Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak and to be part of this Canada-wide process. It's important that we do these things.
The homelessness and mental health action group is a group at St. Andrew's, which is a very large church just down the street, at Burrard and Nelson. We decided to take on a role in educating the public, business, and community leaders and governments regarding the issues of homelessness and mental health. To do that, between May of 2007 and the present, we've convened about seven different public forums. We brought people from Portland who've had a very good and effective approach toward ending homelessness in that city. We brought the Calgary Homelessness Foundation, and we actually arranged for them to meet some of the emergent board of directors of the Streetohome Foundation, about which my colleague will speak next.
Most recently, we had a concert in collaboration with First United, and much of our fund-raising also goes toward the mission at Hastings and Main. We raised $22,000 in a community concert. At most of our meetings, we have anywhere between 700 and 1,400, the maximum that the church will hold. I'm saying that we've generated a lot of public interest. We've also presented in the provincial budget consultation process and the City of Vancouver consultations on their social housing plan. So that's the kind of role we take in the community.
Today I'm going to talk quickly about mental illness and give some stats on why people with severe and mental illness experience what people call institutionalized poverty--that is, they can't possibly get out of the current situation they're in because they don't earn enough. They can't earn money, and they don't get enough in social assistance benefits in order to be able to afford to live in a neighbourhood other than the downtown east side core, where most of the homeless and mentally ill people in our city live.
Finally, I want to close by talking about the need for a national housing strategy, which will support to some extent what the Citywide Housing Coalition has said. Broadly speaking, the mental illness overview is that one in five Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime, but 2% experience what we call severe and persistent mental illness. Included in that--you would see this on the streets of Vancouver--would be people with acquired brain injury, with fetal alcohol syndrome, or autism.
We're talking about the needs of a very vulnerable population. As my colleague mentioned, we've closed the institutions and we haven't managed to build the community-based treatment system that's so necessary.
Simon Fraser University research suggests that approximately 6,700 individuals in the Vancouver coastal catchment area--that includes Vancouver, Richmond, North Shore, and up to the Sunshine Coast--have both severe addictions and mental illness and are at risk of homelessness. Sadly, another 3,000 are absolutely homeless and, again, suffering from severe mental illness and possibly concurrent addictions.
The relationship between mental illness and poverty is a bit of a complex relationship and some people say it's an indirect association or a direct association, but my experience is that most people with serious mental illness simply drift into poverty. Again, some will say having a serious mental illness is a form of institutionalized poverty, because.... Well, I'll get to the numbers.
The support for one person under provincial disability benefits is $531 a month plus $375 for housing. But you can see that the average rental for a one-bedroom unit in Vancouver is about $880. Many people spend all of their disability stipend on simply trying to get a roof over their head, if they're not lucky enough to have access to supported housing that is subsidized or a rental subsidy through the treatment system.
I also want to acknowledge, because I've just come from a mental health conference at the Hotel Vancouver, that the federal government has put in $110 million to the Mental Health Commission of Canada. There are five cities involved; Vancouver, Moncton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal.
I know they are working very hard to demonstrate the importance not only of a roof over one's head, and they are evaluating different treatment models. That is progress, but the point we would make is that in the meantime we have thousands of people in this region who are mentally ill and homeless, and they are getting worse.
Recently we opened a treatment centre in Burnaby called the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addictions. Within a year, that had a wait-list of 600 people. So you have a program that takes in 100 and then you have a wait-list of 600. Many of those people, I would venture to say, would be dead by the time they actually got their file into the program, because they're so vulnerable also with concurrent illnesses, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, and those sorts of things. The point is there's a serious treatment gap in this area.
My colleague Barbara will talk in more detail, but we estimate that as of March 2008 there were 3,700 people who were homeless in Vancouver. The province has had a really aggressive social housing initiative, but there will be only an additional 1,100 units by the end of this year. We need at least an additional 1,500 units.
Again, this is where if we had a national housing strategy that put a priority on supportive housing...and affordable housing also, because people with mental illness do recover. What we're seeing is that there's no place for them to move to. That means the buildings that are more intensively serviced are bottlenecked.
I don't think I have to talk to you about the factors I suspect have led to this epidemic of homelessness. It's not only the closure of institutions or the changes in unemployment insurance but also family breakdown and so on.
When we in our action group talk about it, our major point is that the presence of this level of poverty in our communities degrades us all. It diminishes us all. I see Canadians as being kind people. We meet the public at our public meetings, and if the public is willing in one evening just out of their pockets to give $22,000 to the shelter at Main and Hastings, we have to keep stepping up and we have to rid ourselves of this particular plague.
The one thing that has become clear to us is, as some research from Simon Fraser University has said, it costs us more to do nothing than to provide supportive housing. In terms of criminal justice costs, policing costs, city sanitation and engineering, all of those cost $55,000 on average per person versus the $28,000 it costs if someone is safely housed in supportive housing.
I also want to remind you about what was recommended in the report of the Senate committee, and I know it's more complicated at the social affairs committee. It was Mike Kirby and Wilbert Keon's report on mental illness, “Out of the Shadows at Last”. In that report, they recommended 57,000 units of additional supportive housing for this population.
While I am very enthusiastic about the homelessness project, as an example in Vancouver, with that federal money, we're now housing on a short-term basis for three years 300 people. I just want to make it clear that the scale of what is required to address this is significant.
Mind you, if you divide 57,000 up across Canada, our share is probably much less. There are some very creative approaches that are being followed in this region, which Barbara will no doubt speak about.
I think we do need a national housing strategy, because it isn't Canadian to be on the street. I just want to emphasize that. I don't know anyone who thinks it's a good idea, and it's costing us more.
I heard you in the earlier session talk about social inclusion. In relation to the national housing strategy, I'd like to say that for people with serious mental illness, just having a roof isn't enough. One of the things, unfortunately, in the existing social housing policy has been to build congregate housing, which is really a form of re-institutionalization on a smaller level. This is not helping with social inclusion.
On the scattered-site models, the CMHA in Ottawa has received support to buy condos through the social housing policy. People will be housed in not more than 10% of the units in any one building. They will contribute from their disability stipends, but they'll also be able to live in a dignified way in the community in an integrated sense. When stigma and discrimination are such huge issues, in new policy going forward we have to avoid creating more ghettos, because that leads to the NIMBY fights and all those sorts of things.
In closing, we would really be thrilled to see this committee support the development of a national housing policy, and particularly to address those needs already identified in the Senate committee report for people with serious mental illnesses.
I think the leverage that the federal government has...recognizing that the provincial government provides health services, is that it's just not enough for a roof. People do need support to be able to maintain their tenancy. This is a challenge for the provincial government. So it's housing plus supports, and that includes mental health care.
Thank you.