BIA helps create jobs for homeless

By Anisa Lancione –

Joe MacDonald wants to put cash into the hands of panhandlers in an unusual way. MacDonald, public affairs manager of the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area (BIA), wants to put panhandlers to work through the city’s enhanced Streets to Homes employment project. Panhandlers have infested the Downtown Yonge district for years, leaving business owners struggling to attract shoppers and tourists. The BIA had even hired paid duty officers to deal with aggressive panhandlers.

“Aggressive panhandling is against the law. Panhandling itself is not against the law, unless it’s trespass,” MacDonald clarifies.

Now that both 51 and 52 divisions patrol the area, aggressive panhandling complaints have diminished. “I think our membership would suggest to you that they and their employees feel much safer.” And while the BIA still budgets for paid-duty support, “more for safety issues than for panhandling,” MacDonald and his team are forming a kinder, gentler plan to handle the panhandlers that remain.

“The straight enforcement strategy doesn’t work,” MacDonald admits. “So we did a significant amount of research over the past 18 months over the kinds of ways that panhandling has been addressed over North America, and how the BIA should approach it.”

As the BIA’s executive director James Robinson states, “We’re getting to the root causes of why people are on the streets.

“In my 11 years of working in Downtown Toronto, never before have I seen the city as prepared to address issues of panhandling and homelessness in such a constructive way as this,” Robinson confirms.

The BIA plan is to help the panhandlers who can be employed to get back into the workforce, hopefully within the BIA itself via member businesses.

“What we’re going to do now is begin to work with other community groups in the BIA and look at how we can get the BIA membership to participate in an employment program,” MacDonald notes.

“We’re not going to reinvent the wheel,” he notes. “If there are programs out there right now, we will look at those and determine how best we can fit in them.”

One such initiative is the city’s Streets to Homes program, led by Phil Brown, general manager of shelter, support and housing administration, Katherine Chislett, director of housing and homelessness supports and initiatives, and Iain De Jong, manager of Streets to Homes.

Streets to Homes has just finished hiring 48 outreach workers who will be working in Downtown Yonge and other panhandler-prone neighbourhoods to help street people connect with housing, support for dealing with alcohol and addition issues, to helping people connect with employment.

Before the BIA can roll out plans for the employment initiative, “we have to wait for the city to launch the enhanced program. We’re not going to move on that until we do our homework. It’s not worthwhile to put a program like this in place that’s going to make the employers unhappy and won’t work for those who will be employed.”

Watch for news on this project at downtownyonge.com.