Homelessness: Family about to lose their homes can avoid shelters, a London project proves
TheLondonFreePress.com – News/Local –
November 4, 2016. By Randy Richmond
A London pilot project has drastically cut the number of families losing their homes and being forced into shelters.
The project also revealed a disturbing factor sending families into homelessness: unscrupulous or fake landlords scamming people.
“It is something we need to follow up and explore more,” Cheryl Forchuk, a researcher with the Lawson Health Research Institute, said. “The issues of these scams is something we don’t highlight enough.”
For about a year, the City of London and Mission Services have been running a project to prevent families from losing their homes and ending up at Mission Service’s Rotholme Women’s and Family Shelter.
Forchuk and other researchers began a two-year evaluation of the project in January and presented preliminary results at the National Conference on Ending Homeless, held in London Friday.
The results are straightforward. Before the project began, 100 per cent of the family members who called the shelter ended up at the shelter.
After a year, only 9.3 per cent of family members ended up in the shelter. The rest maintained their homes or found new ones.
“We cannot stop homelessness if we do not also prevent homelessness,” she told the conference attendees.
Families are the fastest growing group in Canada’s homeless population, but families often provide a unique opportunity to prevent homelessness, she said.
“Families are one of the few groups that will actually give you advance warning (of homelessness.)”
Moms or dads will often call a shelter like Rotholme to say they’re about to lose their apartment or a relationship is breaking up and they will need a place to stay, Forchuk said.
“Knowing that people contact the shelter creates an opportunity. Instead of saying, ‘Yes come down in three days or next week, what if the dialogue changed to say, ‘What can we actually do to prevent this from happening?’ ”
Rotholme deals with each case individually, Forchuk said.
“Basically what the intervention is, is whatever it takes. What can we do to keep you where you are? Does that mean paying rent in arrears, paying utility in arrears? If that doesn’t work, what can we do to move you to another location?”
Research has shown high rates of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress among parents in homeless families, and developmental, behavioural, health, academic and safety issues among children.
Parents in a family — and by extension their children — can be put at risk of becoming homeless due to lifelong factors such as their own childhood trauma and poverty, mental ill health and addiction, and low levels of education.
But new factors come into play over time, such as being forced to live in unsafe neighbourhoods, welfare rules that don’t allow flexibility and scam artists.
“They had numerous examples” of those scams, Forchuk said. In some cases, landlords took cash deposits and disappeared or denied the transaction took place. In other cases, people pretended to be landlords and stole deposits.
Among the early recommendations from families is a system certifying landlords and better training for renters.
As part of the evaluation, the researchers also studied the experiences of 10 families that didn’t call ahead and ended up in the shelter.
“Why didn’t they? What would have made the difference for them?” Forchuk said.
“Because if we’re only looking at the program and what happened and worked, we also need to know why did some people not access it. Why did they just show up at the door instead of doing something earlier?”
rrichmond@postmedia.ca
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HOMELESS FAMILIES
50%: increase from 2005-2009 in homeless families with children in Canada
43: family members helped in a London pilot project from May 2015 to January 2016
9.3%: family members who ended up in shelter
100%: family members who ended up in shelter before pilot
< http://www.lfpress.com/2016/11/04/homelessness-family-about-to-lose-their-homes-can-avoid-shelters-a-london-project-proves >
Tags: featured, homelessness, housing, ideology, poverty
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