I met Margaret Jacobson in 1993 during a visit to a shelter in Hamilton, where I’d gone as a reporter to write a story on homeless people. Her face was deeply lined. Staff told me she was one of the city’s longest-surviving homeless women, having spent almost 10 years on the street. She was known as Princess Margaret.

I felt an immediate affection for her. She opened up about her childhood, of growing up with parents who were Pentecostal ministers. Later, I learned from Jacobson’s hospital files that she was one of the earliest victims of deinstitutionalization.

The policy began in the 1960s with the closure of psychiatric hospital beds — it was to be the first part of a plan to move people into the community. Over the next 20 years, more than 80 percent of the beds across Canada were closed, along with entire psychiatric hospitals.

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The problem, however, was that the second phase of the plan — community supports and housing for those patients — never materialized. Thousands were moved out of hospitals. Many ended up on the streets.

Each of Jacobson’s moves into temporary housing ended badly. She would be brought back to the hospital, often by ambulance, in a catatonic state and covered in bruises. Nurses would patch her up and discharge her again. One day, she refused to go back.

Instead, she slept in laundromats, in apartment lobbies, in store doorways and on friends’ couches. Two years after I met her, she died after falling and hitting her head in a sub shop. She was 51.

This dismantling of our mental health system played a key role in creating today’s crisis that sees more than 235,000 people living on our streets annually. Meanwhile, a high number of homeless people — 70 percent — have mental health problems.

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In 2012, I founded the Purses for Margaret Project, where I collect gently used purses and toiletries for homeless women. But in Hamilton, I often take food and clothing to a homeless fellow named Dimitri. He’s the new Margaret Jacobson.

Solutions do exist. Last year, Medicine Hat, Alta., became the first Canadian city to end chronic homelessness by providing housing with supports tailored to individual needs, and by catching people early when they first arrive in shelters.

To achieve this nationwide, all three levels of government must engage. We must accept that our one-size-fits-all shelter system does not work. We also need leaders who are willing to act with urgency, even if that means building temporary solutions, including tiny homes, to get people off the streets now.

Homelessness is not a choice. People like Jacobson have made that clear enough. The least we can do is stop looking away.

***

Denise Davy is a journalist and the author of Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets. She lives in Burlington, Ont.

This column first appeared in Broadview’s October/November 2022 issue with the title “Closing time.”

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