Report gives snapshot of local homelessness

By Liam Radford

BELLEVILLE – There’s still a long way to go locally to address the issue of homelessness, but a new report could be a place to start.

Last Thursday Hastings county council received the final report of the first count of people who are homeless in Hastings County. The count was done in April in Belleville, Quinte West, Brighton and Madoc. It found that 211 people were homeless in those areas including 24 children. 

Steve van de Hoef, food minister at the Bridge Street United Church, was the author of the report for Hastings County and says that it is a snapshot of the state of homelessness in the community. He says that the objective of the report was only to describe the situation in the community and the people who are experiencing homelessness. It wasn’t intended to prescribe solutions of what should happen next.

“It’s for the community to decide. Our expertise, my expertise is in conducting this sort of research and doing the project, but it is not in designing the response,” van de Hoef said. “So it’s a real community response and I think that’s where what comes next needs to be defined.”

He said that people should look at the literature on poverty and homelessness to find the best ways to address the issue. Some reports suggest a three-pronged approach to homelessness he says. These areas are providing emergency services, quickly moving people toward regaining permanent housing and preventing future homelessness.

This provides an accurate description of the community van de Hoef said, but the report likely underplays the number of homeless because of the limitations of the count.

“Certainly in Belleville and Quinte West I think that it’s an accurate count,”  he said.

This is the first community-wide count that has been done. Previously, organizations working with the homeless recorded their own numbers which meant there could be an overlap in the data. That made it difficult to interpret. Because of the scope of this count, van de Hoef said the data gathered is very valuable, much more usable and representative of the community.

” The confidence comes from how well did we implement the method and how does that mesh with the experience of stakeholders (local service providers), ” van de Hoef said.

As part of his work on this count, van de Hoef  read previous reports produced by community organizations on the homeless situation. He said that one of the things that caught him by surprise about those reports is that many of them warned of a growing problem with the affordability of housing.

” The extent of the issue is at crisis levels now, so says the Poverty Roundtable. But it seems to have been an issue for a couple of decades at least.”

The largest reason given for why the people surveyed were homeless was the inability to pay rent or mortgage with 25 per cent. Some other reasons given were family conflicts, abuse, unsafe housing and illness.

Unaffordable housing was another factor in the number. People said they could not find permanent housing because of rents being too high, not having enough income or just the lack of housing available. 

The entire report can be read here.