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The struggle to house our homeless and mentally ill is straining the system

October 16th, 2011 · 70 Comments

The Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addiction opened three years ago with the promise that it would be the place that would take on the hardest cases of people who were mentally ill, drug-addicted, sick and homeless, give them treatment and help them transition to a stable place to live.

It’s struggling, as I outline in a story I wrote based on an evaluation of the centre, partly because of the way it was hurried into existence. As a result, it ended up not admitting the most severe cases all the time, not monitoring how they were doing very well, and not having much success with transitions to other kinds of housing. Some of that can be fixed. But some is an ongoing struggle, because the centre’s staff are having a hard time figuring out where the people it treats can live after their time at the centre.

Not surprisingly, I see that Vancouver city staff are in the middle of a struggle to allocate their precious social-housing units that are starting to come on board, as the province’s new buildings are opened one after the other. The city wants to see the 1,500 units in those buildings go to people who are homeless, as detailed in a report released late Friday. But they’re facing enormous pressure from other agencies looking for places for their people — including, I can well imagine, the Burnaby Centre.

The reality is that, in spite of the enormous acquisition and building effort from the province in the last four years, there isn’t enough to go around in a system that keeps manufacturing homelessness.

For those who are interested in the full report on the Burnaby Centre, I’ve attached a link below:

Severed release version BCMHA Final Report

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