shelter, because I kind of thought that would be the place to go in the event that you didn’t have any options available to you,” he said.
Including the storage space he rented for his possessions, Steven estimated that he was paying about $1,000 a month to be homeless.
He started off sleeping in the shelter’s dorms, which house up to eight or 12 people, which he called a “nerve-wracking experience.” At the time, Steven was looking for administration work similar to his previous job in Vancouver.
But he was living in an institutional environment where the lights in his room were on a timer and people would pass out in communal bathrooms.
The shelter didn’t allow for microwaves, and staff removed the only communal electric kettle after a fistfight broke out over it, he said.
Fights would break out about the most mundane things, he said, such as what to watch on the communal television. “Everybody has probably seen them like 100 times at this point, but they would still argue over Rust Valley [Restorers] — it was some kind of car-restoration show.”
At the same time, he said, many of his shelter mates were fundamentally decent people who had ended up homeless due to extenuating circumstances. About 30 per cent of the people living there had jobs, Steven said.
“There was one guy who ended up in the shelter because his house burnt down with all of his belongings.
“When he does get out of there, he’s going to be starting from scratch.”
Like many others who have found themselves pushed out of the rental market, Steven learned that it’s hard to dig yourself out of homelessness when you’re living in a shelter, even when you’re not struggling with substance-use or mental-health problems.
Critics say the answer is better access to subsidized housing so people are not forced to resort to the shelter system.
Shelter ‘horror stories’
Steven’s shelter was a “dry” shelter with a no-drugs-or-alcohol policy, but occasionally people would smuggle substances in.
Once, he woke up to the sound of a crack pipe shattering on the floor in the middle of the night.
Most of the people in the shelter would get “drummed out in a couple of weeks” due to substance-use or behavioural issues, he said.
While many residents were respectful and nice to staff, some were just “too far gone” and would be consistently belligerent or threatening, he said. “It’s not really fair that [staff] have to put up with that.
“They try their best, but I think they’re just spread too thin. I imagine that burnout is probably considerable.”
His shelter was better than some other places, he said.
People transferred from other shelters would share horror stories about people being “hot-shotted” — where someone is held down and involuntarily injected with drugs, he said. “Apparently it happens regularly enough to have its own term.”
Steven said people living in shelters can lose hope for the future because of how difficult it is to get out of homelessness. A few people took their own lives while he was living there, he said — “people [that] you wouldn’t necessarily think have addiction problems or mental problems.”
Many people living there were frustrated by their struggles in navigating a social support system that often required internet skills not everyone had, he said.
Steven, an occasional cannabis user who doesn’t drink, was eventually moved to a single-occupancy-room in the shelter after a few months of good behaviour.
“When you move into a [single] room, they give you one year,” he said, adding that people can be served with an eviction notice afterwards.
He started working again as an office manager in the city in early 2023, but it took him another year to secure an affordable one-bedroom apartment.
His new apartment is only costing him $600 more than what he spent every month on shelter program fees and storage-unit costs, he said.
Steven estimated that he applied to about 35 different rentals in that one-year period. The hardest part was explaining the housing gap to prospective landlords, he said.
“Any kind of landlord is going to want references,” he said. “The longer you go without having a reference, the longer you go undocumented in your living situation, the worse it looks.”
While he was living in a shelter, he “never breathed a word to anybody about my circumstances,” he said.
Occasionally, he had to work remotely from his room, which involved a lot of strategic muting on video calls when someone began yelling in the hallways or if police showed up at the facility, he said.
On nights out with friends, the 37-year-old had to be mindful of the midnight curfew. “It’s the duality of existence,” he said.
Steven credits two of his childhood friends in particular for supporting him throughout the time he was living in the shelter. “If it had just been me and I didn’t have that support network, I honestly don’t know if I could have pulled it off.”
Living in an apartment means he can now plan ahead in life, he said. “When you’re in a shelter environment, you’re pretty much just living day to day.”
Steven said he still recognizes some of the homeless people he sees on the street. “We’ll nod to each other as I head to work each day.”
In May, he spotted one of his former shelter neighbours camping in a park across the street from his office.
“He looks really rough these days.”
‘No place I could afford’
Brenda Wadey, who manages the transitional housing program at the 170-bed Salvation Army Addictions and Rehabilitation Centre — also known as the ARC — on Johnson Street, said it’s meant to be a place where people can make changes, stabilize their lives and get support.
“They establish goals for themselves,” she said. “We provide them with opportunities to make significant changes in their lives.”
Wadey said stays in the program’s single- and five-person rooms are usually capped at 18 months, with case workers available to help people find permanent housing.
At the ARC, a total of 38 units had been used for transitional housing as recently as September, but last month, the Salvation Army shifted some of those units to emergency shelter spaces, increasing the number of the latter to 54 from 21, she said.
While the transitional housing program usually has a fifth of its spaces available, emergency shelter spaces are oversubscribed, she said — there are regulars who come to the ARC to access services but can’t get into the transitional housing program due to lack of money, or into the emergency shelters for lack of space.
In October 2022, Frederick, who also asked to be identified only by his middle name, was checked into the ARC’s transitional housing program from Royal Jubilee Hospital by a social worker.
The 74-year-old had been living on a sailboat moored off Brentwood Bay after moving out of a rent-subsidized apartment in Victoria in 2016.
