Editor

This is my first time in my 40 years I have been compelled to write a newspaper. I have been dealing with my mental health issues and for the last three years have received help and support from an organization which has supported and helped many other in our community.

 I have been reading both the Times and News for a few years watching for recognition of this organizations contributions to the community of Abbotsford. 

From personal experience I know this organization is client centered, providing not just services but a fellowship and belonging which next to shelter and basic needs is necessary for Self-esteem and Self-worth. 

To a certain degree this not receiving recognition is a fault of the organizations priorities. Employing a PR person to arrange for newspaper stories and recognition of their numerous contributions to the community and the people they serve is simply not a priority for this organization as it has better uses for its money and time.

Apparently my view of what newspapers are supposed to be about is skewed. I have always assumed that publishers, editors and reporters where aware of and in touch with what was going on in their communities and what organizations were contributing to the welfare of citizens within their communities. I thought local newspapers would inform the community at large about these organizations services and contributions to the health of the community. 

Instead it seems that our local papers simply rely on and write about what an organizations PR shill chooses to submit to them.

Leaving an organization which provides amazing long term successful mental health recovery services and programs in our community not getting the recognition they deserve from our local media.

 I agree with James W Breckenridge’s article about the fact that if you add up all the claims of people housed by organizations in Abbotsford we should have a negative number of homeless on our streets. 

A number of organizations are pumping out turnstile numbers to access funds and grants, taking funds away from organizations that actually provide people with the fellowship, belonging and long term support that is necessary for recovery. Because if an organization is not providing the services to be successful long term they have a turnstile endlessly counting the same services and people over and over. 

I count today; tomorrow when you come back I will count that as 2: when next day comes that will be 3; and so on and son on. 

Same with housing, Wondering why they are able to help so many, yet the numbers on the street haven’t changed. What are the successes based on? Even if an individual is able to find housing for a month, but has no other fellowship or sense of belonging to anything else besides the street they will simply find there way back where? To the street, Why? We fed them gave them shelter all the necessities right. Why did this person throw all that away? I will explain this and its simple you can give a person all that you feel they need but if there fellowship and belonging has not changed they will return to the one they had.  

A successful count should be only be long term only has meaning in the long term. Having a person housed for 12 months with a newly developed sense of fellowship and belonging in the community should be a bare minimum consideration for being able to say they have a success.

There needs to be some kind of accountability when these organizations say they have helped xyz number of persons in need. 

 I am not saying that these organizations are not in need, they very much are. I would just like them to be honest and upfront - if you simply fed or shelter someone then say we successfully served xyz with a meal and shelter for xyz number of days. But do not say that this is recovery or rehabilitation because it is simply not true. 

I believe, based on my personal experience, that any organization that does not develop a peer system or fellowship with the persons they serve will fail. Whether it is addictions, mental health, or homelessness they will fail.  

Somewhere some basic psychology has been lost. One of the first things you encounter in psychology, that has been around forever is Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to self actualization. 

Most successful organizations in the recovery field have a peer support system; examples of this are AA sponsors, MH Peer Support Workers, Mentors. For some reason the most inexpensive and successful treatment of persons in need has been lost, replaced by politicized, expense formulated costly services that have complicated matters and left out the basic need for fellowship. 

Fellowship provides belonging, when we are validated and accepted only then do people have a sense of self-esteem or worth. Organizations need to heed this approach to be successful. 

Newspapers need to stop taking the easy way out, start paying attention to what is happening in the community and informing the public what the actual situation is. Only in this manner can the public make informed judgments and decisions about these pressing social problems.  

Ray Patrick

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

Homelessness in Metro Vancouver up 20 per cent since 2005

Frances Bula and Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

METRO VANCOUVER - Homelessness continues to increase across Metro Vancouver, especially in the suburbs, according to preliminary numbers from the latest homeless count announced today.

There are now close to 2,600 people in shelters and on the streets any given night in this region, almost a 20-per-cent increase from the last count done in 2005.

But the numbers didn't go up as much as people thought they would and it's far less than the increase between 2002 and 2005, when numbers almost doubled, said Alice Sundberg, co-chairwoman of the Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness, which directed the count.

That is giving people such as Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts some hope that increased services and aggressive efforts to reach out to the homeless are beginning to slow the flow a little.

Surrey's counts indicated that 386 people were either in shelters or, predominantly, sleeping outside on the night of March 11, when the count was done. On one hand, that's grim news. On the other, the number of street homelessness is up only 15 per cent from 2005.

"We have the lowest increase in the region," Watts said. "I think that's because we've made a really concentrated effort with outreach. We've housed almost 300 people in the past two, 21/2 years, and put them into permanent housing."

So although the tap of homelessness is still turned on, the drain seems to be working better.

The early counts show that suburbs such as Burnaby, the Coquitlam region, and the Langleys showed the sharpest jumps in homelessness. At the same time, they had the fewest shelter beds proportionally to accommodate them, so that the majority of their homeless were out on the street.

Langley city Mayor Peter Fassbender said that picture will be drastically different in three years. A new centre that combines 30 shelter beds with 25 transitional housing units, along with a "feeding centre" and space for counselling and training, is due to open in June next to the Kwantlen University College campus. That centre, jointly financed by the city, township, Salvation Army, province and federal government, is Langley's acknowledgement that it must help.

"It's a big step. We have come to the place of saying we have to be part of the solution," Fassbender said.

In Coquitlam, Mayor Maxine Wilson said the area's three municipalities are looking for a location to put a permanent shelter. Coquitlam is also working with the YWCA on another project to build supported housing for women and children.

But Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan said he thinks it's reprehensible that municipalities are constantly made to feel that it's their job to solve homelessness, when it's the provincial government that cut housing programs and tightened up access to welfare.

His city is focusing on long-term housing solutions, building on a foundation of the second-highest number of social-housing units of any other part of the region. (Only Vancouver has more.)

The homeless-count statistics prompted responses from both Downtown Eastside advocates and Housing Minister Rich Coleman about what they meant and what the trends for the future are.

A coalition of advocacy groups held a press conference outside an up-for-sale rooming house downtown to highlight the ongoing problems of evictions and speculation in the Downtown Eastside, which they say are accelerating homelessness. And they accused the provincial government and city of doing little to address the problem.

But Coleman said he was actually relieved by the numbers.

"People were predicting it would be double or triple [the 2005 numbers]. The way I look at it now, we have 2,500 homeless and what have I got in the pipeline? Do I have 2,500 units coming? The answer would be yes."

But even Coleman cautioned that doesn't mean the problem is solved, because there are always more people becoming homeless.

