The Moncton Lion’s Club will become a 125-bed emergency shelter to accommodate the city’s growing homeless population in late December.
The province will be funding the shelter, but specifics such as the exact cost are still being worked out.
The announcement comes less than a week after a homeless man was found dead in front of city hall.
Mayor Dawn Arnold said the centre will require lots of support staff.
“We need to ensure that in this shelter there are those prescribing clinicians, people who can meet people where they’re at … provide the proper antibiotics if they need them, the proper direction,” she said.
“We cannot warehouse people, we need to make sure that we are moving them along the spectrum and getting them out of this situation.”
The city is still determining which community agency will run the shelter.
“We don’t have an operator yet so we have met with all our community agencies that deal with individuals experiencing homelessness and we will be working with them,” Jocelyn Cohoon, Moncton’s director of recreation, told reporters on Monday. “It may be one, it may be a partnership.”
Vincent Merola, the city’s community development officer for social inclusion, said there currently aren’t enough support care workers to meet the existing demand.
“Our system is grossly under-resourced,” he said in an interview on Monday.
“We’re short, and urgently need, prescribing clinicians. In addition to that we are short about 17 front-line workers, 30 case managers, social workers.”
The city is actively seeking another space for an additional shelter.
Cohoon said the city is looking at other options such as heated tents if they’re unable to find the space.
“We’ll also look at what other buildings in the community may become available,” she said.
In an e-mailed statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Development told Global News on Monday that “critical thinkers from various government departments (including) Social Development, Health, Justice and Public Safety, and Executive Council Office” would be visiting Moncton in the coming week and meeting front-line workers “to take an in-depth look at the challenges, current and future, being faced by people experiencing homelessness in Moncton.”