City officials joined people representing other local organizations to hold an event in the central Edmonton neighbourhood of Parkdale on Friday, breaking ground on the future site of buildings aimed at providing stability for homeless people when they are discharged from hospitals.
The project will see a former bus loop located at 8116 115 Ave. become the site of two buildings that will feature 24 private suites and is being undertaken by Jasper Place Wellness Centre, in partnership with the Royal Alexandra Hospital Foundation, and with support from the City of Edmonton.
Edmonton city council approved the sale of land at to Jasper Place Wellness Centre for $1 last year, and that transfer of ownership included a grant of up to $900,000, as part of the city’s Housing Accelerator Fund.
Mayor Amarjeet Sohi said he believes Edmonton is “going through a moment of opportunity” because the city, province and Ottawa are currently “really aligning together to scale up these kinds of models” despite sometimes disagreeing over how to share responsibility for addressing homelessness.
“That gives me hope,” he told reporters, adding he believes the Parkdale project is the most cost-effective way to address giving houseless people somewhere to go when they leave hospitals.
“This is a program that can be easily scaled up at the national level.”
Construction is set to begin this year.
Thirty-six private suites are already operating elsewhere in the city via the two-year-old Bridge Healing program that offers wraparound health-care services and the ability to access other resources to give houseless people help in obtaining identification documents, life skills and permanent housing.
Dr. Louis Francescutti, a public health professor at the University of Alberta who also works as an emergency room doctor at the Royal Alexandra Hospital, is a champion of the Bridge Healing program and agreed with Sohi that initiatives like the one in Parkdale could work in many parts of the country.
“Every city in this country and in Alberta has this problem of how to help people in their greatest moment of need,” he said. “I’ll still see a patient that’s suffering from frostbite that happened in January, and that young man that I saw two days ago lost his lower limbs because of frostbite.
“This program is meant to immediately solve problems like that but more importantly, it gives us an opportunity to develop a new model.”
Francescutti said that over the last two years, 444 patients have been through the Bridge Healing program and “a lot of them have gone on to permanent housing,” in some cases meeting friends through the program and moving into permanent housing together. He acknowledged that many also do not end up in permanent housing and so a project involving NAIT is looking at developing a chatbot using artificial intelligence to better understand the complex needs and challenges these people have.
“(This is) an innovative project that takes us one step closer to building an Edmonton where everyone has the care and support they need, and a safe and welcoming place to call home,” Coun. Ashley Salvador said of the Parkdale plan, noting that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of homeless Edmontonians has doubled.
“We’re helping break the cycle of discharging people into homelessness.”
“Jasper Place Wellness had this idea of helping people in a very disruptive way,” Francescutti said of the Parkdale project. “And I think this is very disruptive, because what it does is it takes the best elements of health care, it takes the best elements of community support.”
Morrel Wax, the vice-president of philanthropy and stakeholder engagement at the Royal Alexandra Hospital Foundation, said his organization is raising money to propel the initiative forward.
“When public and private and non-profit sectors work together toward a common goal, anything is possible,” he told reporters.
Francescutti said doctors, nurses and social workers at hospitals cope with significant “moral distress” when they have to “just put a bandage on … (homeless Edmontonians) and then just put them back on the street.”
He noted that in addition to helping those who are most in need, initiatives like the housing project in Parkdale directly benefit all Edmontonians because it can reduce the amount of emergency resources often needed to deal with homelessness.
“This will make things for the average citizen better,” Francescutti said. “It helps the system relieve a lot of the pressures we’re under today.
“The house itself gives people the opportunity to come together and start seeing the humanity moving forward.”
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