I cannot believe that $16,000 per year needs to be spent on each person served at Woodwynn Farms (“Woodwynn Farms breaks new ground,” Dec. 11).
For 40 years, I worked with a small agency that offered psychiatric rehabilitation services for persons with serious mental illness. Our projects were the first in Victoria to offer housing for persons with those challenges.
The program started in a small way, in partnership with the District of Saanich, which had bought three houses across from the Town and Country shopping centre and gave them to us for clients to live in free for a few years until the road was widened.
We then applied to a program for supported living in a 17-unit purpose-built apartment complex. To ensure support for people living alone for the first time in their lives, (average age 40), it took us nine years from the first planning meeting until the people were able to move in. It required the agreement and approval of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., two provincial ministries, the municipality and caregivers as we struggled with uncertain funding.
We went on to build another apartment block under federal-provincial funding. This time, it only took three years from initial planning to move-in.
We built two more apartment and townhouse buildings, with support, and the last was under a B.C. Housing program that ensured a mixed use of singles and families, various income levels and various levels of abilities. We also took over an existing seniors building and initiated a mixed-use policy.
But the most important work we did in housing did not include purpose-built accommodation. It was much less expensive than new construction or even purchase of an older building. It was prized much more by our tenants than any other housing option we could offer.
And it cost, as of 2006, when I retired, a total of $325 a month over and above the rental allowance paid by the tenant. It was supported rental housing in existing apartment blocks. Support services were an integral part of the program. Active support, as and when needed, spared the person and the system many person-months of in-hospital care.
We developed the program after listening to our clients.
We asked the people we were serving in our programs: “What do you want your future life to look like?” Throughout my career, I have asked a few hundred people that, both formally through research surveys and informally, person to person. Almost everyone said the same thing: I want a place of my own, walking distance to downtown where most of my activities are located, I want a relationship, I want a job and I want to choose what I do with my time.
What did these individuals say they didn’t want? They didn’t want to be scheduled, they didn’t want to have to share accommodation or amenities such as washrooms unless they chose to do that; they didn’t want to be in a ghetto, identified by their address as being a person with some kind of handicapping condition.
So the great advantage of the 130 individual units we had to offer, was that each person could exercise choice.
All of this cost about $4,000 per year as of my retirement, over and above the individual’s shelter allowance.
The tenants really appreciated the anonymity of being just another tenant in an ordinary apartment building. A stigma might be experienced by those housed in a building that can be identified as a “place where people with mental illness live.” At one time, that was the only choice. But now there is a range of choices. This is also a cheaper option for the government, as there is no capital cost. Administrative costs are also greatly reduced.
I was glad to see that part of the outcome of the planning around the tent-city alternatives was that subsidized rental was again being offered. Of course, it is important to note that the key to a successful support system is to have a range of options; there is no one size that fits all.
In any case, I cannot endorse any housing program that restricts people with special needs to living in an area not of their choosing, where the residence is viewed by passersby as a halfway house for troubled persons rather than an individual’s home, and where they are cut off from the services and the social life to which they are accustomed.
And $16,000 annually per person is for all these reasons, in my opinion, no bargain.
Gail Simpson, now retired, served as the executive director of the Capital Mental Health Association.
