ARE WE REANIMATING THE ‘SOCIALLY DEAD’ IN BRAMPTON?
Tags: Brampton, Healthcare Crisis, Homeless, Urban Life, Housing Crisis

A primer to thinking about the people living without a home in your city.

Note: This was written in part of a project to analyse the spread of COVID-19 in Brampton. Seeing our community being blamed for the spread of COVID-19 when Brampton is chronically unserved, underrepresented, and underfunded was hurtful and we decided to do something about it. We came together to produce eight different accounts of what must be improved in Brampton for all communities to live equitably — and this is my contribution. (I will provide link to the full publication when it comes available because everyone else’s is awesome!)

INTRODUCTION

The healthcare crisis in Brampton compounded with COVID-19 places residents in great need of diversified community care to ensure each person is able to adapt and survive. Prior to the pandemic, Brampton has been facing an onslaught of complex existential threats requiring multi-faceted solutions based on the understanding of individual, community and regional experiences. People who have little to no value are not seen as a priority and are otherwise known as the ‘social dead’ (Cacho, 2012). This primer is a step into challenging how we value people in capitalistic measures of worth.

Not every person who lives in Brampton has a home to safely rest and live in. On April 24, 2018, 922 people were recorded to be experiencing homelessness in the Region of Peel (Caledon, Brampton, Mississauga). (Peel, 2019)

Is our city built to expect people to not have a home?

It is likely more than 922 people are living without a home in Peel in November 2020 and are in an ever-increasingly precarious situation. This is based on the combination of the impacts of the pandemic exacerbating the issues of unaffordable housing, unemployment, and lack of healthcare support (Brown, 2020). In the past year, Peel has seen nearly 2,000 new listed households waiting for affordable housing units compared to 13,000 already waiting since 2019. This shows a greater demand for affordable housing which is already in short supply. In March 2020, unemployment rates for youth and adults doubled, showing that people would have greater difficulty in paying for their basic needs, let alone a home. Brampton declared a healthcare emergency in January 2020, pre-COVID, recognising that there is a lack of support for health and social services (Singh, 2020). Without access to adequate health care, how are people expected to sustain a working lifestyle?

Homelessness is the result of an accumulation of structural and systemic failures shaping individual circumstances. Pathways into and out of homelessness are neither linear nor uniform (The Homeless Hub, 2013).

Nevertheless, experiencing either chronic (people living in homelessness for a year or more) and episodic homelessness (people living in and out of homelessness) leaves one extremely vulnerable (The Homeless Hub, 2014).

While there is no single cause for homelessness, out of the five suggested solution-focuses: more affordable housing, community support, funding, home search assistance and employment, the majority of respondents to The Homeless Hub’s Point in Time Count survey selected that the existence of more affordable housing would help them have a home (Peel & PAEH, 2019).

Do we need more affordable housing units or do we need housing to be affordable?

AFFORDABLE HOUSING CRISIS

The Region of Peel offers 7,100 affordable units to households. But as of this past June, 14,997 households are on the wait-list for subsidised units. Last year, the list was just over 13,000 households and the average wait time is an astonishing 6–7 years. People look to shelters for alternatives, but Brampton has an accounted 261 beds across 6 shelters; 3 of which only houses males, 1 for youth, 1 for any household, and 1 for women with only 4 beds. In January, there was some confirmed planning for opening a shelter for women by Brampton city councillor Martin Medeiros but there have been no further updates (Ricci, 2020). With these abysmal numbers of high demand but low supply, how is the city currently serving all of its constituents?

Peel Region’s response to social-distancing was the mobilisation of programs to ensure people experiencing homelessness are able to self-isolate and recover while preventing the spread of COVID-19. Beginning in March, Dr. Naheed Dosani, Medical Director of the COVID-19 Homeless Response for the Region of Peel, made a team of medical, health and social service experts, to move people living outdoors and overcrowded shelters into hotels and other temporary commercial sites across the three cities (Peel, 2020). They provided screening, testing and transportation for people suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19 (Peel 2020). If tested positive for COVID-19, the team places the individual into their isolation and recovery program where the patient would be separated in temporary accommodation for Peel Paramedics daily monitoring, and Salvation Army supporting them with plans for long-term accommodations.

About 11,887 households are known to be receiving a housing subsidy while living outside of transitional housing (Brown, 2020). There were plans to increase the supply of affordable housing, but the Region of Peel failed to follow through and has effectively abandoned their 2018–2028 Home for All Strategy in constructing 7,500 affordable units annually over the 10 years. The region’s current funding strategy allows for only 2,240 new affordable housing units by 2028. It’s ridiculously far from the original goal despite already invested $700 million from the original plan over the last two years with the additional $276 million as of August (Peel, 2020) and another $9.7 million was announced earlier this month to be disbursed to help social services support our vulnerable population (Marychuk, 2020).

Which will cost the city more: investing in zero poverty now, later or never?

As the region continues to mobilise the stop-gap solution to people living experiencing homelessness and COVID-19, they assess each case based on need, allowing the Region of Peel to administer housing allowances proportionately and not by application date (Peel, 2020).

Who benefits from the displacement of homeless people?

ACCESSIBILITY & HEALTHCARE CRISIS

Ted Brown, CEO of Regeneration Outreach Community in Brampton, underlined that while hotels were able to house 51% of Peel region’s emergency shelter seekers, it could displace the person from accessing mental health and community support they had prior to moving into a hotel, thus forcing them to weigh their need for shelter against need for social connection and current or potential job location (Brown, 2020).