That's something that certainly proved true in Vancouver where, in spite of Mayor Sam Sullivan's commitment to reduce homelessness by 50 per cent in time for the 2010 Olympics, the number of street homeless actually increased by 32 per cent, so that there are now almost exactly the same number of people on the street (about 780) as in the city's numerous shelter beds.

The count also fueled debate about what is causing the significant increases in suburban homelessness.

Sundberg, from the regional homelessness steering committee, said she believes it's a case of homeless people now being able to stay in their home communities because there are finally some services there for them.

David Eby, a homeless advocate with the Pivot Legal Society, said he thinks the numbers are going up in the suburbs because people from Vancouver are being driven out of the city by the continuing losses of the city's cheapest housing in the Downtown Eastside.

Corrigan said he thinks the numbers increase, especially in cities like his, are driven by a deliberate plan in Vancouver to "push these people out into the suburban municipalities, trying to clean up for the Olympics."

Those actually out on the streets see it a little differently.

Chris Fontaine, whose battered face fits his life story of bad luck and bad decisions, has been homeless in Surrey for about 18 months.

"It's a crappy life to live. But, hey, I get by," Fontaine said Tuesday while staying at The Front Room shelter in Surrey - a last-resort place for people whose addictions and mental illness make it difficult for them find housing elsewhere.

It's no surprise to Fontaine that a homeless task force recently found about 390 homeless people in Surrey over a 24-hour period.

"I can believe it. They come from Vancouver, Burnaby, New West - they all come to Surrey," he said.

"There's better resources here. It's a better area. More drugs, I guess. There are at least 40 guys that I know who are down here from the Downtown Eastside."

The 33-year-old single man hopes to find a cheap apartment but knows the odds - and his own past - are stacked against him.

"You need a rental history and my rental history around here ain't so good."

For now the Front Room, with its 40 beds, is home.

"The people here at the Front Room - they care about us a lot. They give us hope."

Tally of BC homeless by health profs far higher than housing minister's.

By Andrew MacLeod

Published: January 31, 2008

TheTyee.ca

The number of homeless people in British Columbia may be triple the estimate Housing Minister Rich Coleman provided to The Tyee last week, according to a new report by health professors at UBC, SFU and the University of Calgary.

In B.C. there may be as many as 15,500 adults with severe addictions or mental illness who are homeless, says the 149-page report, Housing and Support for Adults with Severe Addictions and/or Mental Illness in British Columbia. The report is dated October, 2007, and was released to The Tyee on Jan. 30, 2008.

The authors are SFU's Michelle Patterson and Julian Somers, Calgary's Karen McIntosh and Alan Shiell, and UBC's Jim Frankish. The report was prepared at the request of the health ministry's mental health and addictions branch. Other partners and contributors to the report include the provincial health authorities, the Employment and Income Assistance Ministry and Coleman's own Forests and Range Ministry.

To get their estimate, the authors used data and reports from the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Canadian Senate, the provincial government and academic journals. "No single authoritative source of information is available to derive these estimates," the report says. "However, a number of recent reports offered valuable insights into various levels of housing need."

Many at risk

The report says some 130,000 adults in B.C. have severe addictions and/or mental illnesses. About 39,000 are "inadequately housed," meaning they meet the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation's definition of being in "core housing need." Of those, about 26,500 don't have enough support to help them stay in their home.

Somewhere between 8,000 and 15,500 are what the report calls "absolutely homeless," meaning they are living on the streets, couch surfing or otherwise without shelter. The report says the authors confirmed their figures with "local stakeholders and key informants." The report also says that despite impressions that homelessness, mental illness and addiction are urban problems, interviews with front-line workers found the same problems were "highly prevalent in rural settings."

The report's number—which includes only people with severe addictions and mental illness -— far exceeds the figure used by Forest, Range and Housing Minister Rich Coleman. Last week he said there are between 4,500 and 5,500 homeless people in B.C. at any given time. He said the figure came from BC Housing. The agency told The Tyee it based its estimate only on the communities that have done official homelessness counts.

NDP housing critic David Chudnovsky called Coleman's number "bogus." His own "conservative" estimate of 10,500 homeless in the province was made last fall based on homeless counts and numbers provided by shelters and other aid agencies.

High cost status quo

While creating supported housing for everyone at risk of homelessness would be expensive, the authors found the cost of doing nothing is even higher.

"If we focus on the absolutely homeless, non-housing service costs amount to about $644.3 million per year across the province," says the report. That includes the costs to the health care and prison systems as well as emergency shelters. "In other words, the average street homeless adult with SAMI [severe addictions and/or mental illness] in B.C. costs the public system in excess of $55,000 per year."

Providing adequate housing and supports would cut those costs by $18,000 per person each year, it says, saving about $211 million in annual spending.

The authors note they did not include the amount of money that homelessness may cause to be lost by businesses, tourism and cancelled conference or convention bookings. The report says, "The inclusion of these and other cost drivers would further enhance the case for change."

'Key actions' suggested

The report offers a dozen "key actions" that need to be taken to provide housing and support to people with severe addictions and/or mental illness. They include:

• Adopting a "housing first" policy providing permanent, independent homes to people without time limits or requiring residents to get addictions treatment.
• Creating more multidisciplinary treatment teams such as the Assertive Community Teams set to launch Jan. 31 in Victoria. The teams are needed to reach the "hardest to house" and get them better access to services and treatment.
• Taking a "harm reduction" approach at housing facilities and accepting the use of drugs and alcohol on-site.
• Creating more affordable housing and protect the affordable housing that already exists.
• Continuing efforts to make it easier to apply for and receive welfare.
• Hospitals and prisons should set policies so they no longer discharge people with "no fixed address" without knowing where they will go. "No one should be discharged from an institution directly to the street or a shelter without prior arrangement and follow-up."

Finally, the authors recommend immediately building or creating supported housing for the 11,750 or so people with severe addictions and/or mental illness who are already homeless. The number likely underestimates the need, they write, and should be taken as a starting point.

BC Housing's current goal falls far short of the need. The agency's most recent service plan says 1,462 new units of supported housing for homeless people will be added by 2009-2010.

"Without adequate housing and support, people with SAMI who are homeless often cycle through the streets, prisons and jails, and high-cost health care settings such as emergency rooms and psychiatric inpatient units," the Health Ministry's report says. "This is ineffective and costly in both human and financial terms." With help, it adds, they can stay in stable housing. "It is time to implement these evidence-based solutions for British Columbians in need."

Related Tyee stories:

• Homeless, Housing Stats Disputed
  Coleman's figures are 'bogus' says NDP critic.
• No New Homes in Premier's Homelessness Plan
  Coleman challenges cities to "step up."

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

More than 10,580 British Columbians are homeless this winter, according to a survey of estimates compiled by the New Democratic Party. And the ranks of the unsheltered are growing fastest not in the province's largest cities, but in B.C.'s booming exurbs such as Abbotsford and Whistler.

