Vancouver’s official advocate for the homeless had her last day at city hall Thursday, along with her birthday.
My story about her in the Globe is here but I wanted to add a few words.
I started covering city hall for the Vancouver Sun in the fall of 1994 (when I was a toddler, of course). There wasn’t a huge amount of coverage about homelessness in Vancouver back then. An occasional story about an individual fallen on hard times. But most of the stories about homelessness in local papers in the 1980s and early 1990s were about the problem in Toronto or the U.S. or the rest of the world.
But I did start to hear concern about people starting to sleep on the street and crowded shelters throughout the mid-1990s. In 1998, I got a fellowship to study homelessness in Canada and elsewhere. Sometime around then, I went on my first walkabout with Judy Graves, then called a tenant relocation officer or some such thing. We went out near midnight, walking through various alleys and, I remember, into Cathedral Park on Dunsmuir. It had a canopy at the back end in those days, which made it a favoured spot for those sleeping out but an unnerving place to go for people like me. The square was dark and isolated-feeling. (The city later removed the canopy to discourage the campers.)
The thing about Judy was that she just wanted to know about these people. She wanted to know why they were there, how they were surviving, why they couldn’t get housing. She didn’t make assumptions. She asked questions.
Judy wasn’t the only person who alerted me to the increasing problems with homelessness. Many took up the torch. But she became a touchpoint for all kinds of people because of those middle-of-the-night walks. Frank Giustra went out with her twice. Gregor Robertson started going out on walks with her when he was still an MLA and has done others since then.
As Alice Sundberg says in my story, Judy made everyone think about “the homeless” as people, not just numbers or a social problem.
Another thing about Judy — she could do that because she started her little private research project at a time when reporters like me could call city staffers like her, people down the hierarchy but who were still allowed to speak to the media. She was always careful about what she had to say (as were almost all city staffers) but her ability to show people the reality of the issue did more than all the city manager reports in the world.
I personally regret her retirement from city hall not just because of what she did for homelessness, but because she represents a vanishing generation at the city — the knowledgeable mid-level staffer who is passionate about his or her special area of expertise, who has the detailed level of knowledge that those higher up the food chain just can’t have, and who is free to impart that to reporters in order to tell a better story about the city.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Roger Kemble // May 31, 2013 at 3:55 pm
“ But most of the stories about homelessness in local papers in the 1980s and early 1990s were about the problem in Toronto or the U.S. or the rest of the world.”
1980’s / 19990’s? Not to diminish your work with Ms. Graves, but wasn’t the late May Gutteridge active around that time, Frances, same people, same issues, working out of Christ Church basement or was it St. James?
2 Julia // May 31, 2013 at 9:59 pm
Judy will be missed. You might not always agree with her but you had to respect her candor and her passion. Frances, you are absolutely right about the changes at the hall and the loss that represents for all of us as citizens.
3 Silly Season // May 31, 2013 at 10:32 pm
Never mind the people with the masters and doctorates and agendas, Judy.
There’s enough stacks of reports and theories and rules and regs and talk and talk and talk to fill a stadium. People are not numbers and data sets to you.
It’s wonderful to know that in this cynical city, where we seem to get impatient easily and experience ‘compassion burnout’ frequently (and yes, that’s my hand up in the air) you never forgot that everyone you dealt with was an individual–and not just part of a faceless ‘cohort.’
All good things to you in retirement — though I hope it is really only semi-retirement.
4 waltyss // Jun 1, 2013 at 1:05 am
We don’t have that many true heroes in this city. She however is one and will certainly be missed.
I was very moved by her interview on the CBC (Rick Cluff) on Wednesday morning where she discussed her faith.
5 Michael Kluckner // Jun 1, 2013 at 9:00 am
In my recollection, homelessness began again in Vancouver during the 1982 recession and picked up speed with the SRO conversions as Expo approached. The food bank opened then, too. I distinctly remember doing a TV show called Between the Streets with Bob Spence on CKVU in 1982, and seeing a line of sleeping bags under the Dunsmuir viaduct when we were filming around the Beatty Street Armoury. On another shoot at Victory Square, there were a few campsites in the bushes (it was very overgrown). The ’80s were the beginning of Vancouver as we know it today.
