Nearly one month after police removed unhoused people living in crisis shelters in downtown Halifax, some who took the city’s offer to stay in a hotel will be displaced once again.
Gary Kay had been living in Meagher Park — also known as People’s Park, the temporary tent city on Chebucto and Dublin streets — when he found out he would get to stay at a hotel until a permanent housing solution was figured out.
Excited to have a more stable housing situation, he moved into the Comfort Inn in Dartmouth about a week and a half ago.
But that promise was short-lived. With no forewarning, Kay discovered on Tuesday that the unhoused people staying at the hotel would have to leave on Wednesday. He believes about 10 people were affected.
“As soon as I found out about the situation yesterday, I just broke,” he told Global News in an interview at People’s Park, where he returned after finding out the news.
“Desperate, lost, confused, angry … all those feelings, right? But too exhausted to do anything about it.”
Rachelle Sauvé is the volunteer site co-ordinator for P.A.D.S. Community Network, which advocates for permanent, accessible, dignified and safe housing for people.
She said the group was “super dismayed” when they found out the people wouldn’t be able to stay at the hotel.
Dangling the promise of housing and then taking it away was traumatic for those affected, she said.
“We believe that the city’s actions and their inactions in the last little while has caused significant harms,” said Sauvé, who is housed but stays at the park full-time to help those who are not.
“That sense of loss, the sense of having that rug pulled out from underneath you … it is absolutely terrifying.”
As of Wednesday, there were 18 or 19 people staying in tents at People’s Park.
Sauvé acknowledged it’s not an ideal place for people to live, but she said they’re only there because of the kindness of their neighbours, and because the city has not yet introduced any better solutions.
She said there has been a frustrating lack of communication from the city about housing options for the people living in the park, and nobody from council has paid them a visit.
“What we need is actual public conversation and public declaration from the city on what the heck the plan is,” she said, adding that while it’s important to create long-term solutions — such as better access to mental health and addictions resources — there needs to be an immediate fix.
“Every day, more people are going to end up in this boat,” she said. “Folks keep coming and we are running out of physical space.”
City ‘working on a solution’
In a scrum outside city hall, Mayor Mike Savage said the city is working “feverishly” to find accommodations for the people who were displaced from the hotel.
Asked why the stay at the hotel ended, Savage said “you’d have to ask the hotel that.”
“It’s not a decision we made,” he said.
The general manager of the Comfort Inn in Dartmouth declined an interview with Global News on Wednesday, but had told The Coast the previous day that they told the city from the beginning that they only had rooms available for 14 days.
Savage denied knowing that and said he and council believed the stay would be indefinite.
He also said he hasn’t visited People’s Park because he’s “not interested in making the situation worse” and doesn’t want people to get “agitated” when a politician shows up.
Savage said that even though housing is a provincial responsibility, the city is taking steps to get more people into housing.
He pointed at a recently passed motion that allows the CAO to spend up to $500,000 to put a range of emergency housing in place. They are still considering options for that, he said.
Savage added that he is in conversations with Premier Tim Houston, Housing Minister John Lohr and Community Services Minister Karla MacFarlane.
“I want people to know that we are working on a solution,” he said.
–with files from Amber Fryday
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