"We are sometimes fooled into thinking homelessness is a Vancouver issue," said MLA David Chudnovsky, the opposition critic who conducted the study. "But these numbers show that homelessness is a province-wide crisis."

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

"Smaller communities are starting to face this issue," said Deb Lowell, a spokeswoman for The Salvation Army in Abbotsford. "Homelessness now seems to be a problem right across the province, if not the country."

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

The survey estimated there are 400 homeless people living in Abbotsford, and another 184 across the Upper Fraser Valley. Similarly, the survey found 200 homeless in the Tri Cities, 180 in Burnaby and 100 in Langley.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

"If we're serious about ending homelessness, we need to know what the situation really is," Chudnovsky said. "Minister Coleman either did not know, or was not willing to share that information. So we gathered it ourselves."

Field counts were cited where available. For communities without such counts, Chudnovsky's team interviewed social workers with client lists -- people such as shelter operators and outreach staff -- and compiled the province-wide total from their local estimates.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"In Abbotsford, we have what economists would call an ideal economy: High wages. Low unemployment. Affordable living," said Ron Van Wyc, program director for B.C.'s Mennonite Central Committee. "So for a long time, I think there was a public perception that we didn't have a homeless problem here."

That perception weakened after a 2004 field count found 226 homeless people, and cracked in 2006 after a group of local homeless people crowded into a high-profile encampment that became know as Compassion Park.

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Leading the charge across B.C.'s bible belt is The Salvation Army. In Abbotsford, the Army's Centre of Hope houses a 150-meal-a-day soup kitchen, a 20-bed shelter, a 14-bed transitional housing facility and a provincially-funded outreach program.

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

"We don't have SROs in Abbotsford," Clayton said. "There are a few rooming houses that let bedrooms for $400 or $500 a month. One-bedroom basement suites start at $700." But with the province still paying only $375 a month for housing, "There's really no affordable housing to be had."

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

"I had a beat-up old Chevy van that I lived in for three years," said Wiede. He found places that tolerated parking overnight. "They never gave me permission," he said. "But they never kicked me out."

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

A bit more than half of Abbotsford's homeless are locals, according to the 2004 homeless count. Many of those were pushed into the streets by the same deinstitutionalization and addiction that have driven the homeless crisis across Canada.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

Clayton Fraser is a thickly bearded young man who said he'd slept on the streets of Vancouver, beneath the power lines of Surrey, and "in the ditch" as far north as 100 Mile House. He did not beat around the bush when asked why he prefers Abbotsford, where he's spent most of the past year sleeping in a park.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

Randy Clayton's phone rang during our interview. On the other end of the line was a woman from Aldergrove seeking information about shelters. The outreach worker pulled a photocopied list off the wall, and started reading her some place names and phone numbers.

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

B.C.'s suburbs and small towns are less prepared to cope with fast-growing homeless populations than are cities such as Vancouver and Victoria, which host a continuum of services ranging from detox clinics to long-term supportive housing.

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

A new hospital is under construction, and Abbotsford housing advocates are lobbying to convert the old building into new social housing. Van Wyc is also pondering whether some sort of a mobile home park might be pressed into service in the interim.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

Wiede is among Abbotsford's success stories. Unable to work after a back injury, and unable to survive on a $600-a-month pension, Wiede slipped into homelessness at the age of 60. He "wandered around this area" for two years before landing a room at Centre of Hope's transitional housing.

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

Wiede has since found a subsidized apartment across town, and has largely re-entered mainstream society. But his two years on the streets opened his eyes to a problem he said most of his new neighbours still can't see.

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

• Homeless in Suburbia
  Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
• Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
  Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee.

Can Vancouver's Olympic pride be saved? First in a series.

By Monte Paulsen

Published: May 28, 2007

TheTyee.ca

"When the world arrives in Vancouver in 2010, what kind of city will they find?" asked Mayor Sam Sullivan in his inaugural address.

They will find a city in which there are more homeless Canadians shuffling in the shadow of BC Place than Olympic athletes parading inside the Vancouver stadium.

That's the conclusion of a three-month investigation by The Tyee, which found that unless Mayor Sullivan and B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell radically reshape their response to North America's fastest-growing homelessness crisis, the number of Greater Vancouver homeless will easily exceed the 5,000 athletes and officials expected to participate in the 2010 games.

And it could get worse. If affordable housing continues to erode throughout the region at the rate it has during Vancouver's recent SRO buying binge, there could be twice that many. Should that happen, there would be one homeless person for each of the 10,000 members of the international press corps expected to encamp at the new $800 million Vancouver Convention and Exhibition Centre.

During the coming days, The Tyee will publish articles that explain:

1. How the sudden loss of Vancouver's residential hotels accelerated a crisis that had been growing since Gordon Campbell's BC Liberals slashed welfare benefits
2. Why Housing Minister Rich Coleman's bold expenditure of more than $100 million provincial tax dollars will deliver very little additional housing
3. How local and provincial taxpayers could wind up spending more money taking care of the homeless than building Olympic venues
4. Why Mayor Sullivan's elaborate plan to privatize social housing is an untimely gambit that appears to have distracted his administration during a pivotal time
5. Where neighbourhood NIMBY groups have stalled the construction of sorely needed supportive housing
6. What governments, business, non-profits and Olympic organizers must do this year in order for Canada to avoid a lasting legacy of shame in the wake of the 2010 Winter Games

Today: A look at the numbers.

Over 2,200 homeless now

On March 15, 2005, a team of social workers counted 2,174 homeless people in Greater Vancouver.

Starting at 5:30 in the morning, they scoured shelters, drop-in centres, parks, and other locations frequented by the homeless to produce The 2005 Greater Vancouver Homeless Count. The total number of homeless doubled since the previous count in 2002, from 1,121 to 2,174. More than half (1,291) were found within the City of Vancouver, followed by Surrey (371) and New Westminster (92). (A map of their findings is here.)

"All counts underestimate homelessness, because of the difficulty in finding those who do not use services or spend time where homeless people congregate," wrote the report's authors. Also, the one-day count did not consider people sleeping in detox facilities, recovery houses, hospitals or sofa surfers -- even though many of those residents have no fixed address. "Thus, the Homeless Count did not enumerate every homeless person in the region on March 15, 2005, and is an undercount."

But while the report does not claim to offer a complete count of homelessness, it does provide an accurate survey of the region's homeless population. Among its findings:

More homeless people were found on streets than in shelters; the number of street homeless rose by 235 per cent since 2002.

People of Aboriginal identity accounted for 30 per cent of the region's homeless population, while making up only two per cent of the total population.

