While the B.C. government works to find a solution to the growing homeless camp outside of the Victoria courthouse, the camp’s prominence should be sending a strong message throughout the city that a failure to provide housing for this community will be fatal.
Between 2007 and 2013, the British Columbia Coroners Service recorded 33 homeless deaths in Victoria, a number disputed by homeless advocates as too low. The University of Victoria’s Poverty Law Club documented 30 homeless deaths in Victoria over a period of just four months in 2012.
Using the coroner’s statistics, Megaphone magazine authored a report last year, Dying on the Streets, which showed the median age of death for a homeless person in B.C. is between 40 and 49 years of age. When compared to the average life expectancy of 82.9 years for British Columbians, we can see that homelessness cuts a person’s life nearly in half.
Worse, most of these deaths were preventable. Almost half, 47.7 per cent, of homeless deaths were “accidental,” which includes overdoses, drowning and motor-vehicle accidents. For the general population, accidental deaths accounted for only 18.3 per cent of investigated deaths.
We also can see that a homeless person in B.C. is twice as likely to die from homicide and suicide. And only 26.3 per cent died by natural causes, compared to 71.5 per cent of the general population.
Sadly, none of these numbers are too surprising. But what is shocking is that the provincial and federal governments continue to drastically underfund the solutions that would prevent these deaths.
According to the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, 1,725 unique individuals used an emergency bed in one of the region’s six emergency shelters last year. It’s a problem that’s only getting worse. The occupancy rate of these shelters went from 93 per cent in 2013-14 to an unsustainable 112 per cent in 2014-15.
There are only 175 year-round shelter beds in Victoria, and an additional 30 seasonal beds and 165 extreme-weather mats. The Coalition to End Homelessness estimates 367 units are needed to house the city’s chronically homeless. Victoria’s council has recently undertaken a number of ambitious actions to address this crisis, but the tent city shows we need to see more immediate and sustainable action from senior levels of government.
That the provincial government can’t fund enough shelter spaces for Victoria’s homeless, let alone the safe and secure housing they actually need, speaks volumes about its response to the crisis.
Over the past month, cities up and down the American west coast, from Los Angeles to Seattle, have declared a state of emergency around their homelessness crises. It is a country with a much starker problem, but also a more sober sense of the toll homelessness has on their communities.
On Monday, we observed Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, a sombre reminder of poverty’s real price. To honour these deaths, and to prevent any more premature homeless deaths, a state of emergency should be declared in Victoria, with a demand for immediate action to end homelessness. Too many lives count on it.
Sean Condon is the executive director of Megaphone, a magazine sold on the streets of Victoria and Vancouver by homeless and low-income vendors.
