You’ve never tasted desperate. You’re Bruce Wayne, the Prince of Gotham; you’d have to go a thousand miles to meet someone who didn’t know your name. So don’t come down here with your anger, trying to prove something to yourself. This is a world you’ll never understand. And you always fear what you don’t understand.
Carmine Falcone to Bruce Wayne, Batman Begins (2005)
I used to be homeless for five years. I’ve spent three of those volunteering daily on the front lines, during which I was essentially a backup outreach worker. I’ve known desperation, and ever since I’ve been surrounded by it.
This is a world beyond the reach of outsiders. In order to understand, you’d have to burn your wallet, trade your nice coat for a scruffy one, then hop on a cargo ship as a stowaway to foreign lands whose language you can’t spell.
Even advocates who lack lived experience don’t quite get it, as I’ve sometimes had to stress out. The best advocates among them are those who realize they don’t get it, because then they talk less and listen more.
Trust me: you do not belong, and you do not want to belong.
But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to this member of the Crazy Indians Brotherhood who’s been there and back, and nowadays patrols on Pandora Avenue like he does belong:
People always ask me why I move the way I do; the truth is, we’re not the same. I didn’t learn life from a class or from behind a desk, I learned it from the streets through addiction, violence, loss, and heartlessness; it nearly cost me my life. Today when I walk beside our relatives I’m not looking down on them, I’m looking across at them. I’ve stood where they’re standing. This organization isn’t just something I belong to, it’s a part of who I am. It gave me a chance to turn my pain into purpose and my past into service. So when you see me out there, understand this: it’s not for attention, recognition, or approval, it’s because I know what it feels to believe no one cares. And if I can be the one person who shows up for someone else, then every step is worth it. We are not the same.
I’m about to give you a sneak peek into that world. By the end of this article you still won’t get it, but at least you’ll know you don’t, and that’ll be progress. Because nothing hurts advocacy work like prejudice from those presuming to be experts because they read the National Post.
Who are homeless people?
In one word, homeless people are largely invisible.
I can see you frown from here. I know you walk downtown and see homeless people all over the place. So they’re not invisible, right?
Well, look at that person beside you while you’re staring at that beggar—who by the way isn’t homeless. I’m talking about the construction worker eating a sandwich during his break, who happens to sleep at an overnight shelter. The woman in a suit who zips past you? She’s homeless too, and you would never have guessed. Same for that couple of tourists sleeping at the nearby hostel, except they’re not tourists, they’re stranded on the island with nowhere to go. There were ten unhoused people around you, and the one person that caught your attention wasn’t one of them.
The 2025 Point-in-Time Count identified about 1750 people experiencing homelessness in the Greater Victoria Area. There may be twice as many for all we know, since the homeless are good at hiding and difficult to approach. Of these you only spot a couple hundreds, if that. The rest are hiding in plain sight. They’re couch surfing, they stay at hostels, they sleep at the workplace.
Many of course stay at shelters, which are chronically overcrowded. The rest sleep rough or camp wherever they can, preferably out of sight, and vanish before you even know they were there. Some hardly sleep at all and just keep moving, because nowhere is safe to rest.
Homelessness means being in survival mode, and survivors hide. This is a big part of the problem, because help cannot reach those forced to hide.
How people end up homeless
There are more reasons people end up homeless than there are homeless people.
Sometimes the reason is obvious, like for that veteran who lost both legs on a land mine. Even then, the real problem may be severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can be more of an obstacle to housing than mobility issues.
Often it’s not clear at a glance what the cause is, even though it looks like a plain mental health and addiction issue. A victim of chronic sexual abuse may be loathe to open up to strangers, for example.
And then there are those who don’t even know why they’re on the streets. Those clients are riddles, and solving them requires extraordinary patience. Especially when coupled with mental health disorders.
There are nonetheless many recurring causes, addiction only one among a vast lot. Brain injuries caused by concussions, for example, show we’re all one bad fall away from destitution. A significant portion of people on the streets are migrants, often refugees, some facing a language barrier. Domestic violence is a common factor, as are workplace injuries, mental illness, old age, illiteracy, wrongful evictions, prejudice toward minorities, and countless more.