When asked why they were homeless, 44 per cent cited lack of income, 25 per cent named addiction or other health conditions, and 22 per cent blamed the high cost of housing in Greater Vancouver.

Less than half of those counted had a steady income source. The rest survived on income from panhandling, bottle collecting, casual employment, or illegal activities.

Nearly three quarters reported chronic health conditions, such as addiction, mental illness or physical disability. Addiction was the most common; almost half of the homeless who responded to this question reported problems with addiction.

When asked which municipality they considered their last permanent home, 75 per cent reported somewhere in Greater Vancouver. Another 8 per cent reported their last permanent home was elsewhere in B.C., 15 per cent reported a location elsewhere in Canada, and one per cent reported a location outside Canada.

The next Greater Vancouver count will be conducted in 2008.

'Unprecedented demand'

Local counts have found higher numbers of homeless.

Judy Graves coordinates the Vancouver Housing Centre's award-winning tenant assistance program. She's worked in the Downtown Eastside since 1979, and has spent much of the last decade trolling the city's streets, parks and alleys for people in need of housing.

Graves conducted her own count in 2005. Using the same methodology biologists use to count wildlife, she found up to twice the number of Vancouver street homeless enumerated in the one-day count. Her next report is due late this fall.

"There are a couple of neighbourhoods in the City of Vancouver where I believe we're seeing a decrease in the number who live outside overnight," Graves said. "In other neighbourhoods, especially outside of the urban core, we're seeing quite an increase in the number of homeless on the street."

The undercount may be even more dramatic in smaller communities. Like most suburban municipalities, Port Coquitlam has no service center at which homeless people would congregate. Not surprisingly, the 2003 regional count was able to locate a mere 10 homeless people in PoCo, and the 2005 count found only 35.

Then, last summer, a new service organization began working in the area. Within months, the group had identified 177 homeless in PoCo.

"I think the situation is comparable in Burnaby and Surrey," said Diane Thorne, an MLA who represents the Coquitlam-Maillardville riding and also serves as housing critic for the New Democratic Party. She estimated that the actual homeless population in Greater Vancouver's suburban communities is "10 times" the 2005 count.

Thorne noted that B.C. does not conduct a province-wide homeless count. The best available statistic is that between October 2005 and April 2006 a record 28,922 people were turned away from B.C. shelters.

"There is an unprecedented demand for shelter services, not only in Vancouver but across the province," Thorne said. "There have been enormous increases in long-term and repeat users."

Disappearing rooms

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the Vancouver homeless epidemic is deeper than the 2005 numbers suggests.

"Rooming houses and hotels are falling like flies," said Jean Swanson, a veteran Downtown Eastside activist now with the Carnegie Community Action Project.

Twenty-two residential hotels were sold in 2006, with a combined total of 1,178 rooms. By adding the number of rooms from which tenants were evicted to the number from which tenants were forced out by rising rates, Swanson counts 600 low-income rooms lost during the same year.

"If we lose 600 more this year, another 600 in 2008, and 600 again in 2009, that's 2,400 units of low-income housing likely to vanish before the Olympics," Swanson figured.

Likewise, intake workers at social housing centres report much longer waiting lists.

"It's just depressing," said Mark Townsend, who directs the Portland Hotel Society. "You feel like Solomon cutting up the baby, yeah? Shall you take this guy who's a problem tenant and no one will have him, or that one who's in a wheelchair and stuck somewhere?"

"We have just flat run out of empty rooms in Vancouver," Graves agreed. "We're at zero vacancy rate in those little rooms that were the last housing refuge for people. Anybody who's in the street now is going to have a precious hard time finding a place to go."

Homeless shelters are overflowing, despite the addition of 181 new shelter beds since 2000. The Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, a daytime drop-in facility, was pressed into service as an emergency shelter last November -- and an average of 50 women continue to sleep there every night.

And outreach workers are reporting more rough sleepers. The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, which operates nightly street patrols, is not only seeing more addicts on the streets, but is losing its own members to homelessness as well. Whereas only one-tenth of its members were without shelter as recently as 2002, now one-quarter of Vandu members are homeless.

"It's more dire, for sure," Townsend said. "Much more dire."

More homeless than athletes

After more than a dozen interviews with these and other housing experts, The Tyee has concluded that unless the city and province begin construction of additional supportive housing this year, there will be an estimated 5,600 homeless people living in Greater Vancouver by 2010.

There are two components of this projection:

1. The Vancouver count will triple to 3,800. In the fall of 2006, Pivot Legal Society forecast that Vancouver homelessness will triple by 2010. No credible rebuttal to that forecast has emerged. And after weighing the number of new units BC Housing currently plans to open in the next few years against the accelerating loss of existing SRO rooms, The Tyee concluded that the zero vacancy rate will remain and Vancouver's most vulnerable residents will continue to be displaced.
2. The regional count will roughly double to 2,000. It appears likely that the 2005 snapshot undercounted suburban homelessness by a greater margin than it did Vancouver. Also, as part of anti-drug efforts, some suburban municipalities continue to raze drug houses, bulldozing affordable housing in the bargain.

Swanson, Thorne and a few others regard The Tyee's projection as too low.

"If the attack on the rooming houses continues, I think we'll see much more than that in Vancouver," Swanson said.

"I expect regional homelessness to triple, at a minimum," MLA Thorne predicted. "I hope I'm wrong about that."

Graves, Townsend and others thought the number was accurate, or a bit high. Graves offered perspective.

"As recently as 15 years ago, there was no street homelessness in Vancouver. We did have shelters. We did have the odd coot," Graves said. She believes that Vancouver could vanquish homelessness again -- within a few short years -- if political leaders made it a priority.

"The causes of homelessness are complex," Graves said. "But the solution is kindergarten simple: Build supportive housing."

Related Tyee stories:

• Seven Solutions to Homelessness
  Each is working somewhere else, and will save money and lives here.
• Province Snaps up Poverty Hotels
  Plan to protect housing catches insiders off guard.
• Shovelling with Mayor Sam
  Stalled homeless units finally jarred loose. Pols scramble for credit.

Monte Paulsen is a contributing editor at The Tyee.

10,000 Homeless in BC

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

More than 10,580 British Columbians are homeless this winter, according to a survey of estimates compiled by the New Democratic Party. And the ranks of the unsheltered are growing fastest not in the province's largest cities, but in B.C.'s booming exurbs such as Abbotsford and Whistler.

"We are sometimes fooled into thinking homelessness is a Vancouver issue," said MLA David Chudnovsky, the opposition critic who conducted the study. "But these numbers show that homelessness is a province-wide crisis."

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

"Smaller communities are starting to face this issue," said Deb Lowell, a spokeswoman for The Salvation Army in Abbotsford. "Homelessness now seems to be a problem right across the province, if not the country."

