I had a coffee in one hand and a fresh baked cookie in the other when a homeless friend stuffed a folded sheet of paper in my shirt pocket with a cryptic comment about retirement homes.

Emptying my pockets later at my habitation I found and unfolded the sheet, which turned out to be a page of ready-to-assemble wood storage and recreational building kits from a home improvement store.

Some were pretty spiffy looking and given the cost of housing these days, extremely attractive in price. Which may well explain the warning “before finalizing your purchase, always check with your local building code official for any requirements”.

With my friend currently residing in a tent under a bridge, I can certainly understand the buildings attraction for him. Spacious 8 X 10 foot floor space – with a floor yet – space to stand up, luxurious accommodation compared to his tent.

He raises an interesting point, or is that an interesting idea, to ponder.

We have hundreds of homeless currently on the streets of our cities, with more people becoming homeless as time passes. We have no housing, make that no housing affordable to the homeless and creating the needed affordable housing will take years once (or if?) we ever begin to address the growing need for housing people can afford.

We have decommissioned schools surrounded by open playing fields. What about putting up a community, a “subdivision” as it were, of ready-to-assemble kit buildings? The school building would provide washrooms, bathing facilities and lockers for safe storage of belongings.

The classrooms and offices would provide space that could be used for a wide variety of purposes by a wide variety of organizations and government agencies.

I acknowledge there would be problems, but I point out that our current situation is full of a growing number of problems.

It is an interesting idea, hearkening back to the soup lines and shanty towns that sprung up in city parks in the Great Depression.

I know many will not find this an interesting idea or think it has any value or should be considered. They can easily remove it from consideration by advancing good, practical, workable ideas.

Without practical, workable ideas we are going to fall back to soup lines and shanty towns in our parks and open spaces even though one would have thought we would have come up with better ideas and ways of addressing poverty and housing in the seventy years since then.

Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

Published: Saturday, August 02, 2008

Home for Ed Chase is a patch of grass near the corner of 96th Avenue and 160th Street in Surrey.

He and his dog, Daryl, who is old and whose hind end is paralyzed, sleep there and spend their days there out in the open, or under a big, gaudy beach umbrella when it rains. It is a busy intersection, cornered by a high school, a Chevron station, a Husky station, and the Parkland Fellowship church, which owns the patch of grass Ed has homesteaded.

Ed and his dog, and the wagon Ed pulls Daryl around in, and Ed’s tarp, and Ed’s few belongings, are all visible to the passing traffic.

In both a physical and moral sense, Ed’s patch of grass has become a battleground. At the centre of that battle is Ed. On either side of him are arrayed two opposing sides: those who do not mind his presence and want to help him, and those who want him gone. Here, compassion clashes against the need for civic order, which is a fight played out a thousand times a day over the homeless.

But this isn’t the Downtown Eastside with its hordes of street people; this is a middle-class neighbourhood in the farthest reaches of Surrey, and Ed is an anomaly here. He stands out in stark relief to the suburban landscape, and his presence, and the polarizing effects it has had on the neighbourhood, are being played out with all the elements of some New Testament parable.

Ed is 47. He was born in Saskatchewan. He’s drifted around – Toronto, the Yukon, the Prairies – and he first came to B.C. when he was 19. He’s worked in construction and odd jobs.

“I’m a lifetime loser,” Ed said. “A jack of all trades and a master of none.”

He fell into homelessness five years ago. He told a disconnected story about being evicted for late rent, and then losing his van to ICBC, and then, more recently, having his car towed away. He slept in nearby Tynehead Park for 2 1/2 years, and when his gear was confiscated, he slept on picnic tables.

The authorities asked him if he wanted to go into a shelter.

“They wanted to put me in a shelter but I don’t want to live with anyone else. And I had my dogs.”

(He had two dogs at the time, Daryl and Ray. More about Ray in a moment.)

When he was rousted again, one of the neighbours in the area approached Brian Stewart, the pastor at Parkland Fellowship, and asked if Ed could park his car in the church’s parking lot. Stewart said yes, and Ed started sleeping in his car on the church property last November. The church, Stewart said, offered to help Ed find a place and even help him financially. But again, Ed, like many homeless, was resistant to that. In May, the police and bylaw people visited the church and told Stewart Ed’s sleeping in the car was illegal. At the same time, Stewart said, the church had concerns about Ed and his dog’s presence in the parking lot because of his proximity to the church’s daycare. Ed moved his gear out to the church’s boulevard.

The church, however, did not force Ed to leave the property entirely. They were Christian. They were not about to turn their backs on the social leper.

“As a church,” Stewart said, “we want to be redemptive in this community.”

For the first few weeks, Ed’s presence on the boulevard was uneventful. But he wore out his welcome at both gas stations, which have now banned him from their properties. In the meantime, Ed said, the city and police conducted what he considered a campaign of harassment against him, repeatedly confiscating his tents and belongings.

It reached a crisis point on June 28. Ed got into a fight with a customer at the Chevron station. Ed – who is convinced the provincial government has exacerbated the homeless situation with its policies – was holding up an anti-government sign in a one-man demonstration, something he does often. Words were exchanged. In Ed’s telling of the story, the customer grabbed him and started punching him. A second man tried to break up the scuffle, only to be punched in the mouth by the man fighting with Ed. It was then that Ed’s dog, Ray, whom Ed had on a leash, bit the man fighting with Ed on the leg. (The second man would later say the dog was only trying to protect Ed.)

