SHELTERING THE HOMELESS
Soccer stadium to house up to 150
Organizations working to support Montreal's homeless population welcomed the announcement that the Stade de soccer de Montréal will be converted into a site to house homeless people with COVID -19, but they said the work can't stop there.
Officials say the site, announced on Thursday by Quebec and Montreal as well as the Red Cross, will accommodate up to 150 people in individual units that respect public health guidelines. Located in a five-year-old building on Papineau Ave. in the St-michel district, it's set to open in the coming days and will be staffed by Red Cross teams.
“This is good. What we need, though, are places that are in areas where homeless people hang out,” said Nakuset, the executive director of the Native Women's Shelter of Montreal. “Because if you put a place for 100 (people) in Papineau and you're around Cabot Square, you know … start walking.”
The Red Cross confirmed that a shuttle will take people from downtown to the shelter, the details of which will be more concrete in the coming days. Still, Nakuset said people are comfortable in their usual spots and that she's been working to have something set up in Cabot Square.
Between the announcement on Thursday and another on Wednesday that 112 beds will be added at the Centre Pierre-charbonneau near Olympic Stadium, more than 250 beds are set to open in Montreal despite an earlier claim by Premier François Legault that the city had enough space to accommodate the homeless population.
Legault made the claim to explain how homeless people would avoid being fined amid the province's curfew, and at a Thursday afternoon news conference, he defended that claim by saying needs have evolved with the weather.
“At the time, they were telling me we needed 600 places, so we announced, at the time, 800 places to make sure we had a margin,” he said. “Recently, they told me we need another 100-200, we said `Hey, we'll put another 250.' ”
He reiterated that homeless people aren't exempt from the curfew but that police officers have been instructed to help them get to shelters, not ticket them.
“What we're trying to do from the start is to protect homeless people,” he said. “You've seen we've added hundreds of spots in emergency shelters, we're going to be announcing more today and when there are more needs, we'll add more.”
The CEO of Welcome Hall Mission, Sam Watts, said the added beds are good news, but that they're a temporary and costly solution to a long-standing issue.
“The problem is that's a 19th century answer to a 21st century problem,” he said. “We need to start getting more spaces available that are for permanent, supported housing. To the extent that we can do that, we're going to reduce the need for emergency spaces and for the very costly services that we're having to implement right now.”
Watts said it's difficult to know exactly how many homeless people require housing because it's a mobile population that evolves over time — some people experience homelessness in episodes, whereas for others, it's chronic.
“People like Raphaël (André) who died this past week would've been a case where he was chronic — in that he was circulating in the ecosystem for a long time — and frankly that's where the system failed, is this man should never have continued to be homeless. We should have found some sort of a solution to the challenges that he faced.”
He added that the Welcome Hall Mission has found permanent housing for nearly 200 people since the pandemic began and while it has stepped up to offer temporary shelter, finding permanent solutions remains its priority.
Sophie Hart, the founder of Meals for Milton-parc who works as an intervention worker at the old Royal Victoria Hospital, has similar thoughts about how the city and province are tackling homelessness in Montreal.
“While these 100 or so beds will mean people will have the option to sleep inside, these band-aid solutions are continuing the cycle of homelessness,” she said. “These makeshift setups offer no comfort or level of care for vulnerable people living with housing insecurity.”
Hart, whose job is to care for COVID -19-positive homeless people, worries that the new emergency shelters aren't adequate spaces for people to isolate, given that the units don't seem to have doors.
“The homeless population has been hit extremely hard by COVID in the last month and it continues to be an ongoing crisis where there are not enough beds for housing-insecure people to self-isolate or quarantine safely and with dignity,” she said.