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

The survey estimated there are 400 homeless people living in Abbotsford, and another 184 across the Upper Fraser Valley. Similarly, the survey found 200 homeless in the Tri Cities, 180 in Burnaby and 100 in Langley.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

"If we're serious about ending homelessness, we need to know what the situation really is," Chudnovsky said. "Minister Coleman either did not know, or was not willing to share that information. So we gathered it ourselves."

Field counts were cited where available. For communities without such counts, Chudnovsky's team interviewed social workers with client lists -- people such as shelter operators and outreach staff -- and compiled the province-wide total from their local estimates.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"In Abbotsford, we have what economists would call an ideal economy: High wages. Low unemployment. Affordable living," said Ron Van Wyc, program director for B.C.'s Mennonite Central Committee. "So for a long time, I think there was a public perception that we didn't have a homeless problem here."

That perception weakened after a 2004 field count found 226 homeless people, and cracked in 2006 after a group of local homeless people crowded into a high-profile encampment that became know as Compassion Park.

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Leading the charge across B.C.'s bible belt is The Salvation Army. In Abbotsford, the Army's Centre of Hope houses a 150-meal-a-day soup kitchen, a 20-bed shelter, a 14-bed transitional housing facility and a provincially-funded outreach program.

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

"We don't have SROs in Abbotsford," Clayton said. "There are a few rooming houses that let bedrooms for $400 or $500 a month. One-bedroom basement suites start at $700." But with the province still paying only $375 a month for housing, "There's really no affordable housing to be had."

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

"I had a beat-up old Chevy van that I lived in for three years," said Wiede. He found places that tolerated parking overnight. "They never gave me permission," he said. "But they never kicked me out."

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

A bit more than half of Abbotsford's homeless are locals, according to the 2004 homeless count. Many of those were pushed into the streets by the same deinstitutionalization and addiction that have driven the homeless crisis across Canada.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

Clayton Fraser is a thickly bearded young man who said he'd slept on the streets of Vancouver, beneath the power lines of Surrey, and "in the ditch" as far north as 100 Mile House. He did not beat around the bush when asked why he prefers Abbotsford, where he's spent most of the past year sleeping in a park.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

Randy Clayton's phone rang during our interview. On the other end of the line was a woman from Aldergrove seeking information about shelters. The outreach worker pulled a photocopied list off the wall, and started reading her some place names and phone numbers.

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

B.C.'s suburbs and small towns are less prepared to cope with fast-growing homeless populations than are cities such as Vancouver and Victoria, which host a continuum of services ranging from detox clinics to long-term supportive housing.

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

A new hospital is under construction, and Abbotsford housing advocates are lobbying to convert the old building into new social housing. Van Wyc is also pondering whether some sort of a mobile home park might be pressed into service in the interim.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

Wiede is among Abbotsford's success stories. Unable to work after a back injury, and unable to survive on a $600-a-month pension, Wiede slipped into homelessness at the age of 60. He "wandered around this area" for two years before landing a room at Centre of Hope's transitional housing.

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

Wiede has since found a subsidized apartment across town, and has largely re-entered mainstream society. But his two years on the streets opened his eyes to a problem he said most of his new neighbours still can't see.

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

• Homeless in Suburbia
  Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
• 2010: More Homeless than Athletes? (Series)
  What it will take to provide needed shelter before the Olympics.
• Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
  Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee. He welcomes e-mail and encourages respectful comment in the forum below

10,000 Homeless in BC

Abbotsford tops list of boomtowns plagued by poverty.

By Monte Paulsen

Published: November 30, 2007

TheTyee.ca

More than 10,580 British Columbians are homeless this winter, according to a survey of estimates compiled by the New Democratic Party. And the ranks of the unsheltered are growing fastest not in the province's largest cities, but in B.C.'s booming exurbs such as Abbotsford and Whistler.

"We are sometimes fooled into thinking homelessness is a Vancouver issue," said MLA David Chudnovsky, the opposition critic who conducted the study. "But these numbers show that homelessness is a province-wide crisis."

Interviews with social workers and homeless individuals in the Fraser Valley confirm the NDP's findings.

"Smaller communities are starting to face this issue," said Deb Lowell, a spokeswoman for The Salvation Army in Abbotsford. "Homelessness now seems to be a problem right across the province, if not the country."

Ken Wiede is an Abbotsford native who lived without a home in his own hometown for two years.

"There's way more people living on the streets of Abbotsford today," Wiede said. "Way more. And it's rougher."

Shelter staff supplied estimates

B.C.'s largest cities top the list released Friday morning. The NDP found 2,300 people living without shelter in Vancouver, 1,550 in Victoria and 1,050 in Prince George.

But the second tier of homelessness is concentrated in fast-growing exurbs such as Abbotsford, which ranked fourth on the list.

The survey estimated there are 400 homeless people living in Abbotsford, and another 184 across the Upper Fraser Valley. Similarly, the survey found 200 homeless in the Tri Cities, 180 in Burnaby and 100 in Langley.

Taken together, the NDP estimates suggest that there are now more homeless Canadians scattered across the Lower Mainland than concentrated in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside.

"I was particularly surprised by the large numbers of suburban homelessness," MLA Chudnovsky said. "These include some of the most affluent and fastest-growing parts of the province."

Chudnovsky said he initiated the survey after Housing Minister Rich Coleman failed to respond to his request for an official province-wide homeless count.

"If we're serious about ending homelessness, we need to know what the situation really is," Chudnovsky said. "Minister Coleman either did not know, or was not willing to share that information. So we gathered it ourselves."

Field counts were cited where available. For communities without such counts, Chudnovsky's team interviewed social workers with client lists -- people such as shelter operators and outreach staff -- and compiled the province-wide total from their local estimates.

'We don't have SROs in Abbotsford'

"In Abbotsford, we have what economists would call an ideal economy: High wages. Low unemployment. Affordable living," said Ron Van Wyc, program director for B.C.'s Mennonite Central Committee. "So for a long time, I think there was a public perception that we didn't have a homeless problem here."

That perception weakened after a 2004 field count found 226 homeless people, and cracked in 2006 after a group of local homeless people crowded into a high-profile encampment that became know as Compassion Park.

"As a community, I think we've moved through the phase of denial," Van Wyc said. "Now there is a recognition that something needs to be done."

Leading the charge across B.C.'s bible belt is The Salvation Army. In Abbotsford, the Army's Centre of Hope houses a 150-meal-a-day soup kitchen, a 20-bed shelter, a 14-bed transitional housing facility and a provincially-funded outreach program.

Outreach worker Randy Clayton said he could house more than half of the almost 300 people on Abbotsford's outreach rolls -- if only he could find enough affordable apartments.