The SPCA later seized the dog, and there is the possibility the dog could be put down or re-adopted. The City of Surrey has also informed Ed he must pay a $5,000 fine to get Ray released. Meanwhile, Ray’s fate, and Ed’s ownership, has now become a cause célèbre among animal rights activists. A Facebook website has more than 500 people demanding Ray’s release.

All this has split the community. While the manager of the Chevron station was quoted in an earlier Surrey Now story as calling Ed “a pain in the ass” who has harassed customers and abused his earlier kindnesses like free coffee and sandwiches, and who wants him gone, two employees at the Chevron station, Cynthia Soady and Cindy Oakson, both said they liked Ed and felt he poses no threat.

“I like him,” Oakson said. “But I think being on the street, and fighting for his cause, is really wearing him down. I think a lot of people are against him because he isn’t working (Ed collects welfare), but I don’t think he’s capable of working. I do think we do tend to over-enable him a little bit, but I have a belief system that believes in compassion.”

Oakson said she believed most of the neighbourhood felt the same compassion she does. And Stewart, at Park Fellowship, can attest to evidence of that compassion: many people, he said, have offered their help to Ed, offering him food and supplies. One neighbour even offered his backyard for Ed to sleep in. But Stewart has got plenty of calls, too, he said, from those who want Ed gone, and blame the church for allowing him to stay.

“We’re caught in the middle,” Stewart said. “But we believe, with God’s help, there is a solution here. And if we kick Ed off the property, so what? That doesn’t solve the problem.”

As for Ed, he said all that was important to him was getting Ray back.

“If I get Ray back, I’d leave.”

He didn’t say where, exactly.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com or 604-605-2905

Fate put a copy of the June 23, 2008 Province, containing Joey Thompson’s column on drug court into my hands. Reading that column and the prior June 20 column she wrote on Vancouver police chief Chu’s comments on sentencing says much about why we have such an a abysmal record when it comes to helping addicts into successful recovery behaviour.

From the June 20 column: “…to ensure the crap doesn’t kill them in the short term, even though we all know it still will in the long term.”

I would predict that any program born under or from this kind of attitude will fail to provide effective help in helping addicts into recovery, but will succeed in proving those with this attitude correct by letting their addiction “kill them”.

Let us move forward to the June 23 column.

“After about a year of court appearances and treatment by a specialized recovery team, offenders are expected to have conquered their addiction and found stable housing and a job, or relative training.”

I do not know exactly what the specialized team specialized in, but having known several people who were involved in drug court I can say that whatever it was the team specialized in, it was not recovery. In fact, based on what I saw and learned of the program and feedback from participants in the program, you would be hard pressed to deliberately design a program more guaranteed to ensure the failure and relapse of participants. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to them as victims rather than participants.

Given the program associated with the drug court it is not surprising that few choose to join the program, that so few complete the program and that among those who complete the program so many relapse.

“Send them off to jail, and make sure facilities offer them plenty of treatment and recovery options.”

The important unasked and unaddressed point is what these treatment and recovery options will look like. Should they be designed by the same “experts” who designed the drug court program or the majority of our current crop of treatment programs we will get our usual abysmal failure rates.

No rational, semi-intelligent person with experience with addicts and addiction would ever entertain the idea that “After about a year … offenders are expected to have conquered their addiction”.

If that is the basis of your program you are going to fail those in the program, leaving them in or sending them back to their addiction. And “Program enthusiasts (who) said they were pleased with the results, given the tough demands placed on addicts to clean up, find a job and a place to live” are badly in need of a reality check. Working with a bad or unrealistic program is self defeating since the outcomes are not going to improve in any significant manner.

You might just as well put them on probation requiring participants to go to treatment and complete the treatment program. You will end up with about the same number of positive outcomes and you can invest the funds you do not waste on an ineffective program in developing effective programs and community based support systems.

Current research and knowledge, best practices and successful recovery programs all exist. We can, if we choose to, design community based programs and support systems that achieve high success rates.

But we have to set success as our goal, design the systems to achieve that goal based on knowledge not “that’s how it is done” and to refuse to be pleased with results that do not achieve our goals.

It will not be easy or neat and tidy, but it is achievable.

There is a woman who volunteers on Wednesday evenings to help prepare, serve and clean up after the meal for the homeless and other hungry citizens of Abbotsford.

Last week she was not at her best because she had just lost her home to fire. But this week she was back helping with dinner although she is now living in her car.

She is living in her car because, like far to many others, she has a very limited budget which sets severe limits on what she has to spend for rent and has been unable to find any place within her budget.

Governments can come up with whatever plans they want to help people find housing, people can utter whatever platitudes they want about “they’re homeless because they want to be” but the reality of homelessness for many is that there simply is no places available at a price they can afford.

And while that is a reality that politicians and the public need to recognize it is not the reason I sat down to share this story.

I am writing it because the homeless have expressed to me their belief, their concern that it is not healthy (in a variety of ways) for this woman to be living in her car and their anger that nobody in the Christian community of which she is a part is stepping forward to find or offer her a place to stay, even temporarily.

I leave it to you to ponder what it says about Abbotsford as a community that it is the homeless who are upset about the fact this disabled, not young woman is forced to live in her car while the rest of the community seemingly ignores her plight.