I met Steen while walking through a park in Vancouver, British Columbia. Local Vancouver homeless friends call the area “The Bird Sanctuary” because of the growth of trees in an urban area. I would have never found the place if it wasn’t for Vancouver homeless advocate, Judy Graves. I am honored and grateful Judy took the time to give me a tour of the city.<\/p>\n
Steen is a colorful character. You can see years of street life in his face. Steen tells a very real story about life and death on the streets of Vancouver. He tells us a very detailed story of how he ended up on the streets this time.<\/p>\n
Steen says he has been promised housing before he has to survive another winter, but bureaucracy keeps delaying the local housing project under construction.<\/p>\n
Steen says his friends are in and out of the emergency rooms. He is concerned about two of his friends he believes are close to death. When I asked Steen how many of his friends died last year he responded “conservatively six. It could have been a couple more”.<\/p>\n
This is a very powerful interview. The lack of affordable housing and people dying on the streets stand out. I hope Steen’s story of people dying mess you up as it has me. Especially when these deaths can be avoided with housing and supportive services. No one should die homeless – no one!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":9198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[183,194],"tags":[252,253,515,508,507,199,509],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos\/1422"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/videos"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress-537697-2997182.cloudwaysapps.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}