I can barely remember yesterday, let alone....
I'll draw on the numbers as they come to mind, and our experience at Covenant House.
We know that 30% of the homeless youth we serve have acute mental health issues. About a year ago, we had a change in our model for the crisis program, the short-term residential beds, and we went to gender-specific programming. At any given time, historically, about 25% of our population would be female. Since we made that change, we've brought it up to about 50%. In the female population, no less than 60% of the time will we have an actual diagnosis of mental health issues. The diagnosis of mental health issues in the homeless population is significant.
We do know, and the research bears it out, that if you put somebody inside a house, with a roof and four walls, safe and clean, you will find the mental health issues stabilize, even if you did nothing else.
Of course, doing nothing else is not enough. I want to make this point here. We are in a crisis with respect to homelessness, and it's been a long time coming, but homelessness is only a symptom; it's not the actual crisis. That's where our attention is drawn to, and rightly so, but we got here over the course of 25 years, and we have an opportunity right now, again....
In 1968 we started a very similar conversation, and we're going to keep having this conversation until we actually say, “What is our responsibility?” The question we're going to ask with respect to housing is this: “Is housing is a right, or is housing a privilege? Are timely medical supports a right or a privilege? Is education for our youth a right or a privilege?” Those are fundamental. If you go down the rabbit hole, you're going to come out in different places on different answers. It's how you choose to answer that question.
I also want to point out what Mayor Read pointed out earlier: Housing First is great—we need to get people into buildings—but it has to come with the accompanying resources to support the individual to stay. In terms of evidence, Housing First is only for mental health and addictions. For everything else there's a lot of evidence informing us that it's promising, but we only have the evidence to know that if you put individuals who have mental health issues and addiction in housing and support them, they are going to have a good outcome.
These are nuances, technical questions. I'm going to go back to what I said before: what do we believe to be true of our citizens?