‘LIKE I WAS IN JAIL’
WHY HALIFAX’S HOMELESS DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THEIR TENTS
He banged on the bathroom stall, demanding to see what was inside Mike’s backpack. Mike and his girlfriend, Denise, had just arrived at the newly opened shelter in Halifax, and he needed to use the washroom.
“As soon as I got to the shelter the guards were harassing me, wanting to go through my bags,” he said.
“I needed to get away. Next thing I know, there’s this guy banging on my stall, demanding to go through my stuff.
“It was like I was in jail.” Mike didn’t have any drugs on him. The couple were with about a dozen other people who had also been sleeping outside and were brought in for a tour of the shelter in Halifax’s north-end last month. They were bused to the temporary facility at the back of an old hockey rink.
The province is putting up $3 million that it says will pay for staff and security, meals and support services to the end of August. The city owns the building and has put in a temporary shower trailer.
There, a concrete floor had been divided into sleeping quarters for men and women. Rust-coloured curtains separated the beds laid out side by side.
Mike and Denise were told that they had to sleep in different sections of the shelter. They’d been separated. They weren’t interested. Others felt the same.
One such tour turned violent. A man was punched in the mouth and lost teeth. Police said they would investigate the assault.
The couple (who asked that their last names not be used) got a bus ride back to their home about 25 minutes away.
For the past year and a half, they’ve been living in a tent at a ball field in the Halifax suburban community of Lower Sackville. They are living there with about 15 other people.
“People don’t want to live in shelters, said Denise. “It’s inhumane. No one wants to live somewhere where they don’t know a bunch of people sleeping next to them.
“There, you just feel like an animal.”
Denise copes with borderline personality disorder, severe anxiety and addiction issues. Mike also has mental health problems and is trying to overcome an addiction to hydromorphone. He’s prescribed methadone.
Their campsite community is close to a hospital and a drugstore. Tim Hortons is just up the street. They can also rely on a group of volunteers from the community. Members check up on them daily, and serve them a hot meal for dinner every day. They also provide other essentials, such as clothes, blankets and propane to keep the tents warm.
Mike and Denise live at one of 11 outdoor camping sites that Halifax had earmarked for homeless people. But the city is cracking down after complaints from neighbours and police about them being unsafe eyesores.
One encampment is right in front of city hall. It was started by a pair of volunteers and now has more than a dozen red ice fishing huts paid for mostly through a fundraising campaign.
But it’s also right in the middle of downtown. A couple of shelters have burned, and morning traffic was rerouted when a bigger fire started in another encampment nearby.
City officials went to five sites on Feb. 7 and pinned eviction notices to the tents. People have until the end of the month to leave. The notices came three days after the city was hit with almost a metre of snow.
Some say they will refuse to leave and are willing to be arrested. Rick Young is one of them at city hall.
“I’m not going. I’m not sleeping in no shelter.”
There are options. The Halifax Regional Municipality and the Nova Scotia government have added 30 spaces to the rinkside shelter. There’s also a promise of some beds in a former hotel across the harbour in Dartmouth.
The province announced last October that it was spending $7.5 million to buy 200 U.s.-built Pallet Shelters, half of which will be set up in Halifax. Each unit has a bed frame, mattress and desk, and is ready to be hooked up to electricity. They’ll rely on a central washroom and laundry. But only 19 units will be ready by the end of February.
The province also has plans to build a tiny home village at the Lower Sackville encampment. But people won’t be able to move in until the end of the summer. The project includes 52 units, which can accommodate up to 62 people.
While shelters are slow in coming, the number of homeless continues to rise. The Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia said in early February there were 1,123 people in the Halifax region who identified as being homeless. That’s more than double the number at the start of 2022.
More shelter spaces aren’t going to cut it, said one man living outdoors in Lower Sackville. He also took a tour of the hockey rink shelter.
“My takeaway was everyone would way prefer to be outside and suffering and have a semblance of privacy,” he said. “No one wants to share that much space with so many other people.”