"We don't have SROs in Abbotsford," Clayton said. "There are a few rooming houses that let bedrooms for $400 or $500 a month. One-bedroom basement suites start at $700." But with the province still paying only $375 a month for housing, "There's really no affordable housing to be had."

Forest dwellers

Most of Clayton's clients live in the woods. Some pitch full camps complete with kitchens and fire pits. Others nest in local parks. One former military man dug himself a burrow ten feet underground.

Others live in their cars. In a region with poor public transit, many of the working poor choose to give up their homes before sacrificing their wheels.

"I had a beat-up old Chevy van that I lived in for three years," said Wiede. He found places that tolerated parking overnight. "They never gave me permission," he said. "But they never kicked me out."

Clayton figures there are another 100 to 150 homeless individuals who remain off the Sally Ann's rolls, bringing the Abbotsford total in line with the NDP estimate.

"This is the time of year that we find out how many more are homeless," Clayton said. "When it gets cold like this, people literally come out of the woods looking to get warm."

'Too cold in 100 Mile'

There does not appear to be any single reason why homelessness has roughly doubled throughout the Lower Mainland in the past few years.

A bit more than half of Abbotsford's homeless are locals, according to the 2004 homeless count. Many of those were pushed into the streets by the same deinstitutionalization and addiction that have driven the homeless crisis across Canada.

"I think we are seeing the consequence of social policy decisions made 15 years ago," Van Wyc said, "when there was a decision made to not continue funding social housing."

The other half of Abbotsford's burgeoning homeless appears to come from elsewhere in B.C.

Clayton Fraser is a thickly bearded young man who said he'd slept on the streets of Vancouver, beneath the power lines of Surrey, and "in the ditch" as far north as 100 Mile House. He did not beat around the bush when asked why he prefers Abbotsford, where he's spent most of the past year sleeping in a park.

"Too many games on Hastings Street. Too cold in 100 Mile," Fraser said.

'Anywhere but Vancouver'

Wiede said that many of the "new crowd" who arrived within the past year are from Vancouver.

"It's like a wave," Wiede said. "It's getting tougher in Vancouver. And now some of those tough people are moving here."

Randy Clayton's phone rang during our interview. On the other end of the line was a woman from Aldergrove seeking information about shelters. The outreach worker pulled a photocopied list off the wall, and started reading her some place names and phone numbers.

She interrupted him to explain that she was willing to go, "anywhere but Vancouver."

Few facilities in small cities

B.C.'s suburbs and small towns are less prepared to cope with fast-growing homeless populations than are cities such as Vancouver and Victoria, which host a continuum of services ranging from detox clinics to long-term supportive housing.

"There are few facilities here. The infrastructure is not as well established as in a place like Vancouver," Van Wyc said.

Similarly, the City of Abbotsford does not own any land on which to build new facilities, and is therefore unable to take advantage of funding recently offered by the province.

A new hospital is under construction, and Abbotsford housing advocates are lobbying to convert the old building into new social housing. Van Wyc is also pondering whether some sort of a mobile home park might be pressed into service in the interim.

But while the causes and conditions of homelessness vary among urban and suburban areas, the solution appears to remain the same: provide stable homes.

Blindness of 'untrained eyes'

Wiede is among Abbotsford's success stories. Unable to work after a back injury, and unable to survive on a $600-a-month pension, Wiede slipped into homelessness at the age of 60. He "wandered around this area" for two years before landing a room at Centre of Hope's transitional housing.

"The Salvation Army really helped me out in a big way," Wiede said. "They took me in when there was no place I could go."

Wiede has since found a subsidized apartment across town, and has largely re-entered mainstream society. But his two years on the streets opened his eyes to a problem he said most of his new neighbours still can't see.

"I see things my friend doesn't see," Wiede said. "We'll be drivin' along and I'll say, 'Did you see those eight people in the field over there?' And he says, 'No.'

"And you see, that's just it. With untrained eyes, you don't see it. And if you don't see it, you think the problem doesn't exist."

Related Tyee stories:

• Homeless in Suburbia
  Why shelters outside of Vancouver are filling up
• Vancouver's SROs: 'Zero Vacancy'
  Vanishing old hotels were last refuge for most at risk.

Monte Paulsen is investigative editor of The Tyee.

.

This series about the roots of homelessness and possible solutions in B.C. is funded in part by the Tides Canada Foundation

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Alan Guth, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who agrees this overabundance is absurd, pointed out that some calculations result in an infinite number of free-floating brains for every normal brain, making it “infinitely unlikely for us to be normal brains.” Welcome to what physicists call the Boltzmann brain problem, named after the 19th-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who suggested the mechanism by which such fluctuations could happen in a gas or in the universe. Cosmologists also refer to them as “freaky observers,” in contrast to regular or “ordered” observers of the cosmos like ourselves. Cosmologists are desperate to eliminate these freaks from their theories, but so far they can’t even agree on how or even on whether they are making any progress.

If you are inclined to skepticism this debate might seem like further evidence that cosmologists, who gave us dark matter, dark energy and speak with apparent aplomb about gazillions of parallel universes, have finally lost their minds. But the cosmologists say the brain problem serves as a valuable reality check as they contemplate the far, far future and zillions of bubble universes popping off from one another in an ever-increasing rush through eternity. What, for example is a “typical” observer in such a setup? If some atoms in another universe stick together briefly to look, talk and think exactly like you, is it really you?

“It is part of a much bigger set of questions about how to think about probabilities in an infinite universe in which everything that can occur, does occur, infinitely many times,” said Leonard Susskind of Stanford, a co-author of a paper in 2002 that helped set off the debate. Or as Andrei Linde, another Stanford theorist given to colorful language, loosely characterized the possibility of a replica of your own brain forming out in space sometime, “How do you compute the probability to be reincarnated to the probability of being born?”

The Boltzmann brain problem arises from a string of logical conclusions that all spring from another deep and old question, namely why time seems to go in only one direction. Why can’t you unscramble an egg? The fundamental laws governing the atoms bouncing off one another in the egg look the same whether time goes forward or backward. In this universe, at least, the future and the past are different and you can’t remember who is going to win the Super Bowl next week.

“When you break an egg and scramble it you are doing cosmology,” said Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.

Boltzmann ascribed this so-called arrow of time to the tendency of any collection of particles to spread out into the most random and useless configuration, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics (sometimes paraphrased as “things get worse”), which says that entropy, which is a measure of disorder or wasted energy, can never decrease in a closed system like the universe.

If the universe was running down and entropy was increasing now, that was because the universe must have been highly ordered in the past.

