A Montreal program is saving people from homelessness — with the help of a cash 'boost'
Rapid Entry to Housing has housed 344 people since mid-2021, at a cost of about $11K per person
A program run by a Montreal-based charity is trying to help Canadians avoid homelessness at an average cost of $11,000 per person. That's money well spent, according to Samuel Watts.
"What we're doing is we're trying to capture and accompany people before they end up in the depths of homelessness," said Watts, CEO of Welcome Hall Mission.
The program, called Rapid Entry to Housing, is focused on helping Montrealers who need what Watts called a cash "boost" to get them into a home and avoid homelessness.
"We've got people who walk alongside them for a couple of months, and then they're on their own," he told The Current's Matt Galloway.
The program was born mid-2021, after intervention workers noticed many people falling into homelessness since the beginning of the pandemic didn't fit the usual profile.
"[They're] somebody who's just struggling and a few dollars away from homelessness, unable to pay their rent, or they're part of maybe a classic rental eviction," he said.
"The other group is people who are relatively new arrivals to the city, who fall through the cracks of the refugee and asylum seeker programs that are here in Quebec."
Through funding from both the federal and provincial governments, Watts says they've been able to house 344 people since 2021 — with 84 per cent of them still thriving in housing.
The longer someone circulates in the ecosystem of homelessness … the worse off they become.-Samuel Watts, CEO of Welcome Hall Mission
"I think that points to the success of the program for a certain type of individual," he said.
"It doesn't answer the entire complex social challenge of homelessness, but it does address a particular dimension of it that's very important."
Preventing homelessness 'chronicity'
According to Statistics Canada, nearly 1.5 million Canadian households in 2021 lived in "core housing need," which they defined as living in an unsuitable, inadequate or unaffordable dwelling — and unable to afford housing in their community.
Watts says he wants to help people avoid falling into what he called the "chronicity" of homelessness.
"The longer someone circulates in the ecosystem of homelessness … the worse off they become and the harder than it becomes to help them back into housing," he said.
"This becomes the new normal for them, and they see going back into housing as a bit of a risk." he said. "So that's where we need to come in and walk alongside people and show them that we can actually help them."
Amanda Buchnea, the strategy, policy and innovation specialist at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, says the Rapid Entry to Housing program does a great job addressing a "particular need to support people when they're just at that point of crisis."
"Unfortunately, so many of our supports really don't kick in until people are getting quite sick and have been on the streets for quite a long time," she told Galloway.
Buchnea says most responses to homelessness have more in common with "emergency intervention" rather than prevention.
"So providing shelter, food supports, some of these programs that provide some rental assistance," she said.
"But we need to be looking further upstream. It's not something that comes out of the blue."
Everyone's jurisdiction
Watts says the charity has developed relationships with about 190 small to medium-sized landlords over the last decade who "understand what we do … and they know that eventually, the rent is going to be paid."
One such landlord is Feriel Manai, who has housed three people through Welcome Hall Mission's program.
"You always have to give people a chance. We can't judge people," she told The Current.
"Everyone goes through difficult times. Times where we arrive in a country where we know no one. Every one of us could lose our job or have personal difficulties. So do good to have good."
When someone the program works with has a meeting for a potential new apartment, they're accompanied by someone from the Welcome Hall Mission. The arrangement is "usually well-received," said Watts.
"A landlord is going to want to rent to somebody that they're relatively confident will pay the rent," he said. "That's where organizations like ours [come in]. We've been around since 1892. We're well known in the city."
Buchnea says all of the tools to tackle homelessness are available — it's just a matter of bringing every level of government together to work on it.
"It's nobody's particular jurisdiction, and yet everybody needs a place to live," she said.
"When we all bring those resources together and instead of just kind of like working in like little pockets to do these really incredible things and knitting it all together into an actual safety net for folks that responds to them wherever they're at … I think that we really could make a difference."
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