Employed and Homeless in Mississauga

Working but homeless in Mississauga

By: Jean Carter
Published: August 28, 2008
CBC News

Say "homeless person" and most Canadians picture a scruffy-looking man on a street corner in the downtown core of a big, bustling city.

That's not necessarily the reality. Mississauga – a satellite city west of Toronto that projects an image of homogeneous, suburban prosperity – and the surrounding region of Peel are home to a million people. Ten-and-a-half thousand of them used housing shelters last year. Three thousand of those were children.

Alfred is a 61-year-old sufferer from Parkinson's disease who fits the stereotype. It makes him seem drunk when you encounter him on the street. He was also the victim of a bad gambling habit that cost him his job, family and former life.

He slept in a park for eight months before officials found him a home in Millbrook Place, the region's first new affordable housing project in 10 years.

But the new, and fast-growing, profile of homelessness is of an immigrant mother with children. People like Joyce Appiah from Ghana, who had to quit her job to look after her children when she lost the place she'd been sharing with relatives. Now she and her daughters, aged five and two, are crammed into a small room in a former hotel turned emergency shelter.

And there's Anab Ali, who came here from Somalia several years ago, and has moved from community to community in search of a home she can afford. Right now she shares a single room in an emergency shelter with her three children, the smallest a nursing baby.

The shelter is the only option for women like these. Yet as Mississauga Councillor Patricia Mullin points out, the city's goal is to get rid of shelters. Mississauga – like every other fast-growing city – needs a Canadian housing strategy, she says. Not shelters, not public housing projects where generation after generation remain stuck in substandard housing – but a government strategy for building affordable homes.

It's a measure of how far out of reach affordable housing has become that in one Mississauga shelter four of every 10 people are working poor. "Not bums on the street," says Mullin. "They go to work every day. They just don't have a place to live!"

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Click here to access the original story on CBC online. Jean Carter gives an audio report on the changing nature of homelessness.