Pillars of support: Against all odds, housing workers keep homes steady

CrossCurrents

By Dan Werb

Paula Wynter has been a housing support worker with the Toronto branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) for five years. In her business, that means she’s a veteran, one of the few who have maintained the resolve needed to battle the ongoing series of crises these frontline workers face everyday. The day I spent with her on the job exposed me to an entirely different city, one that most of us hear about only tangentially or read about in newspaper bylines, but never experience ourselves.

Paula and I had planned an hour-long interview at her Toronto office to start our day together. But within minutes of meeting Paula – a warm and energetic woman with a confident manner and a ready laugh – it became clear that something was amiss in the office. We were ushered into a quiet room where the housing manager, in no uncertain terms, laid out the top priority. One of CMHA’s housing clients had harmed himself and had been rushed to hospital early that morning. As staff was overstretched by other emergencies, it was up to Paula to go to the apartment and deal with the situation.

Our hour-long interview would have to wait, as would Paula’s other engagements. While she hurriedly packed up her bag, a man’s voice could be heard on the answering machine, politely requesting that he be moved to a new apartment with a balcony, in order to ease his night terrors. “I was hoping I’d have some time to sit and discuss the program with you,” says Paula as we rush out the door. “But I’ve got to deal with this crisis.”

The term “housing support worker” is misleading and obfuscates the intensity of this line of work. “Most people think it’s just sitting at a desk and making calls to landlords,” says Paula, as we speed across town toward the apartment building. “They’ve got no idea.” Most days, Paula is on the road making house calls, calming the fears of her clients and the landlords who house them, and meeting with prospective superintendents in a bid to secure more housing for her clients. Although she plans her day meticulously, carving out the most efficient route to her many different appointments, most days – as evidenced by this morning’s events – don’t go as planned.

CMHA is one of Toronto’s biggest providers of housing for people with mental health and addiction issues. With over 400 housing units (mostly one-bedroom and bachelor apartments) scattered across the city, the organization is well positioned to cater to the diverse needs of its clientele. “Mental health is invisible – there isn’t money or colour or class attached to it,” says Paula. The clients she deals with come from a variety of backgrounds. Although she tries her best to make sure her clients get housing that appeals to them, she follows one cardinal rule: “If I wouldn’t live in it, I wouldn’t house a client in it,” she says.

The housing units are supervised by only seven housing support workers, which means there are more than 50 clients for each worker, a huge burden of responsibility. When asked whether her training helps her with the many issues she faces, Paula shakes her head. “The textbook stuff just doesn’t apply in a lot of situations,” she says. “Each client is different, each landlord, each superintendent.”

Housing support workers are often the first to respond in crisis situations. Rather than committing herself solely to clients’ needs, however, Paula and her colleagues must also be attuned to the needs of the landlords and superintendents they deal with every day. Much of Paula’s job involves being a spokesperson for CMHA’s housing program to those individuals holding the keys to the rooms she covets. Often, she explains, the initial meeting with a landlord is an educational seminar more than anything; she must explain what CMHA does and what her role is, and address any prejudices – real or unfounded – the landlord might have toward renting to people with mental illness or addiction issues.

Checking in on clients and meeting with landlords, however, is only a fraction of Paula’s job. The full intensity of her work becomes evident when we arrive at a nondescript apartment building. As Paula looks down the street, at the bottom of which can be seen the glittering water of Lake Ontario, she sighs. “He’s artistic, so we found him a place with a great view of the lake. He’s been living here with no problems for so long. But sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to worry about. They never draw attention to themselves.”

We are let in by the superintendent, who Paula informs me is new. In fact, it’s his second day on the job. He looks quite shaken by the incident, but his concern is for his hurt tenant, rather than the damage that may have been caused to the apartment.

It is around 10:30 a.m. as we walk into the apartment, careful not to touch the door handle. It is a disturbing scene, with bloodstains marking the floor and furniture. I wait outside while Paula does a thorough check.

