(reprinted in People’s Voice here)

So the 100 or so people who are being evicted from their tents in five Halifax parks in the dead of winter have three choices:  go to the new shelter at the Forum which has been refurbished in the last months at a cost of $3 million; go to a hotel room, or go to a modular home. 

Well the 100 or so don’t really have much of a choice at all. 

First there is the matter of eviction.  And I thought only rapacious landlords evicted!

If Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) goes ahead with its threat, everyone will be evicted from the five parks on 26 Feb.  The city is happy about the shelter (which is totally paid for by the province)  and it gets people out of the parks.  Max Chauvin, HRM’s Director of Housing and Homelessness, told CBC Information Morning’s host Portia Clark today   that tent dwellers are in very unsafe conditions—subject to “fire, carbon monoxide poisoning, cold weather, no running water, no place to prepare and store food.” 

“Why … ask them to remove themselves from their safe environment to go up to an auditorium with 50 people they don’t know and all their baggage?”

Matt Grant, volunteer

Yet two men, Matt Grant and Steve Wilsack, who volunteer helping tent-dwellers at Grand Parade disagree.  They think  residents of the encampment  with their own household items and their own space are safer there than in a shelter.  Said Grant,  “So, why would you ask them to remove themselves from their safe environment to go up to an auditorium with 50 people they don’t know and all their baggage?” 

What will be done with the residents’ tents and personal effects? Chauvin noted that some people have “9-10-11 bags of possessions, mementoes and pictures, clothes” so there is storage in a shipping container.  But in talking to the manager of the Forum shelter,  I learn that that is not yet available.   

According to Chauvin, “Everyone deserves a home with a closed door and to feel safe – this is your space.” Chauvin is misleading us because the Forum’s shelter is not that.  Curtains divide off spaces that are  small cubicles– with no door.  If the person’s possessions don’t fit safely in the cubicle, the person has to get rid of their things.  Contrary to what Chauvin said, there is no ‘overflow room’ or storage; there is no shipping container.  The Forum shelter manager told me she had not heard about plans for a shipping container.

The demands of charity

The charity, 902 Man Up, has been contracted to run the shelter; here are some of the rules:  

• pets are not permitted, 
• there is a morning wake-up time and residents have to be out of bed during the daytime
• the person can stay in the shelter all day, but not stay in bed  
• “Even for privacy, we cannot close off the beds because then we can’t check on people,” one shelter worker told me 
• Though the shelter is open 24/7, the doors open at 6 am and close at 11 pm  
• If the resident isn’t back by 11 pm, they are locked out till the next morning at 6 am
• The shelter manager said the forum shelter is a “drug free facility and anyone caught using drugs will be asked to leave.” 
• There are security guards to monitor and discourage bad behaviour like theft, violence, making a ruckus, upsetting others etc. 

The shelter manager told me, “the person can stay as long as the shelter is available – until August” when the province will decide what it wants to do with the shelter.  

I decided to compare shelters in the UK (in London) with our new shelter.  While a lot of UK charities operate shelters, many homeless people stay in “hostels.”  In a hostel, residents have their own room, or at most, share a room with one other person of the same sex. Usually the person can stay for free if they are on social assistance. This is considered a step up from living in a shelter.  I suppose a hostel is akin to what Halifax offers as a “modular unit” and will be one of the 61 “tiny homes” (pallet homes) that are supposed to be available soon. 

Still there is constant supervision – and serious rules for living in either modular or tiny homes.  There are rules about using shared  toilets and washhouses, eating with others, not being able to prepare one’s own food (how many kitchens are needed for 61 people), not being in a couple or family, not having guests late at night.  On top of all, spending life in one small room isn’t great.  On this site people write about experiences living in (or working in) shelters – and it isn’t easy but it may be one step beyond living rough.  

So people who are homeless in HRM, or have lived in parks must now live under surveillance. Is that a fair trade for freedom?

“They better bring a lot of cops if they want to get me out of here.”

resident at Grand Parade

Before HRM laid down the ultimatum the tent dwellers preferred to live with freedom. They likely hurt no one, and interfered with no one. Now they will be forced to live under perpetual surveillance for the “pleasure” of having a roof over their heads and dormitory-style  accommodation.  Suzanne Rent, at the Halifax Examiner, visited the Grand Parade the other day — a site with more than 30 tents soon to be cleared by HRM.  One resident she spoke with said he’d “rather be dead” than live in a shelter.  He said “They better bring a lot of cops if they want to get me out of here,” the man said. “I’ll fight tooth and nail to stay.” A disabled worker, he receives very little on income assistance. He asked, “Do you know how many people I know who are only two paycheques away from being out here? You’re either super rich or you’re just getting by.”

A new workhouse?

Let’s talk for a minute about hotels.  In the past only people at risk, or those with health needs or with children, got to live in hotels.  But they were able to live in a room with a door, a lock, a TV and a bathroom plus three meals a day.  Now HRM (and the province) want that to be a last resort – mostly because the cost to the public purse  is probably $150 -$200 a night. Housing a person in a shelter costs a fraction of that. As I’ve written here, here and here, on any given night, there are more than 2,000 empty hotel rooms in Halifax and Dartmouth at this time of year. So now we have Chauvin and HRM council pushing shelters. Vince Calderhead, a Halifax lawyer who specializes in human rights told AllNovaScotia.com — the shelter at the Forum strikes him as a “modern-day poorhouse.” 

The issue is: developers are getting richer and richer.  They are building more and more apartments and homes out of reach of all of the 100 people who are being ejected from the parks. The trickle-down theory doesn’t work.  That theory suggests when a nicer, brand new building comes on stream, those with money leave their older apartment unit, pay a bit more to live in a “luxury” suite or buy a condo.  So the apartments they leave, older apartments, become available– at a reasonable rate. 

That simply does not happen in the urban Canadian housing market. When someone leaves an older unit to move to a nicer or newer building, their former landlord ups the rent on the original apartment – or renovates it in order to increase the rent even more. In a tight rental market such as the one in Halifax – even the rent on a mediocre apartment is beyond the reach of every one of the 100 people evicted from the parks. 

Who’s behind all of this…

Will 26 Feb. be another 18 Aug. 2021 fiasco? 

Will the police go in with pepper spray and truncheons, to bully and to destroy tents, belongings and beat on tent dwellers — if they refuse to leave the parks. Will there be injured tenters and their defenders and massive arrests — which make criminals of the poor and the homeless? I didn’t notice anyone in power seriously apologizing or blasting the cops (especially the then-chief) about how the cops handled the “raid” — 2.5 years ago.  Come to think of it, some HRM councillors denied they knew anything about plans to bust up the encampment near the old library — a claim that is laughable.  The powers-that-be say it will be a “gentle” removal. But that’s sophistry. Compared to the brutal police eviction in 2021, anything would be “gentle.”

The contretemps between the province and the city is pathetic.  Finally the province gave the city a couple of shelters – the new one at the Forum and one on Windmill Rd.  Some people liken them to jails.  No matter, HRM doesn’t have to foot the bill—which is what counts to our city fathers and mothers (the councillors). 

Nota bene:

For an excellent history of the ravages of poorhouses in this province, read A Wholesome Horror: Poor Houses in Nova Scotia by Brenda Thompson (2021). Read my review of the book here.

Featured image at the top: Tent City, San Francisco, by Joseph Abbati. For more photos see Abbati’s site.