Coordinated Care Campus

At the end of June, Council will be debating a recommendation to purchase the Stonebridge Inn and change it to a Coordinated Care Campus. No decision has been made yet: public engagement is happening before any recommendations are brought to Council for debate. And quite rightly, a lot of people are engaged in the conversation.

Following is more information about the process being used, and my take on Supportive Housing initiatives.

This is my personal blog, not an official blog of Council or the City. So any mistakes or personal opinions belong to me and me alone. I strongly encourage you to checkout the official information that has been posted about the Coordinated Care Campus here.

Priorities when addressing homelessness

I’ve heard crystal clearly from our residents: they expect Council and other orders of government to address homelessness in our community. As well as mental health and addictions.

As we tackle these huge challenges, there are a number of priorities I have. They include:

Giving people the best possible chance to get and stay healthy
Reducing social disorder (property crime, loitering in inappropriate places, etc…) in our community
Eliminating the need for people to wander the streets, store property outside, and find a place to stay warm or use the washroom
Saving taxpayers money by reducing City resources spent on responding to complaints and cleaning up public places, and reducing the amount of money other levels of government spend on the medical and justice systems

All of these priorities are shared by Council, and have been clearly communicated to City Administration. The Coordinated Care Campus is a proposal Administration will be making in hopes of actin on these priorities.

What is happening now, what is next

This property is not purchased. City Administration has made a conditional offer on it, but one of the conditions is that Council re-zone the land and authorize the purchase. Council has not yet received recommendations regarding the Coordinated Care Campus, which means it hasn’t debated it yet.

Prior to Administration making recommendations to Council, it is undertaking about a month and a half of public engagement. I’d encourage everyone to take part in that engagement, both to learn the facts of what is being proposed and to have their say. You can signup for a group engagement session or get contact information for lead staff at engage.cityofgp.com/coordinatedcarecampus.

There is also a Public Hearing scheduled for June 28th. It will provide an opportunity for members of the public to address Council before Council first debates the proposal.

What is NOT being Proposed: emergency shelter

It is important to note that there is no proposal for an Emergency Shelter to be placed on the Coordinated Care Campus.

An Emergency Shelter is a place like Rotary House. It isn’t a long-term place for people to be. It is just a place for them to keep warm overnight. Some important elements of Emergency Shelter:

There is no cost to use Emergency Shelter
There is a high turnover over people using Emergency Shelter. When they are in the surrounding community, they aren’t often known or recognized by staff.
Very limited possessions are allowed to be brought in. This leads to many possessions being stored nearby, hidden on public or private land.
People are kicked out early in the morning. This often leads to them spending much of their day wandering the community.
There are minimal behaviour expectations and qualifications for someone to use Emergency Shelter.
While an Emergency Shelter works to refer people to wellness services, it does not offer many services on site.

what is being proposed: supportive housing

Emergency Shelter is NOT what is proposed as part of the Coordinated Care Campus. Instead, what is being proposed is a type of Supportive Housing.

Supportive Housing isn’t a place for people to just be overnight. It is a permanent place for them to live. It also has both security and support staff (social workers, counselors, nurses, therapists, etc…) on-site 24/7.

Some important elements of Supportive Housing:

Tenants pay rent
There isn’t a high turnover of tenants. This means staff have more opportunity to build rapport and will recognize clients in the community.
People have a unit to store their possessions in: there is no need to hide possessions off-site
Tenants have both private and common area spaces to be. Food and other services are provided onsite. This means that they only have to leave Campus for work or things like medical appointments.
Tenants go through a qualification process to get in. Part of this process is they should a commitment to meaningful change.
There are a number of expectations of tenants, including the need to take part in wellness programs
Employment training, health care, positive social programs, and other supports are provided onsite to help people get and stay healthier

Alongside Supportive Housing, my understanding is that Council will also be receiving a recommendation to remove several City departments onto the Coordinated Care Campus. This will allow for the space to be fully utilized, and for there to be more City involvement into and eyes on what is going on.

My take on the coordinated care campus

There are people living on our streets interested in and capable of change. I strongly believe that both for them and for the good of our community, we need places for them to live and get on-site support that helps them get and be healthy. So I see a need for Supportive Housing in general.

However, that is not the same as being in favour of a particular project. I don’t know where I will land yet with the Community Care Campus, because I don’t yet have the information needed to inform my vote at Council.

