Toronto's white underbelly

from the Globe and Mail

Globe reporter Kate Hammer, recently from New York City, asked a question almost no one else had thought to: Why, in a city that is nearly 50-per-cent visible minorities, are the homeless mainly white men? As she hunted for answers, she discovered the status quo is already shifting

KATE HAMMER

With reporting from Rick Cash

David White, 50

He's been homeless since his wife and daughter died in a car accident.

'Sometimes [living on the street] is better. You don't have to deal with people and you don't have to worry about people.'

Adam Matthew Mansillo, 29 He is a crack-addicted panhandler.

'Part of the [problem] is the way the immigrants are living here and creating competition for jobs.'

Ber G., age not given

He has lived on the streets for 15 years and has four teenagers he rarely sees.

'I don't have to live on the street. I chose to. I'm a heroin addict.'

Pressing his face against the shelter's cold iron bars, Russell Mulligan stared across George Street at his brother's house.

Mr. Mulligan, 41, has been living on the streets and in homeless shelters for more than a decade and he knows his family worries about him. He has four sisters and a brother, his parents are still alive, but he can't bring himself to ask for help.

He is thin, tired, addicted to crack and alcohol, and like most of Toronto's homeless, he is white.

White men have long been overrepresented in Canadian politics, company boardrooms, academia and newsrooms. In the City of Toronto, they are also overrepresented in the homeless population: As much as 70 per cent of the homeless population is white, compared to only 50 per cent of the general population, according to academic surveys.

As one of the world's most diverse cities, Toronto could be of particular interest because the pale monochromy of its homeless population defies the trend set by other major North American cities.

New York surveys indicate Caucasians make up only a small percentage of the homeless population, which is primarily black and Latino. City surveys indicate that in Boston, the racial breakdown of the homeless population closely mirrors that of the general population. In Vancouver, aboriginals account for a disproportionately high percentage of the population.

"A native-born ethnic minority that has suffered from discrimination and poverty is going to be overrepresented in the homeless population," said Dr. Stephen W. Hwang.

The University of Toronto professor, who investigates inner-city health, says, "that's true for aboriginal people, it's true for African Americans."

But, for the moment, "street" Toronto still represents the white, Anglo-Saxon place the city was only a few short decades ago.

Experts refer to a group called the "chronic homeless." The majority of the homeless population, they have been living on the streets for years, or even decades.

These street veterans echo another era, when visible minorities constituted only 17 per cent of the population of the whole Greater Toronto Area (in 1986), according to Statistics Canada. For the 2006 census, visible minorities constituted nearly 43 per cent of the population of the GTA. In Toronto proper, the figure is higher, at 46.9 per cent.

FROZEN MOMENT IN TIME

Mr. Mulligan, also known as "Mugsy," stood outside the Seaton House homeless shelter on a recent sunny afternoon catching up with his friend "Pops." Mugsy and Pops compare their pale skin colour to date stamps. Both are middle-aged white men who have struggled with drug addiction and have been homeless for years. And both have a network of family members they won't turn to for help.

Pops declined to use his real name because his family isn't aware that he has been living in a homeless shelter for years.

"Canadian men are taught that you're supposed to leave the house at a certain age and stand on your own two feet," Mugsy said sarcastically.

"We're just a snapshot of an old Toronto. ... " said Pops.

"It's certainly true that there are certain ethnic groups that are very well represented in the general population of Toronto but who are rarely seen in homeless shelters," said Dr. Hwang. His data, which are some of the only statistics on race and homelessness in Toronto, have indicated people of southeast Asian descent, in particular, aren't filling the city's shelters or sleeping on its benches and subway grates.

This may be due to the fact that homelessness and mental health are tightly entangled: Nearly 70 per cent of Toronto's homeless population report a history of mental illness.

In what Dr. Hwang called a "healthy immigrant effect," foreign-born Toronto residents are less likely to suffer from mental illness than Canadian-born residents. This may be due to the fact that immigrants are screened for mental illness before they are allowed to reside in Canada.

