Some day, everyone will have a home

Kamloops got together to talk about homelessness last night. We’ve been talking about it since 1895.

HAP — the Homelessness Action Plan — held a forum at the Alliance Church, a sort of status report on where we’re at on this most fundamental of social issues.

HAP has the ambitious goal of ending homelessness by 2015, which coincidentally would be 120 years since the city’s first social-housing project.

Two years after Kamloops incorporated as a city in 1893, the Provincial Home for Old Men was built.

Unfortunately, what began with the best of intentions and widespread community support deteriorated over time into a place avoided by “regular” people.

City council was involved in the issue early on. Elisabeth Duckworth at the museum tells me the story of a mother thrown out of her home by her son early in the 1900s. Council created a pension for her.

In 1922, a homeless man named Thomas Hornby left a note, then drowned himself in the Thompson River. He wouldn’t be the last to die.

Jump ahead roughly a century to the past dozen years, when we started talking seriously about the issue of homelessness in a context that was broader than just finding a place to store people.

We started forming committees and community coalitions like Kamloops Active Support Against Poverty, the Kamloops Steering Committee on Homelessness, The Kamloops Community Action Team, and, more recently, The Changing Face of Poverty and HAP.

As we turned the corner on Y2K, the Victory Inn taught us that social housing has to fit with the aspirations of neighbourhoods to be successful — a lesson repeated on Cowan Street just last week.

Then the Liberals came into power and it was an era of cutbacks. Street services weren’t exempt. Nor was welfare.

“We have to focus on the core things — health and education,” said MLA Kevin Krueger.

So homelessness became a municipal issue as well as a provincial and federal one. Somebody, after all, had to fill the gap.

In the spring of 2005, a makeshift shelter down at the river caught fire and a homeless man died.

Tent cities on the river shore became a regular part of summers in Kamloops. Sometimes, for “fun,” teens would get together and go down to the river to “beat up a bum.”

So we put up fences — literally — and in 2006 City council started tearing down the tent cities. Businesses built barricades to stop the homeless from sleeping in their doorways. As always, shoppers complained about panhandlers.

In January 2008, Henry Leland — known as “a good guy” —  froze to death in a snowbank. The former Whistler Inn is now a social-housing apartment block named after him.

Politicians began talking about “social issues such as homelessness, drug addiction, prostitution, panhandling, mental health and crime.”

Was this recognition that there are sometimes connections, or a suspicion that homeless people are all drug-addicted crazy criminals?

Persuaded by the B.C. Supreme Court, we allowed the homeless to pitch their tents in parks between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. As long as they didn’t try to use the public washrooms.

At 7 each morning they were rousted out of bed by police and bylaws officers.

Slowly, we’ve made progress, a lot of it. We’ve had failures like Blueberry Lodge, but many more successes. Services are much better. The community and government are, at last, edging toward the effective partnership that has proved so elusive.

Some day, maybe by that targeted year of 2015, somebody will stand at a forum and mention that we once had homelessness in Kamloops.

Wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

 This column is based on a speech to the HAP forum by Daily News editor Mel Rothenburger.