The smell of homemade beef and barley soup fills the air as tenants gather in the communal dining area of the Cornerstone supportive housing facility in Centretown.
Leeann waits on a sofa during the final preparations, fiddling with her cup of tea. Now 50, Leeann was diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early 20s. She asked to be identified only by her first name.
“I started working, but since I wasn’t well-educated, I found it very difficult to work and pay my rent, my bills and my food. I ended up going into a shelter because I couldn’t afford my apartment any longer,” she says.
She moved into her Cornerstone apartment when the building opened in 1989.
She rents a subsidized room in this 20-unit complex for single women.
There are 22,000 social housing units in Ottawa. A fraction are set aside for people in need of an affordable home as well as on-site, tailored support.
Cornerstone caters specifically to women at risk of being homeless. Some of them are also living with mental illness.
Leeann says she appreciates the presence of the Cornerstone support workers, who help monitor her health.
“I’m learning to take my medication on my own,” she says.
Jerry Richard is a community developer at Ottawa Salus, a supportive housing agency for tenants with severe and persistent mental illness.
He says that the number one issue for the agency’s clients is rent, which is a challenge for anyone living on disability.
He says affordable apartments also need to be located in safe neighbourhoods with on-site support staff.
“You can rent a room in a crack house for $350 a month, but if you’ve got a mental illness and you’re coming out of the hospital, it’s not going to last long before you’re at the shelter or you’re back at the hospital,” says Richard.
The Ottawa Community Housing Corporation, which looks after 15,000 units, is the largest provider of social housing in the city. But Jo-Anne Poirier, the organization’s chief executive officer, says most of its units are in desperate need of renovation.
Poor conditions can make life harder for tenants with a mental illness, she adds.
“If you are living in a unit where there’s water infiltration or you’re not comfortable or you don’t feel safe, that certainly will not help,” Poirier says.
Poirier says there are currently 10,000 names on the waiting list for social housing in the city. Waiting times can range between five and eight years.
Cornerstone is currently operating at full capacity and the Salus list is 700 names long.
“The federal government does not have a national housing strategy and a lot of it was transferred to the province,” Poirier says.
She says under the Mike Harris government, responsibilities for social housing were transferred to cities, but the money needed to fund the infrastructure and the services didn’t follow.
Poirier says extra funding is needed to fix up the actual units, expand social housing opportunities in Ottawa and increase the number of support workers for tenants living with mental illness.
“It's important to have both the roof over a person’s head and the support that they need to be happy.”