Most people shudder at the thought of becoming homeless. But homelessness is only the culmination of the unhoused’s ordeal, and usually isn’t the worst part by any means. Every person who ends up on the streets fell between the cracks of the system, through the meshes of society’s safety net. Solving homelessness means first and foremost addressing whatever issue got them rock bottom in the first place. In other words, homelessness is the symptom of systemic social dysfunction, not the actual problem.
Drugs?
I know you want to talk about drugs. But that’s a different problem.
Many believe there’s a one-on-one correspondence between unhoused people on the streets and hard drug users. That’s a gross overgeneralization. Only a minority of homeless people are drug users, and the number one abused substance is alcohol, surpassing all other drugs combined; I swear I’ve seen more people destroy their livers with vodka than overdose on fentanyl. Conversely, only a minority of drug users are homeless, the rest being people with stressful jobs or working night shifts, university students with part-time jobs struggling to cope, chronic pain patients denied opioid painkillers, PTSD patients requiring psychedelics, and so forth. Someone in your household could be doing hard drugs or abusing prescription drugs and you might never find out.
Another common misconception is that homelessness is caused by drug use. In my experience it’s more often the converse: people start doing street drugs once they hit the streets. In fact, many take methamphetamine, a most potent stimulant, because they have nowhere safe to sleep; ‘meth’ allows them to stay awake and vigilant for three or four days straight. As for fentanyl, it’s often the only opioid painkiller available, and a convenient way to numb oneself once life has become insufferable.
Yet another source of prejudice is the notion that users are screwups who should just have said no to drugs in the first place. Often someone’s first exposure to drugs is in clinical settings, either during surgery or being prescribed opioid painkillers by a family doctor. The number one ‘gateway drug’ is actually oxycodone, at the centre of a massive overprescription racket; OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma has recently been dissolved after a rare corporate criminal conviction. Think about that before casting the first stone, because the opioid epidemic has largely been caused by the pharmaceutical industry’s unchecked greed, the dividends of which being deposited to your pension fund.
Bouncing back from rock bottom
Everyone who ends up on the streets has to be treated like a posturgent case. The longer people remain unhoused, the more their condition deteriorates; they become more likely to despair, get assaulted, become traumatized, resort to substance abuse, catch a sexually transmitted disease, end up incarcerated, and even commit suicide. The longer they remain drifting, the harder the recovery, and the bleaker their prospects.
For most people the obvious first step is to find an overnight shelter. Unfortunately those are chronically at capacity and wait lists can be excruciatingly long, especially in winter. Besides, these aren’t a proper option for many clients. For example, the stress of sleeping surrounded by strangers and subjected to sporadic violence and theft deters many from using them. Another factor is that some people are just too disruptive for shelters, from those who snore as loudly as a tractor to those who sleepwalk or yell bloody murder in their sleep; these may have to find refuge in the woods altogether.
The next step up the ladder is to get admitted in a transitional shelter, waiting to get into supportive housing. This is much like an overnight shelter, except it operates around the clock, while residents are fed and provided onsite amenities like laundry and showers. That’s a huge improvement, especially for those who need to lie down during the day, a near impossibility otherwise. Even then, residents shouldn’t simmer in purgatory for an indefinite amount of time; in my experience the breaking point for most people is two years, at which point despair sets in and minds break down.
In order to get into supportive housing, one usually needs to be recognized as a Person With Disabilities, which is a lot harder than cynics think. The process is also utterly degrading. Both bureaucrats and health care professionals presume applicants are whining screwups and suckups who need to be classified under some kind of demeaning psychiatric disorder, something I refer to as the ‘disability plea deal’, in order to earn their designation and pittance. The worst part is that many applicants genuinely need health care yet the system has no patience for them, to the point that they struggle to obtain a valid diagnosis, to say nothing of proper treatment. Trust me, every time I’ve met with a doctor for this purpose I felt so insulted I wanted to kick them in the face; once I even slammed the door in outrage.
