After Boyle Street Community Services announced Tuesday it would be closing the doors to its current building and searching for a new home, leaving services in a bit of a limbo, there is a melancholy sentiment circulating amongst the community: Edmonton’s vulnerable population doesn’t matter.
Boyle Street, which provides services to people facing poverty and homelessness in Edmonton, currently operates out of a building on 105 Avenue beside Rogers Place.
With the lease with the Katz Group ending at the end of September and construction yet to begin on the new King Thunderbird Centre, a few blocks north near 107A Avenue and 101 Street, Boyle Street needs to find somewhere to host its social services for the next 18 months.
Almost all of the city’s social service agencies that serve the city’s homeless and vulnerable populations are in the city’s core, north of downtown.
A contingency plan has been created and Boyle Street said its main priority is continuing to provide services to the community.
However, community representatives say it feels like another disappointment on top of the existing pile of last-ditch efforts for the houseless.
“I was heartbroken to find out we were going to lose yet another of the already severely limited options for people that are struggling to have housing in this city,” said Jim Gurnett, spokesperson for Edmonton Coalition on Housing and Homelessness.
The losses are piling up, he said, with the departure of a friendship centre a few months ago as well as the closure of the Mustard Seed, which declared bankruptcy in 2021.
“People that need a place to be are just not important and we’re letting the already inadequate services shrink more and more,” he said.
Candy Papastesis said Boyle Street previously helped her get ID – a lengthy and challenging process for someone who is homeless but also, something that is needed in order to find housing.
Having lost her identification, she now has to go through the process again but doesn’t know how that’s going to happen and, subsequently, how she will get home, ultimately leaving her left out on the street.
“I don’t know where to go now. I don’t know what the first step is to get an ID,” she said.
“The problem with the lives of the people that live on the street in Edmonton is they do not matter to the governments that should be funding, ensuring that they have a decent life,” Gurnett said.
“The reason things are not viable is because the provincial government refuses to fund services for people who are living deeply in poverty.”
The problem, he said, is if the province provides funding for a housing unit, it’s just the structure, not the staff required to run it. It’s the same situation for drop-in centres and other services, he added.
“All that’s being done is putting band-aids on serious wounds and those serious wounds are just going to be infected and become worse and the results of it are going to be life and death,” Gurnett said.
He noted that other service organizations are already bursting with demand.
The Bissell Centre, for example, has a long line up every day of people waiting to access services. People aren’t going to have a choice but to use empty lots and encampments spaces now, Gurnett alleges.
“The community is suffering (insurmountably) right now, we can’t even measure it because it affects so many brothers and sisters,” said Judith Gale of Bear Claw Beaver Hills House about the Boyle Street building closing.
She said it has the most impact on the mentally ill population because they are the ones who find “refuge” in the daytime drop-in centres.
“I really, really want to implore Edmontonians to please, in the coming weeks, please be patient and please be loving and mindful of our brothers and sisters as you see them more and more on the street because there is absolutely no place for our brothers and sisters to go in the downtown core.
“They’re not allowed to exist anywhere in the city of Edmonton, it seems,” Gale said.