Cancer treatment had left him with severe vertigo that prevented him from returning to the liveaboard life, he said. “I had money, but there was no place to put me and no place I could afford,” said Frederick, who lives on a monthly fixed income of $2,000.
Born in Sudbury, Ont., Frederick had arrived on Vancouver Island in 1975 to work on the green chain at the now-defunct Tahsis mill. “I worked like a dog and then I’d go skiing for four months a year,” he said.
He could no longer do the job, however, after he was involved in a car accident with a drunk driver in 1983. He moved to Calgary and worked in a bar, where his alcohol and cocaine habit got worse. “I was drinking and using every day, which I had never done before,” he said.
Frederick said he stopped using cocaine in 1982 after he went through what he called a “.45 calibre recovery program” in Oklahoma, courtesy of some pot dealers he was friends with at the time.
“We can’t have you running around running your mouth being a f—ing idiot,” he recalled his friend saying. “Basically, it was ‘either get it together or I put a bullet in you.’ ”
Alcohol took a little longer to quit, but he said he was finally able to do so in 1987.
He would go on to work in the addiction-recovery field with children and young adults in a hospital-based clinic and with federal parolees.
In 1994, he quit his job to travel from Thunder Bay to Manitoba on the old fur-rade canoe route and wrote a book based on his journey. “I’m bipolar — manic-depressive — so when I focus, there’s nothing else. There are no distractions,” he said. “When I’m depressive … I pretty much freeze and I’m unable to function very well.”
The first time he stayed at the ARC was in 2006 after a “nervous breakdown” that resulted in his hospitalization at Royal Jubilee, he said.
He would be there for a year, and at a Cool Aid transitional shelter at Dowler Place for another year before he successfully applied for a rent-stabilized apartment.
His transitional shelter stay that began in 2022 was similarly lengthy — he was only able to find a spot at an independent seniors living facility in Victoria in July of this year.
Frederick said very few people he met at the shelter have been able to escape the cycle of homelessness and find permanent housing.
“They’ll spend six, 10 months at the Salvation Army. Then they’ll basically escape it, but they don’t have the resources or ability to maintain, so they end up crashing and burning and being back,” he said, adding that the critical factor is often alcohol and substance use.
“That’s the downpour, not being able to address the central problem, which is addiction,” he said. “It’s not an easy road. There are no shortcuts, no easy paths.”
Frederick said he is extremely lucky that since quitting, he does not have the urge to use substances or drink, although he’s sympathetic to those addicted to drugs.
“At least I was getting pure cocaine. I wasn’t getting garbage like they get now that kills you,” he said.
At least 1,749 people died from toxic drugs in B.C. from January until the end of September, according to new figures from the B.C. Coroners Service released in late October, including 16 who died in Greater Victoria in September.
Need for more subsidized housing
Don McTavish, director of housing and shelters at Cool Aid, said it’s important to remember that the homeless population and shelter population are “just as diverse as any of us.”
“Somehow, the general public has an idea of homeless people being kind of the most acute, most addicted, the most in need of care,” he said.
But people from just about every walk of life have been through the doors of one of Cool Aid’s four emergency shelters and transitional-housing programs in Victoria, he said — the only common denominator is that they don’t have secure housing.
In 2022, just one per cent of available rental units in Victoria were affordable for those earning a median take-home income of $21,000 a year — a financial category a fifth of Canada’s population fits into, Statistics Canada says.
McTavish said half the supportive-housing applications that Cool Aid receives are from people who probably just need subsidized housing. “People ending up in the shelter, especially people getting a little older and on fixed income, they just kind of got priced out,” he said.
Those living in Cool Aid transitional housing stay for two years on average but could likely move out sooner if there were more affordable and subsidized units available, he said.
At the same time, McTavish said current street drugs have turned shelters into a more chaotic and challenging environment.
When it was mainly alcoholics, pot smokers and the occasional heroin user, people would be in and out of a shelter in an average of 10 to 14 days, he said. “Eighty per cent of them we wouldn’t ever see again,” he said.
But then came the harder drugs: crystal meth, fentanyl and crack cocaine.
Shelters started seeing people passed out or dead from overdoses in bathrooms and closets in the middle of the night, “a tragedy and completely traumatizing” experience, he said.
The toxic-overdose crisis radically changed the way social agencies dealt with homelessness, as people were dying before they could be helped, he said. As a result, people with the most acute needs received priority support.
In 2010, Cool Aid began its transitional housing program — which has a monthly charge set at the provincial shelter rate of $500 — to serve folks in the shelter who would benefit from more independence and “a bit more peace and quiet,” he said.
Pacifica Housing CEO Carolina Ibarra said Frederick’s experience of being discharged into transitional housing was better than for most people who don’t have a home to go to following a stay at the hospital.
“They might have had some pretty major surgery and they’ll still be discharged to a park, which was the case of a client we helped that was in Oaklands [Park] a few months ago,” she said.
Ibarra said her organization has seen a sharp rise in the number of seniors and families facing homelessness in the past three years, many of whom do not need the health, addictions and mental-health supports provided as part of shelters and supportive housing.
“I think putting them in that environment is unfortunate if they don’t need it,” she said. “If they can be successful in independent living, why not just provide them with what they need?
“There are a lot of people who really do need the extra support.”
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