Shelter and the Street: Housing, Homelessness, and Social Assistance in the Canadian Provinces

1. Shelter and the Street: Housing, Homelessness, and Social Assistance in the Canadian Provinces Michael J. Prince Presentation to “Welfare Reform in Canada: Provincial Social Assistance in Comparative Perspective” Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy University of Regina & University of Saskatchewan October 25, 2013

2. Housing arrangements of social assistance recipients • Homeowners • Private market renters • Social housing (rent-geared-to-income) • Rooming house boarders • Emergency shelters and hostels for transients • Transition houses and violence against women shelters for abused women and their children • Family shelters • Youth centres • Residential centres (often for people with disabilities) • Provisional shelters (hospitals, jails, detox centres) • Unsheltered and absolutely homeless: sleeping in parks, alleyways, cars, dumpsters, on heating grates, in stairwells, under bridges or on the streets

3. Housing-related and place-based elements in social assistance • Shelter allowance component in the basic financial benefit, adjusted by family and community size, with a ceiling • Reduction of benefits linked to household living arrangements (living with parents or sharing accommodation with others) • Special assistance measures for household activities (e.g. Maintenance, repairs) • Fuel supplements for heat and or utilities • Remote and northern area supplements for higher costs of living

4. Recent policy trends in social assistance for housing • Nominal maintenance of shelter allowance rates in many provinces over past decade or more: means a real decline in purchasing power of benefits for housing, and a growing gap between shelter assistance and actual housing costs • Increases to particular housing-related elements of social assistance since the early to mid-2000s: examples ON in 2005, and PEI and SK in 2009, usually the first increase in several years and of a modest amount • Introduction of new housing-related benefits in social assistance: MB in 2006 new shelter benefits for SA clients in private rental accommodation and for those in room and board lodgings

5. Homelessness • Individuals or families without stable, permanent, appropriate housing – an estimated 200,000 Canadians in a given year • Pathways into and out of homelessness are multiple and diverse • The result of lack of affordable and appropriate housing, the individual/household’s financial, circumstances, family violence (typically male), mental, cognitive, behavioural or physical challenges, cuts in income programs and social housing programs • For most homeless people it is transitional or episodic although for some it is a chronic and long-term situation • A politics of poverty, stigma, exclusion, stress (like social assistance politics more generally) • Also a politics of the regulation of public spaces and the criminalization and penalization of poor people by state authorities

6. Social assistance in the lives of people on the streetsand in shelters • Some people on the streets and in shelters do receive social assistance, and for some it is an important source of income • For other homeless people, SA is a minor resource compared to money raised from other sources such as selling clothes and personal belongings, dealing drugs, shoplifting, breaking and entering, squeegeeing, asking for help from friends or family members, working in the labour force • Social assistance occurs in a context of market forces and failures and economic setbacks, public policy actions and inactions, private troubles • In this context, the question of undue dependency on the welfare state fades into insignificance

7. Conclusions • Social assistance has a dual relationship to housing and homelessness: • As public provision – financial support to people in significant need and perhaps under threat of violence; money to provide some modicum of the basic necessities of living in shelter and related housing expenses such as heat • As part of the problem – with challenging documentation requirements for some homeless people; benefit reduction and claw-back conditions; real decline in shelter support while housing costs rise • Research gaps are large on this issue • Main policy levers for tackling housing and homelessness lie beyond the limited capacity of social assistance