In Boltzmann’s time the universe was presumed to have been around forever, in which case it would long ago have stabilized at a lukewarm temperature and died a “heat death.” It would already have maximum entropy, and so with no way to become more disorderly there would be no arrow of time. No life would be possible but that would be all right because life would be excruciatingly boring. Boltzmann said that entropy was all about odds, however, and if we waited long enough the random bumping of atoms would occasionally produce the cosmic equivalent of an egg unscrambling. A rare fluctuation would decrease the entropy in some place and start the arrow of time pointing and history flowing again. That is not what happened. Astronomers now know the universe has not lasted forever. It was born in the Big Bang, which somehow set the arrow of time, 14 billion years ago. The linchpin of the Big Bang is thought to be an explosive moment known as inflation, during which space became suffused with energy that had an antigravitational effect and ballooned violently outward, ironing the kinks and irregularities out of what is now the observable universe and endowing primordial chaos with order.

Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal inflation, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes

A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann brains.

The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.

Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.

In such a recurrent setup, however, Dr. Susskind of Stanford, Lisa Dyson, now of the University of California, Berkeley, and Matthew Kleban, now at New York University, pointed out in 2002 that Boltzmann’s idea might work too well, filling the megaverse with more Boltzmann brains than universes or real people.

In the same way the odds of a real word showing up when you shake a box of Scrabble letters are greater than a whole sentence or paragraph forming, these “regular” universes would be vastly outnumbered by weird ones, including flawed variations on our own all the way down to naked brains, a result foreshadowed by Martin Rees, a cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, in his 1997 book, “Before the Beginning.”

The conclusions of Dr. Dyson and her colleagues were quickly challenged by Andreas Albrecht and Lorenzo Sorbo of the University of California, Davis, who used an alternate approach. They found that the Big Bang was actually more likely than Boltzmann’s brain.

“In the end, inflation saves us from Boltzmann’s brain,” Dr. Albrecht said, while admitting that the calculations were contentious. Indeed, the “invasion of Boltzmann brains,” as Dr. Linde once referred to it, was just beginning.

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.”

But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”

You might wonder what’s wrong with a few brains — or even a preponderance of them — floating around in space. For one thing, as observers these brains would see a freaky chaotic universe, unlike our own, which seems to persist in its promise and disappointment.

Another is that one of the central orthodoxies of cosmology is that humans don’t occupy a special place in the cosmos, that we and our experiences are typical of cosmic beings. If the odds of us being real instead of Boltzmann brains are one in a million, say, waking up every day would be like walking out on the street and finding everyone in the city standing on their heads. You would expect there to be some reason why you were the only one left right side up.

Some cosmologists, James Hartle and Mark Srednicki, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have questioned that assumption. “For example,” Dr. Hartle wrote in an e-mail message, “on Earth humans are not typical animals; insects are far more numerous. No one is surprised by this.

In an e-mail response to Dr. Hartle’s view, Don Page of the University of Alberta, who has been a prominent voice in the Boltzmann debate, argued that what counted cosmologically was not sheer numbers, but consciousness, which we have in abundance over the insects. “I would say that we have no strong evidence against the working hypothesis that we are typical and that our observations are typical,” he explained, “which is very fruitful in science for helping us believe that our observations are not just flukes but do tell us something about the universe.”

Dr. Dyson and her colleagues suggested that the solution to the Boltzmann paradox was in denying the presumption that the universe would accelerate eternally. In other words, they said, that the cosmological constant was perhaps not really constant. If the cosmological constant eventually faded away, the universe would revert to normal expansion and what was left would eventually fade to black. With no more acceleration there would be no horizon with its snap, crackle and pop, and thus no material for fluctuations and Boltzmann brains.

String theory calculations have suggested that dark energy is indeed metastable and will decay, Dr. Susskind pointed out. “The success of ordinary cosmology,” Dr. Susskind said, “speaks against the idea that the universe was created in a random fluctuation.”

But nobody knows whether dark energy — if it dies — will die soon enough to save the universe from a surplus of Boltzmann brains. In 2006, Dr. Page calculated that the dark energy would have to decay in about 20 billion years in order to prevent it from being overrun by Boltzmann brains.

The decay, if and when it comes, would rejigger the laws of physics and so would be fatal and total, spreading at almost the speed of light and destroying all matter without warning. There would be no time for pain, Dr. Page wrote: “And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution.” But the object of his work, he said, was not to predict the end of the universe but to draw attention to the fact that the Boltzmann brain problem remains.

People have their own favorite measures of probability in the multiverse, said Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. “So Boltzmann brains are just one example of how measures can predict nonsense; anytime your measure predicts that something we see has extremely small probability, you can throw it out,” he wrote in an e-mail message.

Another contentious issue is whether the cosmologists in their calculations could consider only the observable universe, which is all we can ever see or be influenced by, or whether they should take into account the vast and ever-growing assemblage of other bubbles forever out of our view predicted by eternal inflation. In the latter case, as Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University pointed out, “The numbers of regular and freak observers are both infinite.” Which kind predominate depends on how you do the counting, he said..

In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe. “So maybe we don’t need to care too much” about the Boltzmann brains,” he said.

“If you are reincarnated, why do you care about where you are reincarnated?” he asked. “It sounds crazy because here we are touching issues we are not supposed to be touching in ordinary science. Can we be reincarnated?”

“People are not prepared for this discussion,” Dr. Linde said

Correction: January 21, 2008

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about paradoxes that cosmologists face in trying to explain the origin of the universe misspelled the surname of a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who commented on the limitations of probability measures. He is Raphael Bousso, not Buosso.

Studies suggest the brain calculates math and ethics the same way

Whether it is a child's belief in Santa or a religious belief in the incredible miracle story, belief looms large at this time of year. Religion is the starting point, but this five-part series explores the many facets of belief, from the placebo effect to the neuroscience of belief and disbelief. Today, atheists on belief and disbelief.

Sam Harris may be the best-selling author of two books on the destructiveness of religion, but he has not given up on belief. Now a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles, Mr. Harris and his colleagues have just published research that, they believe, maps for the first time where in the brain decisions are made about what we believe and do not believe.

Mr. Harris said he wanted to understand the biological process that allows people to accept certain descriptions of reality as valid.

Test subjects were scanned with an MRI while being asked to decide whether they believed the veracity of a particular statement. The researchers then looked for which parts of the brain "lit up."

They discovered the part of the brain used for lower cognitive functions -- such as deciding whether something smells good or bad, or assessing pain -- is also used to decide whether a proposition is true or false.

"Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as 'true' or its rejection as 'false' appears to rely on more primitive [processing]," Mr. Harris and his team wrote in the journal Annals of Neurology this month.
In an interview, Mr. Harris said there are many studies in neuroscience that have "broken down the boundaries between higher cognition and more primitive emotional processing." But this appears to be the first study to show that at the physical level of the brain.

