Brian Howell, left, sits with some of the other people involved in counting the homeless population of Prince Albert. The number of people living on the street in the city has doubled in the last year. (Susan McNeil/paNOW)

By Susan McNeil

Homelessness

Number of homeless on the street doubles

May 26, 2022 | 2:12 PM

The number of homeless people on the streets of Prince Albert has doubled in the last year.

A count done in March of this year showed 57 people with no form of shelter compared to 26 in 2021.

Brian Howell of the River Bank Development Corporation, which conducted the count, said it appears something changed during the pandemic that led to the increase.

“We just can’t keep up. We should have a shelter here running during the summer, we should have a bigger shelter in the winter, and we just don’t have the money,” he said.

Funding did increase during COVID, but running a homeless shelter is expensive, costing well over $500,000 annually.

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As to the cause, Howell has his suspicions and said there seem to be several factors but without numbers, he wasn’t able to be more specific.

“We think that’s related to a number of factors, but we still haven’t really been able to nail it down,” he said.

Previous years’ counts have consistently seen 26 or 27 people counted every time.

When added to the 63 people who are living in one of the city’s shelters, there are now 120 homeless people, which is not everyone, according to Howell. The previous high count was 106 homeless people.

“We don’t presume it to be a count of everyone who was homeless in Prince Albert that night. We think there’s lots of people that we missed,” Howell explained.

Sometimes homeless people will find shelter under stairs in apartment buildings or might have created an encampment that the volunteers have not been told about.

The enumerators have no way of counting the people who “couch surf”, staying temporarily with friends or family but with no permanent residence.

A requirement of the funding they get from the federal government means River Bank must conduct a point in time count of the homeless population every two years.

These are split into two categories, sheltered homeless (those staying in places such as Stepping Stones but without a permanent home or the ‘couch surfers’) and those who are unsheltered, which means they are living on the street.

The count was done on March 24. Counting people who are unsheltered involves volunteers driving the streets looking for homeless people and stopping to ask them to answer a short survey.

“We’re basically quite sure we have covered most of the areas, including the downtown and Cornerstone and the top of the hill and Second Avenue,” Howell said.

A further breakdown of the numbers showed that 26 per cent of the homeless population is under 18, and a small percentage are in their early 20s but by far the largest age group is people aged 25 to 39, at just over 40 per cent.

“You’re seeing a significant number of people who are younger. In the past in Prince Albert, a lot of it has been you know, older people who were caught up in alcohol,” he said.

The youth or children are mostly living in shelters and are not on the streets.

For gender, 53 per cent are male, 41 per cent are female and almost five per cent are two-spirited. Almost all are Indigenous at 99 per cent.

Over one-half had spent time in a foster home, 45 per cent had no income and just under 42 per cent were receiving provincial benefits.

Powell said there is a single cause of homelessness and that is a lack of income. Even people relying on some form of government assistance cannot afford market-rate rents and are reliant on subsidized housing. Even that is sometimes not enough.

The issue is a national one and not isolated to either the Province of Saskatchewan or the City of Prince Albert.

Regina has also experienced an increase in homelessness in the same time frame (from 280 to slightly over 500) and smaller communities such as North Battleford and Humboldt are starting to see the same issues. A count in Saskatoon does not have numbers available.

“They previously haven’t really been in this game and are now seeing this too,” said Howell. “This is really a warning to our province, these sets of numbers in the major centres that there’s something happening out there.”

Recent data from Stepping Stones, one of Prince Albert’s shelters, shows that the shelter housed 422 unique individuals from mid-October to April 30, at which point it reverted to being an overnight shelter.

They provided 617 overflow beds for 56 days of operation and 4,532 beds for the duration of the winter.

The shelter gave out 20 lunch bags every night, feeding people almost 4,000 times.

In order to provide the expanded service over the past winter, they used one-time funding from several sources and say that without it this coming fall, the shelter may not re-open.

“Without COVID funding, we do not have plans to reopen Stepping Stones in the fall, and may return to the 10 beds in the basement of Our House if that funding is still available to us,” said CEO Donna Brooks in an email to paNOW.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com