The number of homeless people in New Westminster is dropping but the need for outreach services is a growing concern.
The 2014 Metro Vancouver Homeless count, released Wednesday, showed there were 104 homeless people in New Westminster in 2014, compared to 132 in 2011.
“Most of our population is sheltered. That’s really important,” said John Stark, the city’s senior social planner. “In New West, when you look at it overall, our numbers went down from 2011 to 2014 which is positive. That is both sheltered and unsheltered.”
About 40 volunteers took the streets of New Westminster, shelters and social agencies on March 12 for the homeless count. Of the 104 people counted in New Westminster, 32 had no shelter, 70 were in emergency facilities or shelters and two had no fixed address.
“While the 21 per cent decrease in overall homelessness (unsheltered and sheltered) is positive, I believe the important number is the 22 per cent decrease in unsheltered homelessness,” Stark said. “In New Westminster, 68.6 per cent of the homeless population is sheltered, which means they are accessing support services, including addictions and mental health counseling, housing support, life skills, etc.”
The count, which is considered a 24-hour snapshot of people who are homeless in Metro Vancouver, found there was a total of 2,770 people living in shelters, transition houses, living outside or staying temporarily with others, five per cent more than the 2011 count.
“Regionally speaking, homeless numbers remain stable from previous years,” said Deb Bryant, chair of the Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness. “This shows that we’ve stemmed the tide of increasing homelessness and have achieved some stability, but we still have more to do to end and prevent homelessness.”
Stark believes New Westminster is an area where people can get a true picture about the extent of homelessness in Metro Vancouver. Prior to the count he worked with bylaw enforcement officers and housing outreach workers to identify locations where unsheltered homeless people had been spotted and passed that information on to the volunteer enumerators
“We are seven square miles – 15.6 kilometres. You have about 45 to 50 volunteer enumerators. Each count I go out with Dave Brown (of Lookout Emergency Aid Society) and we start out really early, like 6 a.m. We are going up the embankments from Front to Columbia, checking out parks. When you look at larger municipalities like Delta or Surrey, parts of Burnaby, it’s just hard to get into all those areas, the physical extent of it all. I think when we look at New West we get a truer extent of homelessness and a truer count, recognizing that all counts undercount because you don’t get those people who are couch surfing necessarily.”
Vancouver had the most homeless people in the region (1,719), followed by Surrey (403), the North Shore (119), New Westminster (104), Langley (92), Ridge Meadows (84), Burnaby (58), Tri-Cities (55), Richmond (38) and Delta/White Rock (19). Of the 2,770 people counted as homeless in the region, 957 were unsheltered and 1,813 were in shelters.
People who are counted as being “unsheltered” include those living outside, couch surfing or using homelessness services on the day of the count. People are classified as “sheltered homeless” if they were in shelters, safe houses for youth, transition houses for women, or people with no fixed address who were temporarily staying in hospital beds, jails or detox facilities.
The 2014 Metro Vancouver Homeless count’s purpose is to estimate the number of people who are homeless in the region, obtain a demographic profile of this population and identify trends compared to previous years. The final report, which will be released in July, will provide a more complete analysis of the count data and survey questions, including how long people have been homeless, health issues, barriers to ending homelessness, sources of income, and services that people who are homeless tend to use.
Stark said volunteers ask questions about income, health, mental health, addiction, length of time they’ve been homeless and their home municipality – questions that allow service providers to target services to individuals.
“One of the other things we have to consider in New Westminster is shelter and housing is really important, but outreach is also important,” he said. “We have lost some of our outreach capacity over the last few years, which is really concerning. We are trying to keep people housed so they don’t become homeless because it’s more difficult after they become homeless to house them. There were cuts to Lookout Emergency Aid Society, and more recently to the Seniors Services Society and the Hospitality Project. That’s concerning, just in the fact that without those resources we are less able to assist individuals who are either at risk of homelessness or are just becoming homeless. We have to be very careful – there is a big push around ‘housing first’ and creating housing but we also need that outreach capacity.”
Stark participated in his first homeless count in 2008 and has seen improvements since that time.
“There were a significant number of people along the railway tracks, on Front Street, on the embankment between Columbia and Front. In 2011, I think we came across three or four. In this past count, we didn’t count anyone in there. A number of people are making their way, at that point, to the Union Gospel Mission. We count them there,” he said. “When we look at homelessness, we have even noticed a difference with regards to those who are on the street.”
Previous counts showed there were 97 homeless people in New Westminster in 2005 and 127 in 2008.
“When we think about homelessness, they can be quite transient, they can move around. What happens in another municipality can have impacts on ourselves,” Stark said. “We know when we look at that sheltered population why that has increased – most of our shelters got approved in 2007, 2008 and 2009 and took several years to construct. They didn’t come on-stream, a lot of them, until 2010 and 2011. We can see that accounts for the increase in our sheltered population. With regard to the unsheltered population, they do move around.”
