As a proud Newfoundlander, David Oliver naturally turns to maritime metaphors to describe his life.

So when he talks about the role the Downsview Dells men’s shelter played in his transformation from a homeless alcoholic who cycled in and out of jail to the proud, happy and life-loving man he is today, he can’t help himself.

“The Dells was my ship to the mainland,” says the 41-year-old former construction worker, whose fridge-like frame would be intimidating if it were not attached to his goofy, disarming grin.

“Without the Dells, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today … it saved my life.”

Where Oliver is at today is a world away from where he was in September 2010, when he walked into the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter in Brampton after his latest — and he hopes last — stint in jail.

Oliver was broken. He had used up the last of his family’s sympathy and had nowhere else to go.

Today he’s coming up on 15 months clean and sober, having moved steadily from “the Dells” — a city-run shelter in North York for men battling addictions — to the graduated system of transitional housing provided by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, where residents earn more independence and responsibility the longer they stay clean.

Oliver talks excitedly about launching a home-renovation business in the near future. He already has sleek new business cards — smartly designed with a cartoon caricature of himself in a yellow hard hat and blue overalls — which he uses as a motivational tool to remind him of his goals.

“My next step has to be to step away from the system and let someone else come in behind me.”

But if Mayor Rob Ford’s 2012 budget is passed as it is proposed, the path Oliver took to lift himself out of homelessness and addiction simply won’t be an option for those who follow him.

For one, Downsview Dells — the life-saving ship to which Oliver attributes much of his recovery — may be sunk. It’s one of three small-but-specialized city-run shelters slated for closure to save a total of $1.9 million (closing the Dells alone will save $652,000).

At the same time, the 11 houses St. Vincent de Paul rents from Toronto Community Housing — including Oliver’s current home — are among the 706 to be sold on the open market to help the city’s struggling housing agency work down a $650 million repair backlog. (The sale must still be approved by city council and the province.)

On top of that, a major cut to the affordable housing budget means the city will build dramatically fewer rent-geared-to-income homes over the next few years, while the ever-growing affordable housing wait list breaks new records every month. (There are now more than 81,000 households on the list, another record.)

The combination of cuts and the TCHC sell-off could create a perfect storm to worsen homelessness in the city, say housing experts, making success stories like Oliver’s much harder to come by, if not impossible.

“It really is a one-two punch,” says Michael Shapcott, director of affordable housing and social innovation at the Wellesley Institute, a non-profit think-tank for urban health. “We’re choking off the housing options for low-income Torontonians, we’re shutting down the shelters that are a necessary part of the process to help people move from chronic homelessness into housing, and two of those sets of policies together really create a vicious loop.”

The city’s shelter and housing systems are interconnected, like an ecosystem, through which, in ideal circumstances, a person will enter at the lowest level — an emergency shelter, where food and shelter are the priority — and then graduate through transitional shelters and supportive housing, where treatment, counselling and training take on a greater role.

Cuts to one part of the system put pressure on the others.

“They really need to sit down and coordinate the moves that they’re trying to make, for the sake of the people they’re trying to serve,” says Danny Bourne, president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Toronto. “They just blindly say, ‘Oh well, we’ll find these people places.’ Meanwhile, their other department is taking those places out of the system.”

The city says the 100 shelter beds lost in the proposed closures can be absorbed by the overall shelter system, which is at about 95 per cent capacity.

But Shapcott says the cost of closing the three shelters — Bellwoods House, a 10-bed residence for senior women with mental-health issues; Birchmount Residence, a 60-bed shelter for senior men; and the Dells — is greater than the lost beds, because they are transitional shelters and an important part of the continuum from the street to independence.

“These three are probably the ones you’d least like to lose, because they provide that vital pipeline.”

Shapcott adds the cuts are not doing taxpayers any favours, either. “Because what they’re doing is pushing the costs of dealing with these problems onto our prison system, onto our police, onto our hospitals and our health-care system, all of which are extraordinarily more expensive than our shelter and housing systems.”

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a Ford ally and the chair of the community development and recreation committee (which includes shelter and housing), did not respond to interview requests.

Mammoliti has previously favoured expanding support for transitional housing over emergency shelters, but he is likely to support Ford’s proposed budget.

Bourne fears that if the 86 men St. Vincent de Paul currently houses are moved into the general Toronto Community Housing population, they are likely to relapse into their addictions and fall back into emergency shelters — “further away from becoming productive people integrated back in the community.”

He worries the city is simply looking at the issue from a numbers perspective, as if every shelter bed is equal and can be easily replaced.

“At some level there is a lack of appreciation of the complexity,” he said. “It’s not just a roof over your head.”

Shapcott likes to think of the shelter and housing systems using a front-door and back-door analogy: The front door is the intake at emergency shelters. When homelessness increases, the front door is busier.

The back door is the transition

In what Shapcott calls “smart communities,” like Calgary and Vancouver, cities are adopting strategies to close the front door by creating policies to help people stay housed, while opening the back door to more and more transitional strategies.

“Toronto’s doing the exact opposite: We’re making it easier for people to get into the shelters by elminating affordable housing, and we’re making it harder for them to get out by shutting down the transitional paths.”

