Homelessness is a big concern in NB's three largest cities (Photo Credit: Free Images)
New numbers on homelessness in Saint John have been released, and the issue continues to grow.
There is a consistent increase of people using emergency shelters, with a total of 417 last year compared to 2017, a 17 per cent increase.
There was also a spike in occupancy rates and turn-away’s last year, due to overwhelmed shelters.
Public housing units dropped, and rent costs rose.
There are almost 18 hundred people on the waiting list for housing in the region.
Michael MacKenzie with the Human Development Council says while numbers are up across the board, there are still some positives.
“Those are stats that we don’t want to be seeing,” he said in an interview.
“At the same time we’ve seen housing programs in Saint John that have actually housed more people over the last couple of years than ever before, and their stability rates are higher than the national average.”
The report contrasts things like social assistance rates in New Brunswick—which was $537 in 2018—to average rent prices in Saint John. A one-bedroom in 2018 costs $648.
“So it just kind of gives a bit of an idea of how difficult it can be for people to access affordable housing here in Saint John,” he said.
The report also shows results from a Point-In-Time count in March last year, where 113 people experiencing homelessness were surveyed.
Of those, 25 per cent were Indigenous, 27 per cent were youth, and 48 per cent were in need of mental health supports, highlighting underlying issues in the cycle of homelessness.
MacKenzie says if the city wants to see true reduction in the numbers, it’s time to refocus.
“Focusing more on what we need to do to actually reduce and eliminate homelessness and less on what we need to do to kind of manage and react to homelessness, which is where I think we’ve been for too much of our time,” he said.
MacKenzie says there needs to be more cooperation between agencies moving forward.
‘We do have very effective programs, but they’re not leading to a reduction in homelessness. For us that really says that we need to change the way that we operate. That really is about working in a more coordinated fashion,” he said.
He says he wants to work on developing a coordinated access system that brings individual agencies together, instead of doing their own separate intakes and assessments of new people.
“It really streamlines the process so that if I am someone who’s experiencing homelessness, I can go do an intake, do an assessment and then I’m put into this coordinated system that will refer me to the appropriate service, without me having to do all of that legwork myself,” he said.
Another effort in Saint John in the past year was the creation of a by-name list, essentially a list of all known people experiencing homelessness in the community.
“We did that as a way of prioritizing people for housing,” said MacKenzie.
They hope to continue to build that list and bring more service providers on board.
