Plan to End Homelessness panel holds public meeting
Causes of homelessness were analysed on Tuesday night during a meeting to tackle the burning issue, while individuals who once suffered homelessness shared their stories.
The Plan to End Homelessness Advisory Panel and Steering Committee held its first meeting with the aim of defining the problem at hand and looking at how people become homeless.
The meeting was one of four planned and will result in a draft plan to end homelessness in Bermuda.
Denise Carey, the director of the charity Home, said: “I must emphasise that it’s not only about persons who are homeless right now, but persons who are also on a pathway to homelessness.
“That is how we as a community will move from that emergency last-minute housing to being able to predict when someone is in a situation that is more likely than not to end in homelessness.”
Ms Carey said that a person’s home had to be physically sound, provide privacy and independence, and be considered legally theirs to be considered a home.
She said that because of this, homelessness could be classified into roofless, which included sleeping rough; houseless, such as those in temporary shelters; housing insecure, which includes people facing eviction or the threat of violence; and housing inadequate, such as those without electricity or running water.
She added that different factors are at play, such as immigration status, domestic violence, poverty and mental health.
Ms Carey said that those who suffered from poverty were less likely to seek the help they needed, particularly medical assistance.
She added that this had the knock-on effect of making a person withdraw from social circles that could offer support and lead to a struggle to hold employment that would help to keep them afloat.
During first sitting of the Plan to End Homelessness Advisory Panel, several individuals shared their experiences living rough.
One man said that he found himself spiralling from having a $100,000 salary and private healthcare to sleeping on a park bench and getting medication from the Mid-Atlantic Wellness Institute.
He told the group: “It is amazing how cold it is at night in July.
“You’d think it’d be hot, but I remember sleeping on the outside of this wall because there was an air conditioner down there and I was trying to get the heat coming off of it.”
The man said that his time being homeless let him see first-hand the pitfalls of institutional help, particularly how they collectively refuse to take on certain responsibilities.
He explained: “I know what it’s like trying to deal with financial assistance, saying to [the Department of] Financial Assistance that I’m not getting support from MWI, and then Financial Assistance saying ‘that’s not our problem, that has nothing to do with us, we just need you to fill out this paperwork’.”
He added: “I have a reading and writing disability, and no one helps me fill in the paperwork.
“If you don’t get the paperwork in on time, guess what ends up happening? Your food card gets cut off.
“The amount of times I’ve been inside MarketPlace, walking around and looking at the food with that severe temptation to steal some food and run out the door has been overwhelming.”
A woman told the panel that she became homeless overseas after being forced to leave the island for help and getting stranded for years.
The woman said that although she worked two jobs, she struggled to make ends meet and left Bermuda in March 2020 to “save my sanity”.
She said that because she could not afford to pay out of pocket to quarantine in a hotel, she was forced to stay in the United States, even when her living situation crumbled.
She said: “I was on the street.
“I stayed in different people’s houses, but I was living under a bridge for a few months with two other women.
“The only thing that got me through it was prayer.”
The woman said that between the shelters overseas and the shelters here, she had the same problem.
She explained: “People who stay down the shelter have to be out at 8 in the morning and come back at 5pm.
“If you’re not working, then where do you go? Where do you get something to eat?
“If it’s raining, then there’s no shelter, where do they go?
“If the mall is closed because it’s Sunday or a holiday, where do they go?
“If their family’s not there for them, where do they go?”
Another man said that he became homeless at age 15 when he left his abusive household and had been homeless ever since.
He said: “I had to choose between horrible and terrible.
“I chose to be out here. I had to go to school while on the street.”
He told the panel that he had done several things to get shelter, including going to prison.
The man said that many homeless people were often taken advantage of, and those who demanded more help were excluded.
He added that many were deemed “problematic” or “in the way”.
The man said: “Yes, there’s passion involved; yes, there’s emotion involved; yes, there’s anger involved.
“I may have been given food, but where am I going to heat it up?”
Ms Carey said that it is more difficult to pull out of poverty than might be initially thought and pointed out that the average cost of living could fall anywhere from $3,794 to $5,494 a month.
She explained that, for context, a person would have to save the wages from working 335 hours a month under the present minimum wage of $16.40 — nearly 12 hours of work every day — just to lift themselves out of poverty.
She added that this did not include the work needed to maintain one’s housing status and health.
Ms Carey said: “I couldn’t do all that, and I go to sleep in a bed.”
She added: “This is the impossible climb that our community has, and so when someone calls me to say somebody’s mad because someone’s outside their property, you’re not as mad as them.
“When you’re thinking ‘why don’t they just’, I need you to run through all of this in your mind so you can see how hard it is to ‘just’.”
Ms Carey said that because of the factors that generate homelessness and the pitfalls that prevent people from leaving it, homelessness was “a policy choice” rather than “a personal choice”.
She said: “What about this is attractive, where someone is saying ‘yeah, I want to be a part of this team’?
“It’s impossible, and that’s why we’re here.
“We’re here to not only say ‘people have the right to housing’, we need to have a deep understanding of why people are outside and why they are so frustrated.”
The next session of the community consultation will be held on February 6 at the Chamber of Commerce on Front Street at 6pm.
It will give an overview of the plan to end homelessness.
• The draft plan can be seen under Related Media
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