He said it at first seemed surprising that "such a creaturely preference is operative here." But he added it makes sense because evolution had to employ ways to make sure the decisions we made would help us survive as a species.

"Belief really is the hinge upon which so much of human activity and human nature swings," said Mr. Harris, author of The End of Faith and its follow-up, Letter to a Christian Nation. "You are to an extraordinary degree guided by, or misguided by, what you believe. If you're a racist that is a result of what you believe about race. If you're a jihadist, that is built on what you believe about the Koran and supremacy of Islam. So belief is doing most of the work humans do. And it's an engine of conflict and reconciliation, so it really matters what people believe."

What was particularly surprising, he said, was that there were virtually identical patterns of brain activation whether someone was being asked to evaluate a straightforward proposition, such as two plus two equals four, or something that tested an ethical belief, such as whether torture is just or unjust.

"One obviously has very strong emotional association and one doesn't. So it is surprising that the coolest, calculated kind of reasoning we can engage in and the most emotionally laden in ethics could be so similar."

Mr. Harris's study concluded with the poetic notion that "truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense and that false propositions may actually disgust us."

He said other studies have shown that when something disgusts us, the area of the brain known as the anterior insula is most active. In his study, it was the anterior insula that was most active when a proposition was rejected.

"The feeling of doubt, of not buying a statement, is on a continuum with other modes of rejection -- the epitome of which is disgust."

His next task will be to study how the brain evaluates religious beliefs and he expects that his results will be much the same as his latest study.

"I think on the basis of this study I expect to see that belief is belief is belief. Evaluating the belief that Jesus was the son of God is importantly different than evaluating the belief two plus two equals four. [But] there's going to be a common final pathway that governs whether the belief is accepted or rejected. There's something held in common between these modes of thinking."

clewis@nationalpost.com

Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness T
The City of Victoria released its homelessness report on October 19. http://www.victoria.ca/cityhall/tskfrc_brcycl.shtml

High Cost of Inaction
http://www.victoria.ca/cityhall/pdfs/tskfrc_brcycl_inactn.pdf
From the report. Reference citations are provided for these figures.

• It costs taxpayers more than $50,000 per year to support each homeless resident in British Columbia.
• With a homeless population growth factor estimated at 30 per cent, compounded for each year of inadequate housing stock and supports, Victoria’s homeless population could double by 2010.
• The Victoria Police Department has identified a group of 324 homeless residents—many of whom are mentally ill and suffer from substance use problems or a dual diagnosis—who are responsible for 23,033 police encounters over a period of 40 months, at a cost of $9.2 million to the City of Victoria.
• The City of Victoria has spent over $1.4 million already this year in expenditures associated with homelessness; including clean-up costs, needle pick-up, damages to sensitive ecosystems, security and responses to complaints.
• Without proper access to health services, homeless residents rely on emergency and acute care health services—66 per cent of all homeless residents admitted to hospital by Vancouver Island Health Authority have a mental health or substance use related condition.
• The Task Force found that there are over 200 organizations in the Greater Victoria area currently engaged in addressing the needs of homeless, addicted and/or mentally ill people in our community. Over 20 funding agencies already spend an estimated $76 million annually on housing, mental health and addiction services.
• By not addressing the needs of the homeless population in Greater Victoria, we are spending at least $62 million in other services, such as policing, prisons, hospital services, emergency shelter, clean up, etc.
• A study conducted by the province of B.C. in 2001 showed that the cost of service use under the status quo was 33 per cent higher than the cost of housing and supporting individuals.

Help for the homeless
$7.6 million pledged to help deal with homelessness, mental illness, addictions
Carolyn Heiman
Victoria Times Colonist
Saturday, October 20, 2007

The Vancouver Island Health Authority will supply $7.6 million for measures to ease Victoria's homeless crisis, including new detox beds and specialized outreach teams.

The announcement was made yesterday, moments after the unveiling of the City of Victoria task-force report "Breaking the Cycle of Mental Illness, Addictions and Homelessness", aimed at finding ways to reduce the number of people living on the street.

The largest chunk of cash is earmarked for 15 adult detox/residential treatment beds ($1.7 million) and creation of four community/treatment outreach teams, at a cost of $3.35 million. The teams, a cornerstone recommendation of the task force, will offer support and treatment for clients where they live, be that in parks, on the street, in shelters or in supportive housing.

A "housing-first" strategy, in which priority is given to finding homes for people on the street, regardless of their mental-health and substance-abuse issues, is the other cornerstone of the recommendations.

The outreach teams, to be established in the next year, are to include mental-health, substance-abuse and social-service specialists with shared caseloads and low staff-to-client ratios. They will be on call 24 hours a day. One team will focus on individuals with significant criminal records and a history of behavioural problems.

The expert panel on the task force said similar outreach teams were credited with reducing hospital admissions in Ontario by 62 per cent after one year, and 83 per cent after six years.

Victoria police found that 324 homeless residents -- many with mental-illness or substance-abuse problems or both -- were behind 23,033 police encounters over a period of 40 months, at an estimated cost to the city of $9.2 million.

Supporting the teams will be two new case managers assigned to help those leaving the hospital and correctional facilities, at a cost of $200,000.

Dr. Perry Kendall, provincial health officer and chairman of the expert panel, said the current system for delivering services is complex and difficult to negotiate, especially for people with mental illness and substance-abuse problems. Because they're required to move from one service to another, they often fall through the cracks. He noted a study of injection-drug users showed that half had obtained treatment in the previous year, while 30 per cent tried unsuccessfully to obtain treatment.

The health authority also earmarked $1 million toward building the $4.6-million Downtown Health Access Centre, a Victoria Cool Aid Society project planned for its Johnson Street building. The centre will provide one-stop health services to homeless people. It replaces a program that Cool Aid board chairman Andrew Benson said is "bursting at the seams" at its Swift Street location.

Benson said he is pleased with the VIHA commitment but anxiously awaiting word on applications for another $1.5 million from the province and $500,00 to $700,000 from the Capital Regional District before construction can begin in March. The balance would be raised through donations.

A home and day detox program will receive $240,000, while a similar amount will go to train 10 homeless people who are ready to rejoin the workforce for jobs with the health authority.

The funding announcement also earmarked $600,000 to help the hard-to-house homeless, who will take up residence at a new 45-bed facility on Pandora Street. The facility, run by Our Place Society, is scheduled to open in November.

Kendall said the current system lacks co-ordination between mental-health and addiction services. Clients trying to obtain mental-health services are often rejected because they have addictions, while the same is true for those with mental-health problems trying to obtain addiction services.

VIHA yesterday earmarked $100,000 to train outreach workers to support clients with both mental-health and addiction problems.

cheiman@tc.canwest.com