Giving Compass' Take:

• The 'Hotel of Last Resort' started as a housing facility for people suffering from mental illness and drug addiction. The hotel offered them a home and accommodated individuals' needs and eccentricities. 

• The author talks about the 'housing first' social policy that promotes the idea that if you house someone first, they will be able to solve their mental health issues. How effective is this approach in comparison with others? 

• Read more about housing first policies in the U.S. that health systems are trying to take on as an effort to reduce health care costs. 

The Portland Hotel is located in a rough neighborhood of Vancouver, Canada, called the Downtown Eastside. 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. “We ended up being known as the ‘hotel of last resort,’” Evans remembers.

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.

There were a lot of empty rooms in the hotel, so Evans also began to fill them up, taking people in off the street who were blacklisted from everywhere else. After just a few weeks, Evans was responsible for 60 or 70 people. “People who came with mental health issues, HIV, criminal histories, and drug use,” she says. “That is who needed the support.”

Everyone who lived at the Portland was severely addicted to drugs or alcohol. Evans estimates that 95 percent were injection users. But, the primary goal was not to fix people, but to give them a space to live in the greatest degree of comfort that the Portland could create.

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.

Read the full article about the hotel of last resort by Travis Lupick at YES! Magazine