Last refuge for the homeless will close on Friday
‘These people came from somewhere,’ says Nadine Green, who offered shelter in her convenience store
For more than five years, Udanapher (Nadine) Green has welcomed more than 100 homeless people into her convenience store on Water Street in downtown Kitchener.
They’ve been welcome to enjoy the free food that people and businesses send over. They can play a game of pool or sit around and chat. They can use the bathroom or the telephone. They can sleep on the floor at night if they have nowhere else to go.
The chairs and pool table mean there isn’t much room for merchandise. But Green’s guests can buy potato chips, cold pop and hot coffee, and put it on their tab. They won’t have to pay until their cheque comes later in the month. These tough men and women of the street adore Green. They never miss payments to her. They give her hugs and call her “Mama” and “Pearl,” and “the mother I should have had.”
But all this will be over on Friday, when Green says the sheriff is scheduled to come and evict her from the property.
Green isn’t sure what will happen then to the people who have treated her store like a home.
“I have no place to go,” said Jordan G. Burrows.
He isn’t welcome at local shelters because of conflicts with other residents.
“I’ve been sleeping outside in parked cars,” he said.
“If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know where I would have slept last night.”
Green sees this action as part of a larger movement to push homeless people out of downtown Kitchener as it gentrifies. “These people came from somewhere,” she said. “They came from families. They didn’t just drop from the sky.”
For the past few months, Green has been fighting her eviction in court.
The landlord is a numbered company that also owns neighbouring properties between King and Duke streets, such as Slices restaurant and the Money Mart.
Calls and emails to Mary Ann
Friedrich, assistant administrator and property manager for the landlord, were not immediately returned on Wednesday.
However, court documents from last fall detail the landlord’s complaint.
“Since the fall of 2018, the Tenant, has allowed, increasingly, Vagrants to use the premises as a club house,” Friedrich said.
People go in and out showing no signs of buying anything. There are no hours of business posted at the store.
Meanwhile, other businesses have complained about loitering, garbage, and rocks thrown at delivery trucks in the area, she stated.
Green was ordered to vacate a week before Christmas.
She ignored the order. “Where are the guys going to go?” she said.
“This store is not about me anymore.”
In fact, there isn’t anywhere else for homeless people to go.
Until now, there has always been some kind of refuge in the bitter winter months.
Years ago, the Out Of the Cold program was set up to use local churches in the core areas as temporary sleeping stops for those who couldn’t go to a shelter. Volunteers offered meals and set up bedding. Churches took turns to host.
That situation ended after drug addictions and violent behaviours both intensified in a minority of the guests. It overwhelmed the energy of the volunteers, who had no professionals on site to back them up.
The Region of Waterloo set up temporary “warming” centres for the next couple of years that served as a drop-in for people who spent the night on the streets.
But the number of people they held kept shrinking. Meanwhile, the number of homeless people, by most accounts, has grown as soaring land values downtown meant cheap, substandard housing was converted into high-end apartment or condo buildings.
A couple of years ago, St. Matthews Lutheran Church was used as a 70-bed temporary centre where people who were out at night could warm up or get some sleep.
Last year, the YWCA in downtown Kitchener, which operates a shelter, also made room for a 45-bed temporary shelter in its building.
That wasn’t available this year. When the cold weather started on Remembrance Day, nothing had been planned.
St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church opened and accepted 100 people a night. After that the vacant Tim Hortons shop was used at Frederick and Lan
“If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know where I would have slept last night.” JORDAN G. BURROWS HOMELESS
caster streets. It was operated by The Working Centre. But it too was only a temporary solution and closed before Christmas.
Even though one study shows there are as many homeless people sleeping “rough” outside as there are people in official shelters, the Region of Waterloo has no plan for keeping this most vulnerable group of people warm and safe on cold winter nights.
The only plan is Green’s plan. And in a couple of days, her comfortably cluttered store with its maps of the world’s countries and portrait of Bob Marley on the wall, the tray of free doughnuts on the counter and the crumpled paper bags that hold records of what each person owes her, the ringing phones and the animated conversation, the barber’s chair that people perch on for a chat, will all be gone too.
There’s nothing to do now but pray.
“God, I know you’re working,” she said.
“It’s not over till it’s over.”