As we walk back into the car, Paula and I are silent, lost in our own thoughts. Paula immediately starts calling her co-workers to get the whole story, and we soon learn the client had lost a lot of blood and was in critical, though stable, condition. “He’s lucky to be alive,” says Paula as she flips through her address book to get the number for a trauma sanitation service (who would later have to rip out the floorboards and remove some of the furniture from the apartment). It is up to Paula to ensure the apartment is cleaned, that the hospitalized client is well looked after, that a support worker from CMHA is in constant touch with him, and that the superintendent is satisfied that everything has been taken care of. “Oh well, just got to keep moving,” Paula says to herself softly as we drive away.

Soon we’re heading north to the apartment of a client who had just moved from a one-bedroom suite to a communal living arrangement the day before. The scene we left is still vivid in our minds, but Paula manages to maintain her good humour, and the sight of a number of “For Rent” signs elicits from her a broad smile.

Already at this early hour, it’s clear that a lot of Paula’s job involves navigating the many highways and thoroughfares that run through Toronto. Making things more difficult for the housing support workers is the fact that the diverse clients they serve are situated in many different areas across the city.

As we pull up to the apartment building – a quaint, two-storey red brick building on the corner of a quiet residential street – I ask Paula about the burnout rate among housing workers. “There’s burnout in this business, for sure,” she replies with a laugh. “One key to avoiding it is being honest with yourself. That incident we just went into – you have to recognize that it affects you. If it doesn’t bother you now, it’s going to bother you tonight. Or tomorrow. Or maybe in a week,” she says. “At the end of the day, I leave work and go home to my family, and I don’t want to be carrying these issues home because I have to come back tomorrow and there’ll be a whole new set of issues to deal with.”

Paula’s meeting with the client who had just moved into the apartment the day before goes well. He is an outgoing man with whom Paula has been working for more than four years (which astounds both of them when it comes up in conversation). He is happy to be in a more open living environment with people close at hand with whom he can socialize. But when he makes a disparaging comment, Paula is quick to call him on it. It’s clear that while most people would have chalked up the client’s behaviour to his illness and let it slide, Paula has not given up on her client.

“Mental illness is just a small part of who a person is. They still have hopes and dreams and joy and visions of the future,” says Paula. “Just because you have mental illness doesn’t mean that your life is over – and that’s what I try to instill in my clients,” she says, as we head east on the highway, this time driving toward Scarborough to deal with yet another unforeseen crisis. “One in five Canadians has a mental illness, and that could be you or I in that situation. How would you want to be treated?”

A few beats later, Paula fills me in on the second crisis of the day. “There’s been a series of fires at this building and they are concerned that it could be our client.” We are on our way to delicately ask the client about it.

But before that, Paula has an engagement she cannot break – meeting with a client who suffers from nightly fits of somnambulism and panic attacks that have begun to scare his neighbours. It is up to Paula and another support worker to try to convince the client to move into a group home. It is a delicate conversation – the client is a young man with a keen intellect and a desire for “normalcy.” He is immediately averse to the idea of moving into a more supportive environment. Paula and the other worker display incredible tact in bringing the client around. The conversation, which lasts for about 45 minutes, ends amicably, with the client agreeing, though with some hesitation, to move the following week. Paula is relieved – the superintendent of the building had threatened to evict the client immediately if no alternative was found.

A few blocks away, at a huge apartment building owned by the same large investment group, Paula has to now deal with the superintendent’s charge that one of her clients might be involved with the fire in the building. In a tense meeting with the superintendent and a representative from the investment group, Paula defends her client while maintaining her calm, but the superintendent won’t budge. Though her gut reaction is to fight the charges, she finally acquiesces and promises to find new housing for the client.

Outside, Paula looks at me with a pained expression. “Could you think of a way out of that?” she asks as we step into her car. “We’ve got 20 units with this company in a whole bunch of buildings. I just couldn’t sacrifice the relationship.” It’s a tough call, made harder by the fact that moving the client now will be very difficult because the family has now settled into its new home.

Paula’s job, she tells me, is like this every day. There are almost always emergencies that force her and her colleagues into action. But in a later discussion, she stresses the positive. Although her days are often full of tense situations, this represents only a small minority of the 400 or so clients the CMHA houses. This, she says, gives outsiders a skewed sense of the success of the program. In reality, “about 95 per cent of our clients are doing OK,” says Paula. “Naturally, it’s the people with problems who we see the most, but they are in the minority.”

After a day “on the job,” I quietly wonder whether there ever are any calm moments for housing support workers. I get the sense that they are few and far between.

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