She was past retirement age and sleeping in her car — and it’s unclear how many other Ontario seniors are like her
When the near Arctic air blasts 71-year-old Joan Alexander outside her London seniors’ building, her first reaction isn’t shock — it’s gratitude.
Alexander has a warm home now, but she knows the cold of homelessness. She lived it several years ago after breaking her hip, losing her rental room and, most heartbreaking, ending a job serving meals in a local nursing home. “I wanted to work until I was 75!” Alexander said.
Instead, she slept in her Chevy Cruze for three months, huddling under a sleeping bag in the autumn chill, until a local women’s support centre called My Sisters’ Place offered Alexander a cot and connected her to subsidized housing.