Another factor which may inoculate Toronto's immigrant population against homelessness is the wide network of family support that exists among residents of a new country. When Ruichun Tang came to Toronto seven years ago with her husband, she left a large and far-flung family at home in China. Soon after she arrived she began receiving e-mails from distant cousins and uncles, asking for help in finding housing in Toronto.

"I remembered it was such a struggle coming here that I helped them any way that I could," she said.

Her family passed her phone number on to more distant cousins, and the neighbours of cousins, and before long Ms. Tang became a settlement counsellor at Woodgreen Community Services. Many of her relatives cram several families into small apartments, they co-operate to pay the bills and care for their children, and they support each other through financial difficulties.

"To let people just drift out onto the streets just isn't part of their culture," said Michael Shapcott, a senior policy analyst for the Wellesley Institute, an independent urban health research and policy institute based in Toronto.

CHANGE IS COMING

Holes are beginning to show in the safety nets provided by Ms. Tang and others like her. According to Maisie Lo, director of immigrant services at Woodgreen, Toronto's Asian community has exploded over the past 10 years and the city's homeless population will begin to reflect that growth. Asians won't be alone. The city's swiftly changing population can't help but be mirrored in the streets.

Pops and Mugsy, for instance, said that they have only recently begun to see shelter beds occupied by people of Asian or Latino descent.

"We never used to see the immigrants in the shelters - but we're seeing more of them all the time," said Pops.

Outside Seaton House sat Fernando Lopez, 44, a political refugee from Colombia. Mr. Lopez stared through dark aviator glasses across George Street, but where Mugsy had seen the family, Mr. Lopez saw a row of anonymous houses occupied by strangers whose language he doesn't speak.

Through a translator, Mr. Lopez said he's only met one other Latino in Toronto's shelter system, a Cuban man who stayed only briefly. He said he was sometimes lonely.

Mr. Lopez and the Cuban could be part of a growing trend. But without hard data, no one knows for certain.

Though Toronto's ethnic diversity is well documented, routinely measured and scrutinized, the racial breakdown of its homeless population remains a sensitive issue.

For the 2006 Streets Needs Assessment, a homelessness survey conducted by the City of Toronto, more than 100 questions were asked. Respondents were not asked about race unless they were of aboriginal descent.

As city council prepares to vote whether to bolster the Streets to Homes program, a city strategy aimed to help take panhandlers off the streets and into housing, with a $5-million-a-year budget, questions about how to most efficiently and effectively address homelessness in Toronto have rippled through City Hall.

While race has not coloured that discussion, some argue that statistics on ethnicity and race could galvanize the way Toronto deals with homelessness. "We need to have more culturally appropriate shelters, detox centres and support," said Lesa MacPherson, a housing worker at Regent Park Community Health Centre, who said she has seen a growing number of African men who have been ostracized by their families, kicked out onto the streets because of addiction or mental illness.

Ms. MacPherson suspects that this population of single African men is growing. Without a more intimate understanding of where these men come from, the languages they speak and the obstacles that act like bars, both real and imagined, to accessing help, she can't tailor her support.

"There's been a reluctance to collect statistics based on racial categories," said Mr. Shapcott.

According to the Wellesley Institute analyst and other experts, Toronto's city officials have distanced themselves from their urban American neighbours - who have wrestled with race in very public and sometimes violent ways - by "burying their heads in the sand."

The experts say there is a prevailing nervousness that observing homelessness through the lens of race may lead to segregationist policies, but that there's important potential value in these data.

And, "there are cultural realities that need to be accommodated," Mr. Shapcott said. Muslim men, for instance, sometimes experience shame in asking for help with an addiction, or Asian families sometimes need housing that can accommodate a network of extended family.

Contrarily, some experts feel that the practical applications of data on race wouldn't significantly benefit the homeless population. According to Katherine Chislett, a director for the City of Toronto's Shelter, Housing and Support division who is part of the Streets to Homes initiative, there are more important data to collect. "I'm not saying it's not important, but it just wasn't important enough for us in terms of providing support," she said.