Homelessness spurs St. Stephen to examine long-term solutions

Homelessness will not go away with the arrival of warm weather, St. Stephen's Mayor Allan MacEachern says. An "out-of-the-cold" warming centre opened on December 13 to prevent people without homes from freezing to death this winter, but MacEachern hopes that outreach work with people using the centre continues well past this spring.
"There's more to it than a warming shelter," he states in an interview, adding that staff are working with clients "helping them get on their feet and get them so that they don't have to be in a warming shelter," a need he does not see ending soon. "So I can't see that stopping because of warm weather," he says.
The former St. Stephen Town Council approved $10,000 for the warming centre, but most of the money, including pay for staff, comes from the provincial Social Development Department. Neighbourhood Works administers the warming centre, located on Prince William Street, and offers breakfast, hot showers and laundry facilities every morning at its own facilities in the former Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church on Union Street. The John Howard Society provided training for an outreach worker, also based at Neighbourhood Works, to reach out to people without homes.
The Unsheltered Persons Working Group proposed the warming centre and outreach worker as a stop-gap response to an alarming number of people in tents in public parks and other places last summer. Supporters argued that these measures would prevent people from freezing while work continued on long-term solutions to the lack of affordable housing.
A survey last summer identified about 30 people in St. Stephen describing themselves as homeless. The tents are gone, but many people still live in inadequate housing, including crashing at the homes of friends -- or staying all night at the warming centre.
MacEachern sees the "tiny home" movement as one solution for St. Stephen. In Fredericton, the nonprofit group 12 Neighbours Inc. is developing a micro-home community that is planning to grow to 96 little houses. MacEachern has attended one information session and spoken to a service club on the idea, but nobody has stepped up to take the ball and run with it yet.
Whatever the solution, MacEachern agrees it will require money from taxpayers and charity. He accepts the argument that a private developer cannot build housing with borrowed money and keep rents low enough for poor people to pay. "It has to be supported by the province or someone," the mayor says, adding, "You don't do it to lose money; you know, a developer doesn't do that."
Not everybody in St. Stephen supports the warming centre. At the February meeting of the municipal district council -- which took over from the former town council on January 1 -- Councillor Marg Harding said that she took many calls from citizens "about the situation that's going on in St. Stephen about the warming shack, what happens there."
Councillor Emily Rodas, a social worker, objected to Harding's terminology. "It's not a 'warming shack'; it's the out-of-the-cold regional warming shelter," she said. Rodas told councillors that she chaired a committee meeting where a young man who had experiences with drug addiction and homelessness spoke. "As a community we have a responsibility to provide services to individuals so that they can work. We can't expect people who don't have a home to just, you know, enter the workforce," she said, adding that people elsewhere in New Brunswick praised St. Stephen for the short time it took to get its warming centre up and running.
Deputy Mayor Ghislaine Wheaton said that she received calls "about the homeless situation" but said the problem goes beyond St. Stephen. Wheaton saw "a whole bunch of tents" on a recent visit to Saint John, she said, adding, "We are not the only one, but we do have to come up with a solution."
Councillor Brian Cornish suggested reaching out to the pastor of a local church who seems interested in the issue. Cornish said that he did not know a lot about homelessness and users of drugs, but the two seem to overlap. "I certainly would like to help them, but I think we have a situation that's not very different from the rest of New Brunswick, Canada or the world, but some of them -- I don't know which some that is -- are actually causing some disturbances, some fear and people are getting scared, and I think there's going to be trouble before it's over; so I think we as a council have to deal with that," he said.
St. Stephen residents possibly spoke with their feet and pocketbooks on February 25 when 177 people divided into 29 teams raised $53,040 in a "Coldest Night of the Year" walk for Neighbourhood Works, more than double the goal of $26,000.