Duncan grows cold to warming shelter

Park not the right place, councillors say

Duncan councillors have rejected a proposal to put a warming station for homeless people in a municipal park because of objections from nearby residents.

“Many people understood the complexities of the issues with respect to people who are living completely rough,” Duncan Mayor Phil Kent said in an interview. “But they just felt that location was not appropriate” for a warming station, said Kent.

Councillors voted against turning the McAdam Park field house, mostly used as a change room for young athletes, into a spot were people living outdoors could come to warm up.

Many people in the nearby community, especially parents of children at the adjacent Cowichan Preschool, objected. Encounters with discarded hypodermic needles this year forced the preschool to erect a chainlink fence around the perimeter of its grounds as a barrier to injection drug users.

McAdam Park is one of Duncan’s larger green spaces. It has two sports fields, used year round. A portion of its land has been donated, leased for $1 a year, to the preschool.

Duncan has found itself stretched in recent years as it tries to deal with a homeless population that continues to expand.

Signy Maddon, executive director of the United Way, Central and Northern Vancouver Island, and a member of the Cowichan Coalition to Address Homelessness and Affordable Housing, said surveys show homelessness in the Cowichan Valley has increased at least 26 per cent in the past three years.

She said a February survey counted at least 73 people in the Cowichan Valley as “absolutely homeless,” sleeping outdoors or in a shelter, compared with 56 in 2014.

Maddon said the warming shelter was only a first attempt by the coalition to offer shortterm assistance. The next effort will likely be a separate women’s shelter, she said. Many homeless women will not stay at existing shelters since they don’t feel safe.

Maddon said United Way, Cowichan Housing Association, Social Planning Cowichan and Our Cowichan Health Network have formed a group to find solutions to homelessness.

“We have a huge increase in homelessness,” she said.

“Those poor folks are in the parks, merchants are seeing them in their washrooms, libraries are seeing them.

“They are there and their numbers are increasing,” Maddon said. “Where we are coming from on the coalition side is we are worried about people dying on the street.”