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The painful toll of the province’s homelessness crisis is on full display just steps away from the Law Courts in Vancouver, where a man has been hovering over a small steam grate on the sidewalk for weeks.
During Sunday’s pouring rain storm, the man was wrapped in soaking wet blankets while trying to stay warm atop the grate, which periodically vents steam on Nelson near Howe Streets in the city’s downtown core.A broken walker could be seen nearby. When asked if he was OK, the man nodded ‘Yes.’“It’s heart-wrenching,” said Dr. Paxton Bach, an addiction medicine specialist at St. Paul’s Hospital. On March 12, Global News spotted the same individual in a sleeping bag, writhing over the grate as drivers and pedestrians passed by.Last Friday, firefighters and paramedics attended after passers-by became concerned about the man’s well-being.“Nobody wants to be living in a wet suitcase on a steam grate in Vancouver in March,” said Bach. “But we’re not providing some of our poorest, most vulnerable citizens with viable alternatives.”With a limited number of shelter beds available and people not always feeling safe in shelters, Bach said we are seeing staggering amounts of visible poverty amid a toxic drug crisis.When individuals are struggling with basic human needs, it’s certainly a factor in terms of their use of substances and risk of overdose, he said. “The current strategy is not only failing us, but it’s also incredibly expensive, incredibly inefficient,” Bach told Global News in an interview on Monday.
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Bach, who also serves as the co-medical director for the BC Centre on Substance Use, said increased access to treatment options for substance use disorder is needed.Currently, he said, people in crisis are ending up in hospital emergency rooms, jails or other facilities not set up to provide housing and shelter affordably.Bach said we should be saddened and enraged to see people who are forced to live outside in conditions similar to the individual clinging to a sidewalk grate.“It’s heartbreaking and we’ve become quite inured to it, become quite used to it,” said Bach. “This has become our status quo in Vancouver, not even a status quo because we know the numbers are getting worse and worse each year.” “The system’s broken,” said Canadian Police Association president Tom Stamatakis. “We need to rethink what we’re doing.”Stamatakis lives in downtown Vancouver and said the harm reduction approach the city has taken for decades, is not working.Instead, he said, we need to build better supportive housing capacity for people who are struggling with substance use and/or mental health issues in the community so that they are actually supported.
“It’s sad, it’s sad when you walk around and you see what you see and what’s even more sad in my view, is that people seem to be OK with it,” Stamatakis told Global News in an interview. “They’re suffering, they’re living in squalor, we should not be OK with that.”Addressing the suffering on the streets is not a role for police to play, said Stamatakis, adding that firefighters and paramedics are overwhelmed with the overdose crisis. “There’s no coordinated response, there’s no ‘what’s the long-term strategy,’” said Stamatakis.On Monday, the steam grate near Vancouver’s BC Supreme Courthouse was bare while damp clothing, feces, used needles and other signs of someone in crisis, remained.BC Emergency Health Services (BC EHS) refused to disclose how many times paramedics have been called to this location this month, citing patient privacy.Vancouver Fire Rescue Services said members went to the intersection for a medical-related event about eight times within the last month, but could not confirm whether crews attended for one person or multiple individuals.“It breaks my heart and when I’m working in a hospital like St. Paul’s and were discharging people back to shelters and back to the street after investing all this time and money and energy and emotion into providing medical care,” Bach told Global News. “It really does feel Kafkaesque, it feels very perverse.” It’s not an effective use of hospital time and resources he said, while it’s wearing down the medical system.“It’s inhuman to be discharging people back to the same conditions that led them to seek hospitalization in the first place,” said Bach.