The whole process takes at least two years, even for urgent cases. I spent five months at an overnight shelter before getting admitted to a transitional shelter, then four years and six months before my turn came for supportive housing—and don’t get me started about disability, especially since mine is essentially invisible and doctors can’t spell it. Even then, I was more fortunate than most; a great many don’t make it through alive, or drop out once they lose their minds.
Displacement kills
So what happens to those who cannot enter a shelter, either due to bed shortage or because it is inadequate?
The unsheltered are basically illegal people, preyed upon by the system. While indigence is no longer a crime, municipal governments still enjoy tremendous discretion to constructively chase away the homeless beyond their boundaries. Under a system which criminalizes poverty, two likely outcomes are jail and death.
I swear, for having experienced both the streets and jail, that the latter is the better option. Once again don’t just take my word for it, but that of this criminal defence lawyer:
“I’ve had three clients this week asking to extend their time in custody. The extreme housing crisis, fear of dangerous drugs on the street and general lack of resources, it’s all real. And a terrible indictment of society when the best people can do is jail.”
Melanie Begalka, criminal defence lawyer
The notorious ‘bylaw sweeps’ are of course largely to blame, because they compel displacement. The worst challenge for clients navigating the system is to keep in touch with outreach workers; if they’re forced to move around all the time, contact becomes nearly impossible to maintain. This means clients cannot access services or secure housing because they cannot be notified when their turn comes. Furthermore, BC Housing requires applicants to confirm every six months lest their names are struck off the list, which isn’t a realistic expectation for people lacking any stability.
Furthermore, bylaw officers kick them on the ground rather than help them back on their feet. Their belongings are routinely disposed of, even when they would gladly pack up and move along, and gratuitously so—especially when advocates and legal observers aren’t watching. This makes the unsheltered far more likely to resort to crime in desperation, thus fuelling the homelessness-jail cycle.
Among the crassiest things known for bylaw officers to dispose of is identification papers. Without ID, one isn’t legally a person. Without ID, one cannot open a bank account, find a job, rent an apartment, apply for benefits, obtain health care, or navigate the justice system. In fact, without ID one can hardly get replacement ID, especially without anyone vouching for them.
As the restrictions keep piling up and challenges mount, survival becomes nearly impossible. The law turns into a noose and enforcement a death sentence. The indigent have to keep moving until they drop dead from a thousand cuts.
In desperation, three unsheltered residents of this city filed a constitutional challenge to the Parks Regulation Bylaw’s latest amendments closing parks with amenities to overnight sheltering, thus displacing encampments to the outskirts of town far from services. One of the petitioners died within weeks of the filing; far from being vindicated, his name was unceremoniously struck off the petition. Prior to that, an old man with limited mobility, who couldn’t comply with the bylaw, hanged himself to a tree on the day he was set to be evicted from an encampment.
Housing is only the beginning
Even those who manage to obtain housing may not be out of the woods. Just in the past month I’ve met two formerly unhoused people who were back on the streets after getting wrongfully evicted. Which shows that without addressing social ills like the housing crisis and the lack of tenant protection from predatory landlords, finding clients homes merely sets them up for perpetual failure.
Housing First is a recovery-based approach prioritizing housing as the central aspect of addressing homelessness. In many cases, when clients are ready to move on from the onset, that is indeed the way to go. Besides, I already warned against keeping them in shelters indefinitely, even transitional ones.
In practice though, I prefer a more gradual approach putting clients, not housing, at the centre of the intervention plan. Because rushing them into shoeboxes without a proper assessment then forgetting about them is unfortunately how Housing First is implemented by bureaucrats who care not to read the fine print, often with disastrous results like immediate relapse or death.
Allow me to tell you the story of A, who used to be my neighbour for several months in a supportive housing complex, as the perfect example of the entire intervention pipeline going awry. I share it with apprehension, even anonymized, and deliver it with a trigger warning; if you prefer swallowing the blue pill at this point, by all means, just press the back button on your browser and believe whatever you want to believe.
A moved into our single room occupancy building after experiencing homelessness in this city. We could all tell from the onset that he would be a difficult tenant. Oh, he was charming in his own way, and I’ve had some nice exchanges with him about what he aspired to in life. Yet he continually stood out as needy and mercurial, and it quickly became obvious that our building was a poor fit for him.
