Giving Compass' Take:

• Travis Lupick describes how Liz Evans pioneered the "housing first" approach to homelessness when she turned an old hotel into a living space for the homeless, often drug addicted and/or mentally ill people of Vancouver, Canada.

• How can philanthropy help scale the housing first model? What kind of support do homeless people need beyond housing? 

• Find out how funders can make an impact on homelessness. 

The Portland Hotel is located in a rough neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada, called the Downtown Eastside. An open-air drug market operates in a park across the street, and the benches there make it a popular spot for the neighborhood’s homeless people and alcoholics.

The hotel itself was built in 1908, and when Liz Evans took the keys in March 1991, 1908 was apparently the last time anyone had bothered to give it so much as a fresh coat of paint. It was a slum; paint peeled off the walls, the pipes leaked, the floor was filthy, and the lighting was dim. The Portland’s tenants were only there because it was one step better than living on the streets.

“We ended up being known as the ‘hotel of last resort,’” Evans remembers.

Evans had completed nursing school just one year earlier. She’d taken a job at Vancouver General Hospital but hated the way mental health patients were treated there, more as statistics than as people. And so she quit, took an interview with a nonprofit organization called the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, and got the job. Evans had been the only one to apply.

On paper, her job was to support 10 tenants at the Portland Hotel who were diagnosed with severe mental health issues. In fact, the entire hotel was hers to run as she saw fit.

Everyone who lived at the Portland was severely addicted to drugs or alcohol. Evans estimates that 95 percent were injection users. “They were treating themselves badly and treating each other badly because they didn’t feel like their lives were worth much,” she says. “I was getting to know people and listening to their stories. And always the common denominator was, ‘My life is worth shit, and I don’t matter.’ That was the piece that really made me think about my mum and think, ‘Well, fuck, these are just people in the world who don’t feel like their lives have a right to occupy space.’”

In recent years, a social policy that’s gained attention from governments across North America is called “housing first.” It posits that by giving a person a roof over their head, you begin to stabilize a person’s life to a point where they can then work on their addiction issues, mental health problems, prospects for employment, and relations with family and friends. If you first give a person a home and ensure that they can stay there, research shows that this degree of stability will give them the space and the time that they require to figure out the rest.

Read the full article about Liz Evans by Travis Lupick at YES! Magazine.