Halifax homeless population doubled in a year, according to not-for-profit group

A not-for-profit organization working to help build affordable housing while protecting Nova Scotia's existing housing stock says homeless in Halifax has doubled in a year.

The Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia (AHANS) said as of Sept. 27, more than 690 people are experiencing homelessness in the municipality — more than double the number from this time last year.

Most of those people, 484 of them according to AHANS, identify as "chronically homeless," meaning they've been homeless at least six months or recurrently homeless during the last six years.

AHANS gets its numbers from community service providers who share them, including Metro Turning Point, the Salvation Army, Adsum for Women, the YWCA and the Out of the Cold Shelter.

"There's a desperate lack of housing, particularly housing that's accessible to lower-income people," executive director Jim Graham told CBC's Information Morning Nova Scotia on Monday.

"And the other thing that complicates it is just pressures on low incomes is growing all the time. Fuel costs are up, food costs are up, inflation is up."

Wages not keeping up with inflation

Pensions and minimum wage aren't keeping up with inflation, Graham noted, adding there are many reasons why more homelessness is being reported in the city.

"There's no short-term solution to creating more housing, there just isn't. There's a lot of people being supported in hotels right now and other more or less temporary accommodation and it's not really meant to be a permanent home," he said.

The province has provided funding for an emergency shelter in the Halifax area that is aiming to have 40 additional beds for people by mid November.

There are also some rapid housing projects underway as well, Graham noted, like Adsum for Women and Children's new 25-unit affordable housing development.

More mental health supports needed

"I think the Department of Community Services with its mandate around permanent supported housing — that's a huge help. It's not something you can do immediately but a commitment to having that kind of housing support attached to housing is really important," he said.

Graham said one of the things missing is mobile mental health supports that aren't only for crisis situations.

"The thing with mobile crisis is they solve the crisis and they go away and the crisis repeats so the community doesn't have the access to the kinds of professional services they need to properly support some people and keep them housed," he said.

Brian Comer, the provincial minister responsible for the Office of Addictions and Mental Health, said Graham makes a fair point, but his office is working across government departments and community partners to improve access.

"We have introduced some lower barrier supports like recovery support centres, which allow people just to drop in without an appointment, which I think is a good thing," Comer told Information Morning the following week. 

"There's also some great groups in the province that do, I think, really good work ... but I think we always need to do better because it's certainly a significant issue."

He said these support centres are located in New Glasgow, Middleton and Dartmouth, and there are also two overdose prevention sites in the province, Direction 180 in Halifax and the Ally Centre in Sydney.

Renovictions and rental arrears

As the number of people experiencing homeless rises, there's also an increased demand from people seeking legal aid for their housing concerns. 

Katie Brousseau, a community legal worker with Dalhousie Legal Aid Service, told Information Morning, said she's meeting more people who are experiencing homelessness for the first time and a "new overrepresentation of seniors."

Some of the big issues include renovictions — when a landlord forces residents to leave a building so it can be renovated, then rented to new tenants for substantially higher prices — and people no longer having the financial means to afford rising rents, Brousseau said.

Brousseau said she's seeing loopholes around renoviction legislation. For instance, more tenants are signing fixed-term leases which don't give them adequate security because there's a hard end date to a lease instead of an automatic renewal each month.

"People out of desperation out of necessity agree to rent increases they simply can't afford," Brousseau said. "... Fixed-term leases are high on the list of things that need to be reformed within residential tenancy specifically because we've seen too many times the abuse of the use of a fixed-term lease."