He’s 32, been living on the streets for a little more than a year and desperately wants to work.

David Masters (not his real name) says in that time he’s not only seen the worst of humanity but has experienced how little the city’s well-resourced homeless programs have done to give him a “hand up” to get his life back on track.

Masters met me last week near the city library where he spends his days sending out resumes on an old laptop, one he carries in his knapsack, along with a clean pair of slacks and a shirt for job interviews.

He figures he e-mails out 30 resumes a day and if he’s “lucky” gets two or three interviews. This summer he’s sleeping in a parkette at Harbourfront, because he feels the area is safe.

He collects $330 a month from Ontario Works and tries to survive on $6-$10 day for food so he has extra money to wash his clothes, shave in a public restroom (at 25-cents a pop) and to pay for a phone (to get job interviews).

Masters e-mailed me after he saw my article on the panhandlers at Spadina and Lakeshore, noting it made him angry.

“I can’t bring myself to do that (panhandle),” he says. “If I sat down I’d feel like I was giving up.”

He didn’t want his real name used because he says he lost his last job as a front desk clerk at a small inn two months ago when the manager there found out he was sleeping on the streets.

A senior web designer by profession with a BA in Digital and Media Arts, his descent into homelessness began with his father’s sudden death due to a heart attack two years ago, His father was his only remaining relative — he has no siblings and his mom passed away from breast cancer six years ago.

“I got really depressed and my work suffered,” he says, noting he used up all his savings to help his dad (who was living in the U.S.) with his health care costs.

Masters says he started missing project deadlines and was let go 18 months ago. He subsquently lost his apartment.

He said after staying in the Scott Mission for just one night — where his passport and his originial laptop was taken from his knapsack — he reached out a little over a year ago to the city’s ($17-million) Streets to Homes program at 129 Peter St.

Pat Anderson, spokesman for the city’s Shelter Support and Housing department, says of the 90 StoH workers, there are 71 at Peter St. who are supposed to be providing housing access to clients, shelter referral, case management and counselling as well as putting together a “housing plan” to which a client can commit.

“Our job is to help street-involved clients seek and secure permanent housing,” she said, noting staff even accompany clients to see units.

That’s not at all what happened with Masters. After taking down all of his information, he said the caseworker he met told him they have no apartments to offer because they’d pretty well “burnt their bridges with (private) landlords” — that he’d have to search for apartments himself.

He said she also gave him a list of shelters (he refuses to go back), offered to put him on the seven-year waitlist for affordable housing and that was it.

Masters says he’s never been approached either by any of the city’s 19 street outreach workers while he sleeps outside— particularly in winter when he was forced to wander the streets to keep warm.

At the Toronto Employment and Social Services (TESS) office at Metro Hall, it took him nearly three months to get steady payments because his file kept getting misplaced or “messed up.”

His current — and fifth — caseworker (the turnover is tremendous) is better than the others but he feels TESS officials never really take it “seriously” that he wants to get off welfare.

Despite assurances from TESS spokesman Anna Fiorino that a key responsibility of a caseworker is to develop a service plan for each client (which includes referrals to job opportunities and mental health supports), he says at no time has he been given a list of job openings or been told about any resources provided to help update his resume, upgrade his computer skills or help search for a job, or has he been provided money to buy new clothes for job interviews.

“I feel like the city and the government programs ... they give you enough just to survive,” he said. “They don’t give you enough to change your life or get out of your situation ... they give you enough to keep you where you’re at.”

He says after a year on streets he feels invisible.

Masters says the people he encounters mostly just ignore him or sometimes he’ll hear comments that he’s a “bum, a hobo and why doesn’t he get a job?

“I would (get a job) if I could ... it really sucks,” he says. “I feel like less of a person ... I don’t feel like I’m part of society ... I feel like I’m just walking around and that’s it.”

SOME FACTS ON TORONTO'S HOMELESS/ONTARIO WORKS PROGRAMS

- Duties of Ontario Works caseworker: Develop a customized service plan with each client that includes referrals to job prospects, job training programs and housing and mental health supports.

- Average starting salary of an OW caseworker: $65,000

- No. of Toronto OW clients, June 2017: 83,924

- No. of clients who left OW in June 2017 due to employment or who declared employment income: 2,464 (2.9%)

- No. of Streets to Homes workers: 90

- No. doing street outreach: 19

- Area of coverage downtown: Bathurst to Parliament and Lake Ontario to Yorkville

- Outreach hours: 7 a.m.-11 p.m. 7 days a week in downtown core

- No. of StoH workers at 129 Peter St: 71

- Duties: Operate 24/7 40-bed transitional shelter, provide case management and counselling, housing access, shelter referral.