CALGARY – Jennifer Sputek is a believer in a program implemented four years ago that appears to be helping get people off the streets in the city that serves as Alberta’s corporate capital.
Now 34, and with twin boys who just turned 12, she went to prison in 2008 for trafficking cocaine. When she was released last year, she had nowhere to go.
After years in and out of the young offender system, she talks frankly about being a child prostitute, serving time for armed robbery and getting addicted to crack. Her marriage to a dealer ended when he overdosed on morphine and died.
“I woke up and he was dead,” she recounted at a news conference Monday.
“I had no job skills, no education. I started to sell crack and for 10 years I functioned in the community.”
Sputek is now living in subsidized housing as part of the Calgary Homeless Foundation’s 10-year plan.
The foundation says data from a Jan. 18 survey, along with information gleaned from social agencies, indicates there were 3,190 homeless people on the streets – an 11.4 per cent decline since a similar survey in 2008 turned up 3,601 people without homes.
The foundation says there would have been as many as 4,200 homeless people in Calgary by this year if a trend dating back to 1992 had continued.
Sputek knows what she would be doing if she hadn’t caught a break.
“If I didn’t live in subsidized housing, I would be selling crack, and I would be living in some crappy apartment and paying $1,500 for rent and bills, and trying to find a way to keep my special-needs kid in school,” she said.
“It’s not a ghetto-living environment. It’s an actual apartment building. We live in communities as opposed to just putting us in crappy buildings. They are helping us build communities.”
The 10-year plan aims at reducing chronic homelessness and emergency shelter use. It wants to find homes for 1,500 people by 2014 and eliminate 85 per cent of emergency shelter beds by 2018.
“It’s way too early to declare victory,” said Tim Richter, president and CEO of the foundation. “There’s a lot of work left to do. There’s about 14,000 households at risk. We expect many of them cycle in and out of homelessness.
“We’ve got to find a way to stop that flow in and out of the system.”
Migration is also having an impact on family homelessness, said Richter. More aboriginal and immigrant families are moving to Calgary and need housing and support.
“We’d like to talk to the federal government about more involvement, especially when it comes to aboriginal communities,” he said. “What you’re seeing in Attawapiskat is happening in Alberta. It’s happening within 50 miles of Calgary … that housing situation, the crime, the poverty on the reserve, we’re going to have to deal with that.”
A University of Calgary study indicates 63 per cent of all shelter users in Alberta are in Calgary, compared with 28 per cent in Edmonton.
On a related note, a report released Monday by the group Action to End Poverty in Alberta and Vibrant Communities Calgary suggests the “external” social and economic cost of poverty in the province in 2009 was between $7.1 and $9.5 billion.
The groups say they calculated the costs of health care, crime and lost economic opportunities for children and people living in poverty. The figures don’t include direct expenditures on programs and social services.
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