Hotel rooms for homeless campers paves transition to permanent housing, city says
Offering hotel rooms to homeless campers has proved to be a successful way to help them get into permanent housing, says a local outreach worker.
When city crews cleared dozens of people out of Dawson Park in May, the city agreed to foot the bill for hotel rooms for 10 people who told Boyle Street Community Services outreach workers they wanted to try to get off the streets.
Two months later, seven of those people are in permanent homes and the other three are working with housing agencies.
"It's been very intensive work, but it's been very rewarding to see a number of these people actually get housed and the rest be very close to being housed," said Doug Cooke, team lead for Boyle Street's street outreach team.
More than 1,900 Edmontonians were homeless as of January 2019, and nearly 500 of them were sleeping outside rather than in shelters, according to a city report from May.
Cooke and his team fan out across Edmonton to check on people who camp in the river valley, under bridges, next to roads or in other isolated spots across the city. It's an ongoing effort by outreach workers to help those people find permanent housing — helping them make it to appointments or complete the process of getting an apartment.
But people who live rough tend to relocate often. They might decide to move their campsite or city crews might clear it away. Sometimes a friend or family member will offer a couch or an extra bed for a while.
For outreach workers, this makes them hard to track down and the loss of contact often means having to start the process of getting on a housing wait list all over again, Cooke said.
Putting someone in a hotel, where they are easy to find and where outreach workers can leave messages, smoothes the housing application process.
City spokeswoman Adrienne Cloutier said paying for hotels for people evicted from Dawson Park is how the city decided to wade into bridge housing — temporary, safe places for people while they transition from sleeping outdoors to an apartment.
Creating a bridge housing policy was recommended in a March 2019 report on how the city should deal with homeless encampments on public land. Cloutier said the city is starting to introduce a number of the report's recommendations.
On Monday, Cloutier wasn't able to provide the total the city has paid so far on hotel rooms.
"The city will continue to fund the transitional housing effort on a small scale through the Boyle Street Outreach team until the end of the year," Cloutier wrote in an email on Monday.
"Administration will evaluate its effectiveness as an intervention that improves housing outcomes for people sleeping rough and the corresponding cost at the end of the year."
In the meantime, as tent cities continue to pop up around the city core, Cloutier said the city will work with the Boyle Street team, Homeward Trust and other agencies to try to balance cleaning up the camps with helping the people who set them up.
