Seniors and people with disabilities who are homeless struggle to find housing in the city.
Many are forced to survive outside, living in temporary shelters, such as the encampment on Victoria Street, not far from Barrie’s downtown.
A 66-year-old woman, who declined to give her name, is confined to her dirt-caked, powered wheelchair. She lives in one of the ramshackle sheds made of plywood and plastic tarps with her husband.
The other homeless people in the small community call her "Grandma," "Mom" or "Momma Bear."
She seems to be the matriarch of the small group who live there.
“I give them hugs and I listen to their stories,” she tells BarrieToday outside of the small homemade shack she calls home.
“They go through hard things and I feel for them. I try to inspire them a little bit and give them some self-esteem. They are so down,” she says.
She is parked in her wheelchair close to a lone Canada goose and a mallard duck waddling nearby. They all reside together along the bank of a large pond surrounded by tall trees, eking out a meagre, hardscrabble existence.
“I feed my ducks and geese. I have three families. I see them every day.
“Homelessness can happen at any time to anybody,” she laments.
She has been with her husband for many years — sometimes together and sometimes separated due to their housing difficulties.
“I was housed for a couple months, and after, I came here in February,” she says, speaking of their shed home. “We were on the street before that, living in buildings through the winter.
"It’s a tough life. You don’t know until you do it.”
She takes a sip on a tall can of beer.
“People in this world have got to understand that addiction is a disease,” she says. “And they have to do whatever they have to do, right? It’s not because they can’t get a job, or if they don’t want to work. It’s a disease.”
It’s hard enough for most people on the street to survive with little to no resources. The struggle is even greater for those with disabilities.
But she's resourceful and relies on the goodness of others.
Keeping her electric-powered chair running always poses an added problem for her. She charges her chair at a nearby church.
“The church people are excellent people,” she says. “They come here with food, clothes, blankets, shoes, anything you need. They are down here all the time. And they are helping people all the time. They are beautiful people. Everyone is grateful for it.”
Some local businesses are lenient as well.
“I go to Tim Hortons. They are great people,” she says. “They let the homeless go in there, and as long as you are quiet and you don’t cause problems, they’ll let you sit there."
She says customers who go in there on a regular basis are very nice, too.
“They’ll give you a gift card or buy you a meal. They are very respectful as long as you are respectful back. I’m thankful,” she says.
She's looking for an apartment, but she says it’s so hard.
“They want your debt score and all this information. The problem is they look at you in a different way,” claiming some landlords are discriminatory.
“Ontario Works has their budget and they only have so much money," she adds. "And because you don’t have an address, you only get a street allowance, and it’s not even $300. And what is a room?”
Despite the hardships, her struggles continue.
“I can take a lot of stuff. I’m a tough old woman,” she exclaims.
Meanwhile, a short distance away, in a small grassy field at the corner of Bradford Street and Dunlop Street West, Leonard and Patty, who are 60 and 67 respectively, have been residents of Barrie for the last 23 years.
They now find themselves living in a small two-person tent.
They have been in a tent for about a week and arrived that day at the field after having been removed from a spot on the Barrie North Collegiate high school grounds over a weekend. They say one of the school officials there asked them to relocate, which they did.
“We knew we had to move,” Leonard tells BarrieToday as he sits in a lawn chair next to his tent.
His partner is inside the tent and peers out the door, noting the school was "nice about it."
They plan to stay where they are as long as they can, he says, “until the end of the month, anyways.”
Prior to living outside, they had an apartment at Bayfield Street and Grove Street East.
The couple says they decided to move out due to the prevalence of drugs and his drug habit.
“I don’t drink or nothin’, but I’ve got a bad opiate habit,” he explains. “And the cockroaches. They told us they were going to clean things up, and they tried to, but once the cockroaches are in there, they do not go. No matter what you do. You gotta bulldoze the place.”
Patty then adds, as she rolls up her pant leg, “I wanna show you something. This is where one of those black spiders bit me. Three times he bit me. (It was swollen) and my husband squeezed the poison out of it.”
Her lower legs and feet are covered with countless small, dark scars.
The building is known for drugs, they say.
“There is some decent people that live there, and there's a lot of decent people that live everywhere. Just because we’ve got drug habits doesn’t mean we’re bad people. We kept to ourselves. I don’t party much like I used to when I was younger.”
They had resided at the apartment for five years.
Leonard worked as a roofer for 30 years.
“I got injured … I was bad one time, actually. I used to sell a lot of dope,” he says, as he seems to change his story.
Patty tries to interrupt him.
“Well, I’m going to tell the man the truth, I'm not going to lie to him,” he barks.
Patty was a painter, but was injured in a workplace accident where she fell and hurt her back. She's unable to work as she cannot stand for long periods of time.
The apartment they were in, meanwhile, was fairly cheap and they could afford it.
“It wasn’t the money, just the fact they kept saying they were going to fix it, but they never did shit,’ Leonard says.
In a prior apartment in the Sunnidale Park area, they left as well due to bedbugs.
He says he was not affected by the insects, but Patty suffered greatly.
“For some reason, they will not bite me. They must know my blood’s poison,” he says with a laugh. “They chewed her all to shit; her legs were all chewed up.”
Their plan going forward is to move out of the city altogether. They plan to buy a trailer.
“There’s a place up north just a little ways out of town. We are going to buy the trailer and rent the lot,” Leonard says.
It will cost them $650 per month, is serviced with water and hydro, and rated for all seasons, the couple says.
“We’ll make it," Leonard says confidently. “And if I didn’t smoke as much dope as I did, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s more or less my fault."
Patty agrees: “Yes, it’s more or less his fault,” she says with a good-hearted chuckle.
“She’s a decent woman,” he says. “I’m lucky to have one like her.”
They’ve been together 34 years, through thick and thin.
“It’s good to be able to lean on each other, and we do,” Leonard says. “We talk about things only we can talk about.”
They met at a bar. Patty says she sat on his knee and asked, “what’s your name?”
“I’m going to get you,” she told him that night. “And I got him for 34 years.”
