Six months ago, community-funded emergency crisis shelters were placed on church properties throughout the Halifax Regional Municipality.
The Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth facilitated the project with the goal of providing a safe and warm shelter for people in need over the winter.
One of the project coordinators says since then, the need has only increased.
“We’ve extended for the summer and we’re preparing by putting in some air conditioning. We’re hiring a full-time project coordinator to be more intensive in our efforts to assist the people in the units take the next step,” John Stevens said, a member of the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth.
The goal of finding alternative housing is a growing challenge that was highlighted in the recently-published State of Homelessness in HRM report.
The Point-in-Time-Count was conducted by outreach workers and non-profit organizations in early April.
It aims to provide a snapshot of how many people are experiencing visible homelessness in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
Preliminary findings paint a concerning picture that service providers say they’ve been dealing with for years.
“The housing crisis isn’t new, it’s just getting more and more dire. And, of course, COVID has exacerbated a lot of things and homelessness is definitely one of them,” Cheryl MacIsaac said, program coordinator with Adsum for Women & Children.
Adsum was one of several community organizations that connected with visibly unhoused people for the survey. Participants were given a $20 honorarium to share information about their current experiences.
The survey identified that on April 7 there were 586 individuals without a safe permanent address in HRM.
Nearly half of those who were surveyed are newly homeless, having lost their housing in the past six months.
MacIsaac says the rising cost of living has led to an increase in people experiencing homelessness for the first time.
“It just takes one not even crisis in their life but one major inconvenience, like mobility changes, or a relationship breaks down, or a spouse dies, and that stress alone — everything collapses,” MacIsaac says.
Stevens says extending the crisis shelter program on church properties speaks to the need for creative interventions.
“I think our crisis emergency shelters or the city modular shelters have at least showed us that we can think differently. We used space that we had available, resources that we had available to help who we could,” he said.
MacIsaac says although government-funded hotel stays aren’t a solution, there is a need to make those options more stable until longer-term housing projects are complete.
“Government really coughing up the money, or incentives, or those relationships so that it makes more attractive to hotels to ensure that those stays can be longer,” she said.
MacIsaac says governments should also free up funds to help protect renters that are vulnerable to renovictions from being displaced.
— with files from Alicia Draus