"We've heard that time and time again," Miewald told The Tyee in a phone interview. Miewald says she and colleague Dr. Aleck Ostry, an associate professor at the University of Victoria, have applied for a Canadian Institute of Health Research grant to try to quantify and compare the benefits of various meal programs -- like community kitchens or meal delivery services -- in supportive housing. For now, she says, aside from what Cooper is doing, "there's very little data."

"She's probably the only one doing the quantitative research," says Miewald.

Tallying emergency calls

Cooper has focused on seven SROs that are home to "hard to house" populations (people with mental health and addiction issues, who often fall in and out of homelessness) with the cooperation of four supportive housing providers in Vancouver: the Portland Hotel Society, Raincity Housing, Atira and MPA (Motivation, Power and Achievment).

According to a 2008 demographic study commissioned by the City of Vancouver and BC Housing, a significant number of people in all SROs are dealing with these very problems. Of the 628 people surveyed, 32 per cent reported having a drug addiction, 20 per cent reported having an alcohol addiction, 22 per cent reported having tuberculosis, hepatitis C, HIV or AIDS, and 30 per cent said they had a mental illness.

Cooper worked directly with SRO staff who provided incident log data with names omitted to protect privacy. She analyzed the type of emergency calls that were going out -- police, fire or ambulance -- and cross-referenced these with 911 dispatcher records.

"The fire calls -- and that's not a big number -- are mostly what we would think of as negligent. Cigarettes, matches," says Cooper. "Ambulance, it's everything from drug trips to knife fights. Fights, of one kind or another would easily be the biggest chunk. Knife fights and fist fights and assaults. A fair number of mental health calls. When threats are uttered then the police get called."

According to a 2005 analysis that looked at emergency calls to a sample of 54 SROs in the Downtown Eastside, there were 11,269 calls for police, fire and ambulance during that time period. Slightly more than half of those -- 6,947 -- were for police. Another 1,754 were fire and rescue calls, and 2,618 were for ambulance.

There hasn't been a similar analysis since then (at least, not that this reporter could find), and it's only been in the past five or six years, roughly, that the PHS and other housing agencies have begun to introduce meal programs in a more comprehensive way.

Constable Brian Montague, a media relations officer for the Vancouver police, said in an email, "It would be difficult for us to make the connection between police response and the meal programs."

The police did provide more recent data, for VPD calls only, for six SROs that were part of the 2005 analysis. They include four PHS-run projects (Stanley, Washington, Roosevelt and New Portland hotels) as well as The Savoy and The Balmoral.

The red markers indicate SROs for which 2005 police call data and 2011 police call data are available. The blue markers indicate SROs for which 2005 call data only is available. (If you're reading this story on The Tyee's mobile site, visit our regular site to see the graphic.)

Some, like the Washington, had a significant drop in police calls. In 2005, there were 281 police calls and in 2011 there were 179 (a decrease of 36 per cent). Police calls to the Roosevelt decreased by 72 per cent, from 487 in 2005 to 135 in 2011.

The Stanley saw a modest (about three per cent) drop in police calls between 2005 and 2011.

Police calls nearly doubled at The Savoy, an MPA-run residence. In 2005, there were 53 police calls. Six years later, there were 100.

These are just a few examples; not statistically significant, and not meant to imply that food provision in these residences are the cause of any decline in police calls.

Cooper acknowledges that the research has taken her longer than she thought -- four years longer, and counting -- because there are so many variables to account for. People move around, she says, and other types of programming that might have an impact tends to come and go with funding. There have been renovations in some of the buildings as well, a provincial government response to outcry over deplorable living conditions in many of the aging SROs.

Her ultimate goal is to do a cost analysis: what's the associated dollar value of a decline in emergency calls, and how might that compare to the cost of providing meals?

So far, she has only been able to cost 911 calls to police based on the point at which the officer logs in a particular call number, to the point at which they log off a particular call number. However, there is almost always some additional action at the end of that call that she hasn't been able to account for.

Police might show up and diffuse the situation, says Cooper, but she says it appears equally likely that they show up and take someone into custody. Ambulance calls are often followed by a visit to the emergency room and about half the time, she says, a hospitalization.

"If you talk to nurses at St. Paul's (Hospital) casually, they will say 'Yes, we get people in with pneumonia, and they're basically in the hospital while we feed them for two or three weeks until their immune system is strong enough," says Cooper.

"We spend an enormous amount of money to feed them in the hospital -- it drives me insane!" she exclaims. "We'd be a lot better off to feed them in the SROs."

This raises another important question, from a policy perspective: who pays for this kind of programming? Even if researchers could accurately compare the cost of food provision in social housing, to the cost of not providing meals in social housing, says Cooper, "the problem is the silos where the money gets spent."

"The people in the silos who have to spend the money and the people who are going to save the money are not in the same silos," she says. "I've come more and more to see this as an administrative problem rather than a cost problem."

Tomorrow, a look at the logistics of feeding people in supportive housing, and the challenges and opportunities of expanding meal programs.