For starters, A had guest issues, the number one cause of evictions from supportive housing. He was easily taken advantage of, to the point that the ‘buddies’ he let in would continually break into his room and rob him blind. He had mood swings and inarticulate frustrations, which once led him to smash our flat screen TV with a chair. He became acutely depressed and relapsed into drug use, even though he admitted he wasn’t even addicted; he just wanted to numb himself. Once he overdosed and I had to bring him back with naloxone. Soon he expressed suicidal ideation altogether. I swear advocating for him turned into a part-time job.
One evening shortly after another overdose he hunkered inside his room doing drugs again and flat out admitted he wanted to die. The outreach staff called in the police instead of a mental health outreach team, against my advice, which turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea. At first I intended to stay out of it, but when I witnessed my own George Floyd moment with four cops literally piled on top of him, I snapped into legal observer mode out of concern that they would indeed choke him to death.
The following clip is an excerpt of that I recorded that evening, while the police attempted to handcuff him as he was being apprehended under the Mental Health Act:
Those thugs had no clue what they were doing. Don’t just take my word for it, listen to the patient literally screaming it.
Despite the ordeal he was back into his room before midnight, since he had enough presence of mind to refuse all treatment. Naturally, the incident made him even more suicidal; instead of merely wanting to die (as in not caring whether he lived) he started making imminent plans to kill himself, and I soon had to intervene again, except this time the cops used a more tactful approach—if only because by then they knew who was his immediate neighbour—and we were able to talk things out in a civilized manner instead. Let that be a warning to whoever naïvely believes involuntary commitment is a magical solution to mental health crises and drug use.
Just about anyone would have given up on A at this point. That being said, I was his neighbour, as opposed to a figure of authority, and listening is one of my strong points; I would sometimes put up with his rambling for half an hour straight, paying attention to details most people would dismiss as trivial. For example, that he felt strongly apprehensive of his facial appearance, in particular wearing a snow hat even indoors to hide his large ears. An advocate with clinical knowledge would immediately start connecting the dots, as facial features may be characteristics of a genetic disorder—especially in conjunction with behavioural issues.
Soon after I found what the problem was: fragile X syndrome. It is indeed a genetic disorder, whose symptoms include a long face, large ears, irritability, and hyperflexible fingers; I was able to prove it by showing his finger joints bent backward like they were made of rubber. A cursory examination would have sufficed to diagnose the condition from the onset, but because he was reflexively dismissed as yet another mental health and addiction screwup he went through the entire pipeline without obtaining the treatment he needed, and landed in the wrong building. In other words, he was set up for failure.
A was evicted soon after. He was offered a transfer to a more fitting facility, which disallowed visitors, but he refused. This time I did no intervene, if only because I was in agreement. An advocate isn’t an apologist, or a saviour; in the end, clients have to help themselves. I met A more than a year later on the streets and he was still unhoused. I’m confident he will find his way through eventually, but it belongs to him to accept the help he’s being offered.
The system might think it knows better, but I’ve just shown exactly why forceful intervention is hubris. Clients cannot be squeezed into a mould they do not fit in, especially against their will. With a more humane approach, this fiasco might have been avoided altogether.
If you must retain one lesson from this story, it’s that society needs advocates with lived experience, living in the community, in order to address homelessness. Because the rest of you don’t get it, and probably never will. Trust me, you do not belong, and you do not want to belong. Leave intervention to those who do.
If you witness a mental health emergency falling short of violent escalation, you may call the Crisis Response, Community Led (CRCL, or ‘circle’) team as an alternative to the police; avoid calling 911 for this purpose, and instead dial 250 818 2454 (Victoria).
If you want to hear more about homelessness from those with lived experience, have a look at the Existence Project, which publishes extensive interviews and documentaries on the topic.
There are multiple ways to get involved as an ally. For instance, you may reach out to the advocacy group Neighbourhood Solidarity with Unhoused Neighbours (NSUN). The Peer2Peer Indigenous Society also issues frequent calls for volunteers.