How to get the homeless off the streets? Give them a home.

Housing First Program aims to end Homelessness

15 Jun How to get the homeless off the streets? Give them a home.

They show up in the emergency room and in the back seat of police cars. Sometimes they spend the night in a jail cell. The next day they might be hollow-eyed, hung-over, and hanging onto a grocery cart or hanging out on Leon Street…they are Kelowna’s homeless and how they got there is often complicated.

Every city has its areas where the homeless convene, their sleeping bags lain out on the concrete, their meager bunch of possessions bundled beside them, but what can be done to get them off the streets?

The Kelowna branch of the CMHA has a novel idea. Put them in houses.

Click to read the first of a two-part piece on Housing First, published in the Kelowna Daily Courier.