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The Star spoke to three formerly homeless men, whose paths off the street and away from their addictions may not be replicated if proposed budget cuts go ahead. The cuts are not likely to affect these men, who are only steps away from exiting the subsidized system. But the proposals may prevent others from following in their footsteps.

DAVID OLIVER

He admits he’s still “in the battle,” but in the last 15 months of sober living, Oliver seems to have gained the upper hand on his addictions.

“My life is remarkable today,” he says, beaming.

The youngest of nine children raised in Cormack, Nfld. (pop. 657), Oliver, 41, moved to Brampton when he was 16 with only a Grade 8 education.

He describes his childhood as “great, but dysfunctional.” His parents were alcoholics and he was sexually abused by an uncle.

“I became an angry man.”

Oliver’s hands move up and down, like waves, as he describes the “never-ending roller-coaster ride” of addiction: “Things would get good, things would get bad. Things would get good ….”

He figures he cycled in and out of jail at least 10 times — “30 days here, six months there” — before he hit a dead end in September 2010, when he came out of jail and found his friends and family were not going to help him anymore.

After spending some time at the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter in Brampton, Oliver moved into Downsview Dells, a 27-bed house in a secluded area in North York where the city runs a transitional shelter for men battling addictions.

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“The Dells” taught him structure, responsibility and, most of all, patience.

“As addicts, we tend to want everything now,” he says. “[The Dells] was the beginning of my path.”

That path may be short-circuited for the men who follow if Mayor Rob Ford’s 2012 budget is passed in January. It calls for The Dells to be closed, along with three other city-run transitional shelters, which all target homeless people with special needs.

Oliver says his transformation would not have been possible in an emergency shelter, where “it’s hard to make any progress.”

Today, not only is he substance-free, he’s also grudge-free, having let go of the bitterness and blame he felt toward his parents and uncle for how his life turned out. “I feel awesome,” he says. “I’m happy.”

JEFF MacWHIRTER

When he woke up one day in a hospital bed with no idea how he got there, Jeff MacWhirter knew he had to quit drinking and get off the street.

He had broken ribs and fingers to go along with a severe concussion. But whether he had been hit by a car or beaten up, he had no clue.

“I didn’t want to die, so I asked for help.”

A little more than a year earlier, MacWhirter, 48, had been living in Winnipeg and selling advertising for a national events marketing company. His girlfriend’s sudden death sent him on a downward spiral of drug and alcohol abuse.

He moved to Toronto, thinking it would help him escape the bad memories. But the change only made things worse. Without friends or family in the city, he ended up in the emergency shelter system, spending his nights at the Maxwell Meighen shelter on Sherbourne St.

The violence, petty crime and rampant drug use around the shelter sent him “on an even worse tailspin,” and he turned to sleeping outdoors in parks and alleys, he recalls. “That was even more dangerous.”

After he recovered from his injuries, MacWhirter checked into Toronto East General Hospital’s detox program. He followed that up by moving step-by-step through Toronto’s graduated supportive housing system, run by a combination of charities and the city. He started at Transition House, a group home run by the United Way, then moved to homes run by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul — which the organization rents from Toronto Community Housing Corp. — earning more independence and responsibility every few months.

“Without proper housing, you’re just consumed with your immediate needs,” he says. “[Housing] gives you options to get yourself together without fear … and build your self-respect up so you can go out and get a job.”

All of the 11 properties St. Vincent de Paul rents from TCHC have been approved by the TCHC board for sale on the open market.

MacWhirter who’s been sober for nine months now, recently returned to the company that had fired him and asked for his old job back.

“They greeted me with open arms — I almost wanted to cry on the spot,” he says. “I never thought anybody would ever help me again. Today, I have my life back.”

SHANE MACAULAY

He’s not a “God-fearing fella,” as he puts it, but Shane Macaulay describes his decision to quit booze and drugs as if it were a religious epiphany.

“It was like a lightbulb went off. It hit me right away. I realized that I just couldn’t do this anymore.”

Macaulay was on probation after a domestic abuse charge, but he was still drinking, and the anger management classes he was taking only made him more depressed and frustrated. He was roaming the streets, hung-over and high, when he broke down and called a crisis phone line. That led him to hospital detox and the long road to recovery.

Macaulay said he had been “slowly committing suicide” with drugs and alcohol for 20 years, first in his hometown of Calgary and then in Toronto, where he moved in 2001. He made his living as a musician — composing scores for film and television, recording as a session player and playing with his band, Skyjumper. “But the money always went to my addictions.”

After detox he moved into Transition House, followed by the Salvation Army’s Harbour Light program and then the tiered system of transitional housing provided by the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, through Toronto Community Housing.

Although he was never homeless, Macaulay says he needed to get away from his former lifestyle, and safe housing was the key to his success.

Like all of “St. Vinny’s” homes for recovering addicts, the house Macaulay currently lives in will be sold on the open market if TCHC’s plan goes ahead.

Macaulay has been sober since Aug. 16, 2009, and has moved closer and closer to a full recovery as he has climbed rung by rung through the system.

“All these little steps I took along the way,” he says, “helped me save my life.”