Council is required to make its decisions in public meetings. This means that we don’t typically receive detailed information until recommendations are presented to us. These recommendations and their accompanying reports are given to Council in agenda packages which are available to us at the same time the public can access them.

Administration has not yet made any recommendations to Council. And it will not until it has undertaken public engagement. That means that I do not have detailed information about this project. Without that information, I do not know whether or not I will support it.

As I do get more information and consider how I will be voting, these are the questions and concerns I have in my mind:

Cost and financials. Are the operational and capital budgets presented to Council realistic? What type of research went into them? How much of the costs are new funding, and how much is funding re-allocated from other homelessness initiatives? What contributions are being made by senior levels of government? How secure and long-term are those contributions by other levels of government. What is the net cost on City taxpayers?
Neighbourhood impact. What impact can be expected on nearby properties? What steps will be taken to monitor and respond to any problems that occur? What avenues will be available to neighbours to have any concerns heard and quickly addressed?
Security and supervision. What type of security and supervision will be part of this project? How much of it will there be? How will the safety of tenants and the surrounding community be protected?
Placement of tenants. How will tenants be screened before being accepted into the site? What will they need to do to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to health and to being a positive community member? Will those with criminal records be considered, and if so, what kind of histories will be accepted? Will people from faraway communities be allowed to travel to Grande Prairie to live here?
Expectations of tenants. What behaviour expectations will there be when tenants are onsite? What behaviour expectations will there be when tenants are offsite in the community? What commitment will tenants need to make to things like employment, counselling, and wellness programs?
Enforcing expectations. How will expectations be monitored and enforced, both on-site and in the surrounding community?
Residential Tenancy Act. Will the people living here fall under the Residential Tenancy Act, which makes eviction difficult and time consuming? Or will it fall under other Legislation which will allow for quick eviction if people don’t live up to expectations?
Design. Will this be a reasonable place for people to live and spend most of their time on-site? Will people have good on-site opportunities to be outside so that they don’t need to wander the community to get fresh air? What physical improvements will be done for the sake of privacy and security, both for tenants and neighbours? What will this look like to people driving down 100 St into our community?

I have a lot of questions I need answered before I will know whether or not I support this particular project.

WHY SUPPORTIVE HOUSING IS NEEDED

I do not know where I will land with the particular Coordinated Care Campus being proposed. However, I do see a general need for Supportive Housing in our community.

There are people living on our streets who are both interested in and capable of getting out of homelessness and becoming much healthier than they are. But most of these people have cognitive or mental health challenges, and few of them have strong families to help support them. They need not just a place to live, but also medical and social support.

Too often, people with mental health and addictions issues end up living in emergency shelters or living rough on the street. This leaves them chronically sleep deprived, constantly stressed about the safety of themselves or their possessions, with little dignity, often hungry, and easily accessible to people who will victimize them or encourage them to make poor choices.

People need to have a safe place to sleep, store their possessions, use the washroom, and eat. They need to be able to choose to spend their time away from others who may harm them or be bad influences. And they need to have positive social interactions with other humans. Without all of these things, there are very few of us who could remain mentally healthy. So it isn’t reasonable to expect someone dealing with mental health issues to heal without them.

It also isn’t reasonable to expect someone to not be wandering our streets if they have to sleep in one place, store their possessions in another, get social interaction in another, eat in another, and access services in multiple other places.

Making sure someone has a place to live addresses these challenges.

However, Supportive Housing isn’t just about a living space. It also provides on-site health and social services to help, monitor, encourage residents and to hold them accountable for their behaviours. This on-site care gives them the best possible chance of staying housed and getting healthy.

By making sure someone has a place to live, we make sure they have the pre-requisites of mental health. By making sure there are services and social interactions on-site, we give them far less reason to be wandering the community. And by giving them daily interaction with professionals, we give them the best chance of staying on a path to health.

Supportive Housing is needed to get people stabilized and on a path to wellness. Getting people into Supportive Housing also means that they spend far less time on our streets. And by helping people get to a healthy place, it decreases the use of expensive resources such as emergency police, fire, and ambulance response.

Supportive Housing isn’t just needed for the people within it. It is also needed to decrease social disorder in our community, and to decrease the money taxpayers spend on emergency response.

