As London's homeless problem grows, so do attempts to find solutions

Almost a hundred people representing London's churches, charities, shelters, soup kitchens and aid agencies met Wednesday in downtown London to come up with novel ways to help solve the city's expanding homeless crisis. 

The crisis comes amid rising real estate prices, a broadening gap between rich and poor and an almost constant presence of people who are drug addicted or mentally ill in the city's downtown. People who seem trapped in a marginal existence in spite of the millions spent trying to save them. 

"It's bad," said Debbie Kramers, the city's manager in charge of responding to the problem. "We're in a crisis." 

People beg on medians or sidewalks, their tents appear in parking lots, on boulevards and woodlots. They sleep in alleyways, sprawled in front of storefronts or on top of billowing steam pipes, sometimes with nothing but a blanket or a piece of cardboard to keep them warm. 

"We have hundreds of unsheltered people within our city community that are currently looking for housing and just don't have it." 

'Folks are staying longer in our shelter'

"We're not doing enough for our vulnerable population," she said. "We need a community response." 

It's why the City of London's Homelessness Prevention office called the meeting, to gather together as many minds as it could in the hope that together they might come up with easy and cheap ideas to ease the suffering of so many people who can't afford a place to live. 

Shelley Yeo, who works as the assistant executive director of Anova, a London shelter that provides safe space and shelter for abused women and their children, said she's seeing the effects of the housing crisis every day. 

"Folks are staying longer in our shelter, so maybe months instead of weeks, which means that bottlenecks the whole system," she said.

"Women who really need to get in, women who are in need of safety are not able to get into a safe secure shelter because the women who are there and their families are not able to move on. There isn't enough housing that they can afford to live in." 

Yeo said the discussion, which touched on food security, how to store and distribute donations and community inclusion yielded some good ideas. 

"I'm hopeful," she said. "We're actually talking about some concrete solutions and things that our community can do together. Things we can collaboratively rather than competing for them." 

'My brother was homeless'

While most of the people in the room made their living helping the homeless, a few didn't. For Teri McLaughlin, the meeting was more personal than business. 

"My brother was homeless," she said. "We grew up poor in this city and thankfully we had a wonderful mother who kept it off the street until a certain age." 

He got hooked on drugs and became homeless. Eventually he got back on his feet again, started a family and his how business but McLaughlin said event today he battles his past demon of addiction. 

"He still fights it every day," she said. 

As an outsider, she doesn't understand why everyone else in the room seems to think the problem is so difficult to overcome. 

"The donations are there," she said. "Food is being thrown away instead of being given to people to eat." 

"We have the resources. So we need to stop saying we don't have the resources. We need to coordinate." 

Some of the ideas discussed included creating more food forests, partnering with storage companies to keep donated furniture and clothing free of vermin, and creating a central agency that distributes meals made by homeless people to the city's homeless population.

While they're all good ideas the whole point of the meeting was to build teamwork between the city's relief organizations, according to the woman in charge of responding to London's homeless situation.

Debbie Kramers said when those who help the city's most vulnerable talk to each other, they can break down walls and foster better cooperation. 

"The biggest thing so far that has come through is communication," she said. "Each of the community groups, associations, parishes, foundations don't know about each other, so I think the biggest link we'll get out of today is an increase in communications and what each of those silos do."