PROFFERING A BILLION DOLLARS AS A “SOLUTION” AND A “SAVINGS” IS BOGUS

February 02, 2009

OTTAWA – Edmonton Committee to End Homelessness member and Member of Parliament for Edmonton East, Peter Goldring says the proffering of a billion dollars as a “solution” and a “savings” measure in the committee’s report is bogus

“Some social non-profits even want to treat all homeless as ‘chronically homeless’ which is reflected by the questionably huge exaggerated future operations cost of $90 million per year to serve seemingly 3,750 people. This is after just spending $1 billion over 10 years to house and serve these 3,750 people. That just isn’t the case. The chronically homeless, approximately 10% of Edmonton’s counted 3,079 homeless, do consume more than their percentage of resources. If all Edmonton’s counted homeless were considered chronic, then the costs could well be a billion dollars - however all homeless are not chronic. All homeless counts to date in Edmonton from 1999 ask the question to determine who is homeless: ‘Do you have a permanent place to return to tonight?’ Fully up to half of the homeless population are couch surfers, people staying with family or friends and having no need of social services hand holding and fully 50% of those remaining in shelters are not chronically homeless.  What these people, many of whom have jobs, need and want is affordable entry level rental housing, not social housing and social workers. Yet this plan calls for $100 million per year just to hold the hands of these persons who mostly are quite capable and want to be living independently.”

 Mr. Goldring said throughout the Committee’s deliberations he spoke of the most important fundamental need for affordable private sector independent living singles rental housing, as well as the obvious need, well mentioned in this report, to provide help for the hundreds of chronically homeless.

“The ever increasing numbers of homeless singles in Edmonton shelters, couch surfers or on the street is the direct result of the removal and destruction of fully 90% of singles housing over the past 30 years.  By far most homeless counted don’t need social hand holding, they need affordable independent living rental housing. Where can they go?

“As I pointed out to the Committee, the costing and social analysis of this report is very problematic and highly questionable. The costing numbers were jammed in at the last moment of final drafts and could not be debated for any reasonable accuracy.

“For example, most independent living housing mentioned in this report could be provided by the private sector for one half the cost in the report would need no ongoing operating costs or costly wrap-around social services.”

He added that many so-called experts, some very well-meaning,  arrive at times like this to proffer their “factual” opinions, replete with larger and larger social asks combined with substantial taxpayer cost savings to do so, but which most are grossly inaccurate and misleading.

The quote from the 2007 Laird Report about the annual cost to taxpayers for 150,000 homeless Canadians is estimated at $4.5 - $6 billion is just one such grossly exaggerated number.

Mr. Goldring does agree with the intent and direction of the report, about helping the truly needy, the chronically homeless, but feels the implementation capital and operating numbers are problematic, exaggerated and misleading.

“In keeping with the overall direction of good intentions, I believe that this effort of implementation to help particularly the chronically homeless will have significant financial implications. Not anywhere near the costing statements of this report, but certainly significant commitments.

“Outside of that, this report does paint a credible picture of an honest attempt to shift societal focus from viewing the chronically homeless as a situation to be managed to a more human perspective of bringing an end to chronic homelessness and to possibly impact homelessness overall.

“Of the many other reports that I have reviewed, this report, outside of the financial element is the most correctly descriptive of the need and action. But exaggerating costing or falsely claiming that all committee members agreed with the report’s billion dollars as a solution and a taxpayer savings is completely false and fundamentally wrong.

“Homelessness is an extremely complex and involved expression that has a multitude of definitions of needs, far beyond simply being without a home. It is imperative to decide a national definition to properly describe needs that can be rationally acted upon,” he points out.

“The United States has modeled how to deal with the homelessness issue – create a national understanding of the issue, defining it as best possible and then decide how to most effectively deal with it, and implement that plan. It is my suggestion that Canada form a comparable agency to the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness to begin the process nationally.”