We’ve heard time and time again and I’ve said this in this place, the continuum of care when it comes to individuals that are in a vulnerable state is critical. The proposal being put forward here with the Hub is a great example where you get those wrap around services.
I think it’s important to point out – Hastings County is our housing provider has done census in our community and majority of the individuals experiencing homelessness are individuals from this community.
I’ve read many times online that you know because we have a shelter, and we have a transition home, that these individuals are being bussed into our area. That’s an easy way to wash our hands of the problem and say well, gee, if we just stop that from happening we won’t have this problem in our community. That’s not the truth.
I spend a lot of time as we all do looking at other communities. There’s not a community in this province, not a community in this country, that isn’t experiencing affordability, food insecurity issues, and homelessness.
I think it’s important to point out that just because you’re homeless, you’re not mentally ill. Just because you’re homeless, you’re not a drug addict, and just because you’re homeless, you’re not a criminal. I think we have to take away those type of categories and labels. These are our friends, these are our neighbors, these are our residents in our community that may be going to work every day, and don’t have the ability to pay for rent, or their mortgage payment, and food.
There’s going to be a single mom home tonight that’s struggling to decide, do I feed the kids tonight, or do I put food in for tomorrow for school, or do I rely on the fact that we’ll eat tonight, but tomorrow we’ll go to school and the food for learning program will be there. These are the type of individuals that are looking for support, and that Hub just does that very thing.
The fact that we can provide these wraparound services, the continuum of care, whether it be the need for housing, whether it be the need for food insecurity, whether it be the need for medical care, there’s an opportunity here to have those resources available for references out to other community agencies.
We have a lot of agencies that come to council to present the efforts that they do and there’s a lot of non-profit groups that do just that. By having the Hub as a central place where people can get the support they need, is certainly something that’s positive. It’s being replicated in other communities with success, and I’ll certainly be supporting it today.
Councillor Paul Carr
Here in Belleville at the Warming Center we had 2910 visits between December 15th and March 31st. That sounds like well, that’s a whole lot of people. That was in reality a total of about 220 people over the course. Of those, about 80% of those people actually came sporadically, less than 25% of the number of days available.
One of the advantages of [The Hub] is that it becomes a permanent location for a Warming Center and that people going there will get the social assistance, the physical, the mental health, food, safety, security and trained staff who deal with this because these statistics that I provided to you was from Integrated Investigations who provides the security to all three of the warming centers in Hastings County.
Out of 2910 visits to the Warming Center in total there were only 18 incidences that were actually reported. We tend to amplify the 18 incidences and we do not amplify at all the number of occasions where things were perfectly calm.
Councillor Kathryn Brown, on The Hub
The importance of the The Hub can’t be can’t be overstated. Some some weeks ago myself and the director of Community and Human Services for the County traveled to Toronto and attended a first ever gathering of municipalities under the aegis of trying to get a handle on homelessness.
It was 225 municipalities and agencies that took part in this. One of the common themes, and in the end it was unanimous and everybody understands this. The solutions to the problems we’re seeing right now is a housing first solution, plain and simple housing first.
These unhoused people are not there by choice, they are not there by dint of the fact that they they have mental issues – yes they do, some – by the fact that they’re primarily drug addicts, no that’s not the case.
Just the the sheer complexity of the problem is too easy to put into one category of Us and Them. This Hub solution was touted by when I brought it up that we were considering this at this at this conference, I had no fewer than four other municipalities personally come to me on a break and offer me advice, invite the city of Belleville to visit their municipalities where they have a Hub operating, how to do it, what they’ve learned, what to do, what not to do.
The simple fact of the matter is that we will have a central location for all of these services.
It’s not so much that we’re drawing them away from one area because we need to draw them away. It’s not like we’re holding up a shiny object for some crows to follow, this is this is a very serious solution to getting all of the agencies that need to come together and help these people in one location. We’ve got to stop having little silos here and there and everywhere. This is one location where all of those services can effectively and in a coordinated fashion, deal with the problem that we have right now.
It was said I think in in one of the releases that this is not a solution. Well of course it’s not a solution. I go back to my initial statement: Housing is the solution. We have to get the housing situation sorted because all of this is stop gap.
There will be a day in not too distant future that we will be able to shut down the Hub, I hope. We won’t need it because we will be able to house the unhoused, we will have the proper services in place to look after them and in an effective manner, but until that day comes, we need, not just want, “we would think it’s a good idea” or “we’ll draw them away from the downtown”, we need this. We need this badly. The agencies that are going to work this will tell you we needed this yesterday. I can’t emphasize more how important an issue this is for this community and for the people of this community.
Councillor Chris Malette
I couldn’t agree more with the comments of my colleagues and just one thing that I wanted to add that really came out of the Homelessness Summit that we had a few months back.
A lot of the discussion was around things that the service provider needed to do for the community. Things like coordinated access, by name lists, some of those supports that are really the responsibility of the County and then through them of course, the province.
We had a few members from communities who had really put a dent in homelessness in their area and so after they were done speaking when there was a little bit of a break I went over to talk to them. I said what is it really that your municipal partners have been able to do to contribute to this fight against homelessness? We’re not the service provider, we’re not the province, what has actually been effective?
Really the resonating theme that came for them was landed buildings, was effectively what municipalities could do if you had vacant land, if you had vacant municipal buildings, or if you’re willing to get into the game of buying a building or funding an agency to buy one in order to contribute to the fight against homelessness. One of the things that I ran on in my campaign was being one of the municipalities that best handles the homelessness crisis because sometimes we set goals of 500 more beds in hospitals, but then we don’t have enough nurses.
This to me seemed to be the way to look at what are the best practices, what is fact-based and what is it that we can actually do in our community. I think that this is a great example of our municipality stepping up and really contributing to the fight against homelessness in an effective way. I want to thank everybody for their support of it, for our quick action on it, and looking forward to seeing this come to fruition very shortly.
Councillor Tyler Allsop
Comments
We want to hear from you! Share your opinions below and remember to keep it respectful. Please read our Community Guidelines before participating.