A homeless shelter in downtown Edmonton says it experienced record attendance in June.
Hope Mission said it hosted an average of 663 people per night, with June 19 being the busiest with 848 people.
“Usually in summers we’re used to seeing those numbers drop down a little bit, but this year they’ve stayed pretty consistently high,” said Tim Pasma, senior manager of homeless programs at Hope Mission.
A month later, demand for shelter space is still high, according to Hope Mission – over 700 people slept in the shelter Monday night.
A normal summer would mean about 300 to 400 people accessing the shelter each night, Pasma explained.
While part of the spike is due to a long spate of cold, rainy weather in June, the trend has been “lengthy,” Pasma said.
“We just have more people experiencing homelessness in our city right now so that’s a big part of the challenge that we face,” he said. “There’s a lot of people struggling right now.”
As a result, the shelter is running low on donations like men’s socks and underwear and women’s clothing.
Wendy White, has been staying at the Hope Mission shelter with her daughter for months.
“It’s been pretty packed,” she said. “Sometimes it is (stressful) because people go at you sometimes and you don’t do nothing to them and they still do it.”
White said the rainy weather causes her knee pain, and the pendulum swing to hot smoky weather isn’t easy either.
“(The smoke) has been hard on people, even on me because I have asthma, so it’s hard to breathe sometimes,” she said.
Attendance is high at other shelters across the city – on July 16, shelters were 89 per cent full, whereas on the same night last year shelters were only 76 per cent full, according to data from Homeward Trust.
On Tuesday, the government announced it was accepting applications from agencies who wanted to open new shelter beds in the city – 100 beds each for an Indigenous-led shelter and a women’s shelter, and up to 400 for a temporary winter shelter.
June was also a record month for drug poisonings – Hope Mission staff responded to 96 overdoses, the shelter said.