CONCERNS I HEAR

Whenever we talk about Supportive Housing, there are a number of concerns I hear. Here’s my thinking in regards to the most common concerns I receive:

“There are already too many people wandering our streets.” I agree! Everyone has a right to be on our streets and in parks as long as they are behaving appropriately and staying on public property. However, people who are living rough will spend less time out in the community if they are transitioned into supportive housing. We often have people wandering our neighbourhoods because they have nowhere else to be, and because they have to go different places to sleep, eat, socialize, and access various services such as counselling or medical treatment. Giving them a place to be 24/7 and delivering services they need on-site will lead to them spending a lot less time walking through communities. The monitoring on-site will also help make sure people aren’t acquiring possessions that aren’t theirs. And possible eviction is a new accountability tool available to address any misbehavior that might happen in the neighbourhood.
“These people need accountability, not hand outs.” People in supportive housing pay rent: unlike shelter space, they don’t get it for free. And there is next to nothing the City can do to hold people accountable to anything when they are living rough. Our police are limited by federal and provincial legislation and courts, and those provide little to no tools to hold someone accountable when they are living on the streets. However, to be in supportive housing, people have to sign and get held to a housing agreement. And the relationships they build with staff on-site is the best way to hold them accountable to working towards sobriety and health.
“These projects will just draw more street engaged people to our community.” Late last year, the Mobile Outreach Program (MOP) was established. One of its main tasks: helping people from other communities get home rather than becoming part of Grande Prairie’s systems. Supportive Housing is to address needs that are already in our community, not to draw people to Grande Prairie. Supportive housing requires rent to be paid and a housing agreement to be adhered to. It won’t attract people to our community who are just looking for a free place to be with no steps towards getting healthy. Additionally, most people who are street engaged in our city are long-time residents of our community. In 2019, we had “Tent City” pop up, and City staff surveyed everyone living in it: over 90% of the people in it were longtime residents of our area.
“We shouldn’t be encouraging drug use.” There is no “safe consumption” elements of these projects, and public intoxication has consequences under the housing agreements. Supportive housing doesn’t encourage drug use. Quite the opposite. One of the big goals of it is to get people mentally healthy and sober by making them physically safe, giving them proper sleep, and engaging them with on-site health and social workers.
“We should just incarcerate, institutionalize, or banish these people.” The City does encourage and help people from elsewhere to get back home. However, it has no legal ability to prohibit someone from being in Grande Prairie, nor to incarcerate or institutionalize people, even if it wanted to.
"There are better priorities for tax dollars.” Saving taxpayers dollars is a priority for me. Which is one reason supportive housing is needed. We spend a HUGE amount on homelessness. The City spends money on having RCMP, Bylaw, and Fire responding to emergencies and complaints generated by people living rough, having Parks and Bylaw cleanup encampments, and funding emergency shelters. Our community also loses money as social disorder drives investment (and therefore tax revenue) from our core. Homelessness also costs the province a lot of money in terms of medical and justice resources. Someone living rough costs taxpayers a lot of money. Getting them into supportive housing is less expensive in the short term, and WAY less expensive in the long-term when it succeeds in getting someone healthy enough to live and work independently.
"You should use X building or Y property instead.” Often people highlight a specific building or piece of property Supportive Housing should be built on. Usually, the property brought up in this conversation has already been considered by the City and found to be not practical for Supportive Housing.
“You should build this beside Rotary House.” Rotary House is an Emergency Shelter, which is very different from Supportive Housing. There are people in Emergency Shelter with no current desire to move towards health and out of homelessness, where as Supportive Housing is for people showing commitment to meaningful change. I don’t think we help people looking to move out of homelessness when we have them continue to live next to Emergency Shelter, especially if they know a lot of people still residing in Shelter.
“You should build this way out in the country or in an industrial area.” These settings can be very good places for things like treatment or recovery programs, where people are staying short term to get intensive help. However, the idea of Supportive Housing is to give people a permanent place to live so that they can find recovery and build a life. If we want people to be healthy and as independent as possible in the long-term, they need access to things like jobs, shopping, and transit. An industrial area isn’t a good place for anyone to live long-term, and the country isn’t a good place for someone without transportation to live permanently.

That’s my thinking on this Medical Model Supportive Housing development.

I’d love to hear your thoughts, and any questions or concerns you might have.

My preferred way to chat is by meeting for a cup of coffee. But I’m also happy to talk through email, over the phone, or on Zoom.

If you want to connect, my email is dbressey@cityofgp.com and my phone number is 780-402-4166.

Thanks for reading!

-Dylan

Dylan BresseyJune 1, 2021Comment