I spent Sunday afternoon at First United Church at Hastings and Gore, spelling off the regular staff while they went to a holiday party.
My friend Noel volunteers there and asked a few of his pals to help him out, fitting us out with nametags and emergency walkie-talkies.
I had been in the building before, checking out the services they offer street sex workers out of the Gore Street entrance. Knowing it had become a homeless shelter I had a picture in my mind of people sleeping on wooden pews, but nothing prepared me for what I saw and smelled first-hand.
First United lost its “congregation” about 10 years ago. Now, the nave, the chancel, the altar were buried by bunk beds stacked side by side, wall to wall, with a few corridors zig-zagging through the room.
At two in the afternoon, a funky low-lit sprawl of men and women slept, sat and chatted, some completely covered up on the white plastic-covered mattresses amid heaps of bedcovers and random clothing. Someone’s bare foot stuck out of an upper bunk at eye level, caked in puffed-up purple skin. Upstairs, the former chapel, a smaller sea of bunks, was waiting to be filled at 8 p.m. In the corridors, in random corners, passed out bodies curled around pillows and black plastic bags of possessions amid rank whiffs of urine.
Outside at the bus stop on Hastings, one man couldn’t even be bothered to dilute the hand sanitizer—he was pumping it straight into his mouth. Inside, a smiling older man with ruddy cheeks and a hunched-over back told me his hip was stabbing him with pain. He had fallen into a dumpster the night before.
“I like it here,” said one quiet older guy in a blue hoodie, waiting for dinner.
He recognized me as a former politician, and we chatted about Obama’s troubles with the Bush tax cuts. He had been homeless for 15 years.
“The staff treat you like adults, not like some of the other places.”
More than a hundred people were milling about waiting for dinner in the former gym: scrumptious-looking lasagna served by volunteers from a synagogue wearing blue surgical gloves.
A strung-out woman stumbled up to the reception area and asked for a rig to shoot up. Noel said we didn’t have to give them out, but I did, wondering how it got to this. Another friend helping out, a lawyer who used to be a police officer, was just angry at it all: “This is bullshit,” he kept saying.
The next night I went to hear U.K. writer Richard Wilkinson deliver the inaugural Liz and Bruce Welch Community Dialogue at SFU’s Woodward’s campus.
Wilkinson is co-author of The Spirit Level; Why Equality is Better for Everyone. His message was simple: in rich countries, a smaller gap between rich and poor means a happier, healthier and more successful population. It’s not absolute levels of poverty that matter, but relative levels within a given society. Societies that have the greatest disparities of income suffer from the lowest life expectancy, lowest literacy levels and the highest rates of mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction), imprisonment, violence, lack of social mobility and lots of other ills – without exception. The evidence was overwhelming (www.equalitytrust.org.uk).
Japan, Norway, Sweden and Denmark were the most equal countries; the U.S., Portugal, the U.K. and Singapore the least, based on the ratio of the top 20% of income earners to the bottom 20%.
Noel said 80% of the people at First United had mental illness issues. In Japan, 8% of the population suffers from mental illness; in the U.S.A., 27%.
If the U.K. were more equal, Wilkinson said, the murder rates would halve, mental illness would reduce by two-thirds and imprisonment would reduce by 80%.
The lineups at First United are getting longer. Canada’s income disparity gap is widening. Everything else, in light of Wilkinson’s research, is BS.