"You have such a beautiful country," Betty Anne said in her warm Texas drawl, sipping a beverage inside the Terminal City Club. "But we were so surprised when we got into Vancouver."
"Oh," I said. "Why's that?"
"Welllll . . ." she hesitated, clearly not wanting to be impolite.
I urged her on.
"Well, when we were coming into Vancouver on the train, there were all these homeless people living on the side of the train tracks and on the streets, under plastic tents. It looked like something out of one of those movies about the Depression. I was surprised, we didn't see anything like it in your other cities..."
She took a breath.
"Then," Betty Anne continued, "when I was coming out of the hotel, this young woman came up to me and asked me for money. She said that someone had stolen her horse.
"At first I didn't know what she was talking about. I asked Max, 'Why would she have a horse?' "
Max, sipping a beer, looked up.
"I told her horse is the word for heroin," he said. "The girl was saying someone had stolen her drugs, Betty Anne."
"I wondered at first what she was talking about," continued Betty Anne. "It was so strange a thing to see in a beautiful city like yours. Someone ought to help all those poor people, don't you think?"
Sometimes it takes the eyes of an outsider to put a problem in its full perspective.
The truth is, there's been something cruel and Dickensian about how this city's homelessness crisis has been handled. Correction, make that colossally mishandled.
You can't really put the blame on any one politician, either, though the political activists always try. Just about everyone's culpable in varying degrees since we've put up with this public policy failure for years.
I found myself trying to explain to Betty Anne why she had seen what she had in Vancouver. It was tough going. But here's the fast-rewind of the amazing arc of policy blunders -- given to us by a melange of Social Credit, New Democratic and Liberal governments -- that I tried to explain.
First, imagine progressively shrinking the province's major psychiatric hospital, Riverview, to save money. Then, in a cruel twist, offer no safe harbour for many of those psychiatric patients, who politicians told us would benefit from being "deinstitutionalized" and put back into society.
Instead, let large numbers of these truly desperate souls fend for themselves on our streets. Let them line up for a room in those bedbug-infested flophouses our health inspectors, for reasons that mystify, somehow allow to stay open. While we're at it, we'll also slow down the construction of new social housing, too, since it's too expensive.
"Oh, my," said Betty Anne.
And now the Downtown Eastside is gentrifying, Betty Anne; it's going to be our version of New York City's Tribeca. So now we've got all these lost souls begging and wandering the city's downtown, often in a schizophrenic or crystal meth haze.
But we really haven't done much about it. We're not good at the tough job of distinguishing between vagrants ( who should be moved on by the cops ), or chronic criminals ( who should be put in jail by judges ) and the truly sick ( who should be taken to shelters or hospitals by good beat cops, if we had enough of them ).
Nope. We somehow got used to the sight of people sprawled on sidewalks and inside the doorways of the world's "most livable" city. I told Betty Anne and Max that the young woman wanting money for her heroin was probably not unlike other drug-addicted women who were the victims of our serial killer, Willie Pickton. He saw the Downtown Eastside as a human hunting ground.
"My gosh," said Betty Anne. "That's awful."
Sure is. The truth is that our approach to the mentally ill, drug addicted and homeless has been a moral failure. It's never made political sense. And now, it seems, it didn't even make financial sense, either.
As The Vancouver Sun's Lori Culbert wrote on Saturday, an exhaustive study commissioned by the Ministry of Health has found it now costs society about $55,000 a year to care for each of our estimated 11,750 homeless people -- that's over $640 million. If, however, we invested in social housing, that would drop to $37,000 per person per year. That means savings of about $211 million a year.
This is a watershed finding. The bottom line is that our political leaders have finally been given solid numbers to mount a business case for investing big dollars in social housing. The Liberal government deserves credit for starting to get this and its decision to start buying up old rooming houses and fast-track social housing projects. But this report shows there's reason for Housing Minister Rich Coleman to think even bigger and try to do it faster.
Accelerating the construction of social housing -- and the ancillary supports for our most vulnerable citizens -- will save us all money. It will rescue lives. And, best of all, it will make me feel a whole lot better about my city the next time I run into two train travellers from Texas.