Figure 1 (rendered by Purvangi Patel)

Map of Supports in Brampton for people living in homelessness & Total Incidence of COVID-19 Cases in Brampton

Brampton is a city that requires vehicles to get around. Most of these support services are situated in the downtown core along Highway 410 and Queen St. East. While homelessness is typically more visible to the public, suburban and rural homelessness is often hidden but very much exists (Taylor, 2018). This misconception can make it harder to secure funding and development.

For a homeless youth working a minimum or student wage in Brampton, they are earning $13.40 per hour compared to the general minimum hourly wage of $14.25 across Ontario. It would be practically impossible for someone earning minimum wage to rent an apartment in Brampton’s outskirts or downtown. They would need to work 90–100 hours a week to cover the $1,260 monthly rent. To secure a liveable wage, who are homeless people competing for jobs with?

When nation-wide preventative measures took place, work-from-home transitions, temporary and permanent layoffs forced average unemployment rates in Peel to double. Closures preventing access to our already limited digital access to computers, Internet and other tools to develop and market oneself pose a hurdle to securing an income. While there is a steady decline of the unemployment rate, the people who have access to digital tools can transition into an online workspace more easily than those who do not, leaving behind the people without the chance to adapt and forcing them to fill jobs that would put them at greater health risk.

For those without a home and relocated temporarily in a hotel without an income to take transit to acquire their usual services at soup kitchens or mutual aid centres, this isolation would deny a key component in attaining job stability, mental health and social connection (Brown, 2020).

OUR SOCIAL DEAD

Entangled in a nexus of stigma, vulnerability, isolation, denied humanity, discrimination and exclusion based on one’s housing status are reflected in general interactions with the public, city legislation, law enforcement and the health care system (IGH, 2017). It spawns fear and makes asking for help within and outside one’s networks even harder because it furthers the risk of harassment, negative subjection and marginalisation for a population trying to meet the basic human needs of food, clothing, and shelter.

Who are your community supports?

In neoliberal ways of knowing, the value of life is subjected to economic analysis and assessment of one’s contributions, accomplishments, or investments to their economy and society (Cacho, 2012). It’s the question of “Are they worth the resources?”

Our councillors have not pushed for more funding for support despite having known and hearing the concerns consistently since at least 2018. Based on the 2020 budget passed in January, there was no proposal for any major investment in new housing projects. The only requests to support people living in homelessness were on increasing anti-human trafficking work and maintenance of current service levels; a total of $2 million, which is 0.05% of the total budget (VanOfwegen, 2019). Since COVID-19, our region has taken a concrete step by purchasing a building in Mississauga intending to convert it into a shelter space and opening additional proposed social services throughout the region.

But what is troubling is that this session of acquisition and planning was closed and it is unclear why it was not a public conversation (Wittnebel, 2020). Are the impacted communities part of the development and design of our multi-faceted solutions?

The current response of providing temporary housing and healthcare with the intention to secure permanent affordable housing seems like a plan to reanimate our socially dead and reintegrate them into our capitalist society. But as these efforts contradict social connection and mental support, we are reanimating our socially dead into a space of social limbo because we have yet to change the way people understand homelessness and the idea of measuring a person’s life value. If we begin to conscientiously work against the logic of survivability, perhaps we might find ways to fully revitalise our community (Cacho, 2012).

“Rather than ‘breathe life’ into the spaces of social death (gentrification, privatization, and democratization), we might conscientiously work against the logic of survivability.” — Lisa Marie Cacho (2012)

REFERENCES

Brown, T. (2020, November 13). COVID-19 & Its Effects on the Homeless. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Cacho. L. M. (2012). Introduction: The Violence of Value. In Social death: racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected (pp. 32–33). introduction, New York University Press.

The Homeless Hub. (2014). Addressing Chronic Homelessness. The Homeless Hub. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

The Homeless Hub. (2013). Causes Of Homelessness. The Homeless Hub. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Institute of Global Homelessness. (2017). Stigma & Social Isolation. Institute of Global Homelessness Hub. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Marychuk, M. (2020, November 4). Province gives Peel $9.7 million to help vulnerable people in Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga. Caledon Enterprise. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel. (2020, July 10). The Region of Peel’s COVID-19 Homeless Report; The Region of Peel. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel. (2020, May 7). Peel’s COVID-19 response helping to flatten the curve of spread in homeless shelters. Region of Peel. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel. Peel Living Tenants. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel. (2020, August 7). Region of Peel receives over $276 million in federal funding to support Affordable Housing Master Plan. Region of Peel. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel. Unemployment Rate. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Region of Peel & Peel Alliance to End Homelessness. (2019, March). Everyone Counts Peel. Region of Peel; The Homeless Hub. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Ricci, T. (2020, January 25). 3 Women living on the street explain why Brampton needs a women’s shelter. CBC News. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Singh, H. (2020, January 22). Brampton City Council declares a Health Care Emergency. City of Brampton. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Taylor, M. (2018, July 26). How is Rural Homelessness Different from Urban Homelessness? The Homeless Hub. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

VanOfwegen, S. (2019, November 7). 2020 Budget; The Region of Peel. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.

Wittnebel, J. (2020, September 29). Brampton’s downtown is being overwhelmed by homelessness and drug use; Region promises help. The Pointer. Retrieved on December 1, 2020.