6 Claudia // Jun 1, 2013 at 9:39 pm
May started it adn Judy added to her vision. Two great women who made a difference. Thanks to them both for their commitment to the underdogs of our city
7 Lewis N. Villegas // Jun 2, 2013 at 6:22 am
Great piece, but the gap about understanding the origins of homelessness is daunting.
Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, Maggie Thatcher in May 1979, Brian Mulroney in 1984. Sometime in that era the idea of “mainstreaming” mental health patients emerged and the hospitals were closed. Someone might provide a more accurate account who was working in mental health at the time. It flew under my radar.
I didn’t know it then. But as the homeless remained on the street and one provincial government after another did nothing about it—the division of powers has really been played to the maximum around this one—I began to ask questions, attend meetings, conferences and generally become more informed. Conclusions?
It’s not drugs. It’s not poverty. It’s all those things together, plus: head trauma, foster care, indigenous origin, and a few more. But in most cases, it is mental health first.
Today the consensus seems to be growing that we need to provide housing “with supports”. That it is not going to be cheap. Yet it is going to be cheaper than what we are doing today (emergency room care; provincial and federal incarceration).
Lest we forget… It is going to be much better for the people concerned. “Supports” just means “the way we are going to provide on-going mental health care to those who need it.” Homelessness is the sign, the symptom, the evidence that we are NOT getting the job done.
Neighbourhoods can be designed in every city that have social housing with supports where people live out their existence meaningfully, as part of a community, welcomed and cared for even when they are not capable of fully engaging. Mental health issues crop up in every demographic, so it will be possible to blend the social housing with the neighbourhood social mix.
Reports from the U.S. suggest that the optimum number of persons per house is not more than 7 with one full or part-time health service provider. The tower we’re building at Broadway & Fraser, or turning the Biltmore into social housing—these studies suggest—is doomed to failure.
As is the warehousing or ghetto approach of the DTES—put them in a place that is not really a place (a place set aside just “them”—no one else living there, so there are no stores, hang outs, parks, perks—all the attributes that make places neighbourhoods).
It is daunting that in a nation as wealthy as ours the social safety net should have failed for this long. It will be thirty years and maybe more before we make the connection that we don’t have a homelessness problem. We have a breach in the social contract around one issue.
The stigma that attaches to mental health is still so great that we rather turn our backs to it rather than face it.
8 tf // Jun 2, 2013 at 2:15 pm
To bring some historical context of the issue of displacement in the ’80s and it’s connection to current action today, see link – “The death of Olaf Solheim”
http://downtowneast.net/2013/04/22/solheim/
Is it any wonder that this fight over gentrification in the DTES is over 30 years old?
I also find it troubling that the media had a field day over a missing sandwich board but when a plaque installed by the community is stolen no one says a word.
9 Roger Kemble // Jun 2, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Mentally illness on the streets goes farther back than the ’80’s.
The NDP’s Norm Levi Minister of Human Resources closed Essondale, aka Riverview, in the early ’70’s.
He did so with every good intention. His policy was to provide half-way houses in the community.
At first there was one hell of a hullaballoo which soon quietened: most neighbours just didn’t know!
That was the Kits experience, anyway.
I don’t know the trajectory, escalating house prices I suppose, but eventually the half-way houses closed, government changed, and yes by the eighties all Essondale landed up in DTES.
By then one gets the distinct impression, for all the rhetoric, no one cares . . .
10 Michael Kluckner // Jun 3, 2013 at 8:37 am
I lived in Kits in the early 70s, like Roger, and remember the Riverview closing and the Mental Patients Association house on 6th. The government policy was to close Riverview and provide good community support, but only the former got done. It was the same with the ALR: save farmland and support farmers. The only thing that happened was the land freeze – the easy part.
11 Silly Season // Jun 3, 2013 at 11:40 pm
+1 @Michael Kluckner #10
12 lizzie // Jun 7, 2013 at 8:27 pm
When the mental hospitals closed, patients were released into communities with a network of support services – halfway houses, community clinics, outreach nurses, etc. But the funding for all those services gradually dried up under the “restraint” policies of Bill Bennett’s regime.