Women, Baby Boomers Swell Ranks of Vancouver's Homeless, Report Finds

By Frances Bula, The Globe and Mail

September 18, 2008

Canada

This small transition house is restricted to a group that many people would assume almost never experiences homelessness: women over 55.

But Ama House has been full from the day it opened four years ago, and demand is growing.

"Oh, definitely there's been an increase. There are more women all the time showing up in shelters," says Suzi Kennedy, who worked there for nearly four years.

That phenomenon is not a local blip. The final report from Metro Vancouver's homeless count released this week highlighted several trends that reveal how homelessness is changing.

The proportion of homeless women increased relative to homeless men between this year's count in March and the one three years ago. More than 600 of the 2,660 people counted that night were women. 

The number of older people who are homeless also increased noticeably. Almost 1,000 people were older than 45. The surveyors even found 32 people who were over 65. The number who have been on the street for more than a year grew to almost half.

Those trends are both worrying and somewhat puzzling for researchers, who say they aren't quite certain they know the reasons, but do see those trends as pointing to some ominous developments for the future: even more women, more older people, and more long-term street-entrenched homeless.
One demographic shift does seem clear.

"It's the boomers. That's what we're starting to see. Boomers are becoming seniors," says Alice Sundberg, the co-chair of Metro Vancouver's steering committee on homelessness. "These are people [who] had wild lives and they got themselves into drug problems early in life, and now they're more likely to be marginalized."

But along with those who got stuck in the bad fallout from the 1960s are other groups from the boomer generation.

"We continue to see our number of homeless seniors increase for all kinds of reasons," says Val MacDonald, who works with the New Westminster-based Seniors Services Society. 

They get evicted because they have drinking problems or they can't take care of themselves or their apartments properly. Then they can't find anything else in the region's shrinking pool of cheap apartments.

Or they are people who fall apart if a spouse dies.

One of her group's recent cases was a retired engineer from Ontario who ended up homeless and broke in the emergency ward of St. Paul's Hospital.
Upset and wanting a change after his wife of many years died, Ed sold his house, bought a van and started driving across Canada with just his pension to survive on. By the time he got to Vancouver a year later, he was at the end of his resources, physically and financially.

Older women are especially vulnerable to homelessness, those who work with them say. They're less likely to have pensions or saved money than men left on their own. And they're more likely to be taken advantage of and even abused by adult children. 

Most residents of the Bridge Housing for Women facility downtown are over 40, says Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Women's Resource Society, which manages Bridge.

Some of the homeless have spent decades on the fringe. Now they're getting older.

Keri Chalifoux, a Métis from Edmonton, moved to Vancouver in the late 1960s. She worked as a prostitute for years, living in the Downtown Eastside for 20 of them. "It was a different time then," she says.

Now she's in a wheelchair and has trouble breathing because of bouts of tuberculosis and drug use.

She cycled in and out of shelters and cheap hotels before landing at Bridge Housing.

Now she's one of the old gals of the Downtown Eastside.

"They call me mom," says Ms. Chalifoux, who has a weekly meeting with other older women at a local church where they sew and knit. She values the space she's been able to get at Bridge.

"Now that I'm older, it's harder for me to get around."

Ms. Abbott said the reason for women's homelessness is lack of money. "Older women are poorer and they often have fewer options for housing," she said.

Although women's homelessness appears to be increasing, one reassuring finding was that they typically are homeless for only a short period.

But homeless men, who are also getting older, are staying out on the street longer and they're sicker, with usually one or more health problem.

That combination is worrying, because it means there's a population that is entrenched in living outside for whom it's getting harder with every passing month to get back to a life approaching regular.

"When you've been out there for so long, for years, you develop way more problems," says Vancouver's veteran homelessness worker, Judy Graves. "The complexity of their issues is huge, so much that it's hard to get them back in." 

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