Winnipeg streets hold perils for those without homes
WINNIPEG, MB—The nights Kim doesn't make it into the line-up outside Siloam Mission early enough to score a bed he spends pacing up and down Portage Avenue.
It's too dangerous to sleep, he says.
Once, while warming up in a downtown transit shelter, he saw a young man pull an
eight-ball out of his sleeve and begin wrapping it in plastic to create a handle. Kim had been homeless for less than two months, but he recognized the crude street weapon.
"He said, 'I want all your stuff,'" Kim recalls. He just stared at the man and then walked out into the cold.
Another night two men attacked Kim, screamed at him, pushed him down and stole his ID.
"Night time is a danger; I know," he says.
Sitting on the steps outside City Hall, Kim wears his salt-and-pepper hair perfectly parted and his only clothes—shabby trousers and a sweater-vest over a collared shirt—with all the dignity he can muster. His only possessions are a satchel of English-language textbooks.
When the clothing factory where Kim was paid piecework to cut out jeans moved its labour to cheaper markets two months ago, Kim was laid off. Cutting out clothing is the only job he's done since he emigrated to Winnipeg from southeast Asia 10 years ago.
No job and "bad choices" with his money soon left Kim without a home. He says he's not on good terms with the few members of his family who live in Winnipeg. They don't know he's on the street, and he doesn't want his real name printed, for fear they'll find out.
During the day he takes classes to improve his English—in hopes it will help him land another job before the snow flies. The portion of his EI cheque that he doesn't spend on food, Kim says he is saving up to pay the damage deposit on an apartment.
"People who have no homes have no safety," says Karen Hoeft, assistant executive director of Salvation Army's Booth Centre, which provides temporary shelter for more than 250 Winnipeggers per night.
In September Booth Centre resident Tim Knudsen was beaten to death a stone's throw from the shelter's front entrance.
"Walking down the street here, there's hardly anyone who would be attacked who's not from the neighbourhood," says Hoeft. The danger is for those who literally live here. The worn patch of grass between the Booth Centre and Thunderbird House is populated by a lot of people who are "hopeless and have no safety," says Hoeft.
"People living on the street aren't stupid; otherwise they would be dead," she says.
"Violence [against] the poor is serious," says John Mohan, CEO of Siloam Mission. "People perceive that because people are poor they don't understand their rights and they certainly won't exercise their rights to be protected. It's a huge personal concern."
A higher a police presence would lower the likelihood of attacks, says Mohan. "I see [police officers] as protectors of the poor."
Twenty-one security cameras keep watch over Siloam Mission, both inside the building and out. Mohan says he'd like to hire "greeters" to increase security outside the building, but with Manitoba's labour shortage, Siloam is struggling to keep its current jobs filled.
But Hoeft calls more security personnel an expensive "Band-Aid solution," that won't get to the root of the problem.
"I don't think you can prevent violence," she says. Attacks like the one on Knudsen are spontaneous expressions of rage, by severely wounded people. "It comes back to us as a society: where does this rage come from?"
Her answer: "poverty, cultural genocide, lack of affordable housing."
Addressing Winnipeg's severe shortage of affordable housing would be part of a holistic solution, says Hoeft.
An estimated 2,000 people live on Winnipeg's streets with no home, but as many as 10,000 others may be part of the "hidden homeless" population, couch-surfing in crowded homes, says a recent study by the Institute of Urban Homelessness.
Harvey Rempel, community minister for Inner City Youth Alive, says he can easily think of five houses with 12 or more people living in them in his North End neighbourhood.
Winnipeg's vacancy rate for apartments is at one per cent; one-and-a-half per cent for rental houses.
"We need to build houses for people who make low incomes," says Hoeft. Her generation grew up in houses that were less than 1,000 square feet, she says, but no one builds houses that small anymore.
"We in the Church have chosen that lifestyle," she says. "I would challenge the Church that if we chose to live in smaller homes as a whole we would change the landscape of homelessness in Canada."
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