A total of 130 street people have been found homes in the past 14 months, due to the efforts of the Maple Ridge Resilience Initiative and outreach workers from Alouette Addictions Services.
Meanwhile, 35 of the 99 people who’ve been housed at the temporary homeless shelter on Lougheed Highway have been found homes, since the shelter opened almost a year ago.
The numbers are from a staff report as the Maple Ridge Resilience Initiative winds down its work, after being formed in 2015 to address addiction and mental illness in the city.
While the initiative, initially called the mayor’s task force on homeless, ends, three of four teams it created will continue their work.
The strong kids, community standards enforcement and street action teams should all continue in one way or the other, council heard at its Monday workshop.
How much the focus on social issues will cost the city remains to be seen. That will be worked out in the city’s annual business plan process, said Mayor Nicole Read.
“What resources do we need to support the reality – that this is what cities need?” Read said.
“Some cities are already at this point,” and have full-time social planners on staff.
Coun. Bob Masse said cities have taken on social services by default because of inaction by the senior governments over several years.
“That mandate creep is a huge concern for us. It should belong in the federal and provincial, most of this stuff. But in the absence of that, municipalities are stepping in and certainly not just Maple Ridge,” he added.
“It’s not that we want to step in to provide services that should be provided by higher levels of government. It’s that we had to,” Masse said.
In total, 143 people have reportedly been housed,” thanks to outreach workers connecting street people with places to live, according to the Sept. 19 City of Maple Ridge report.
However, of the latter number, 13 people have fallen out of housing, producing the overall total of 130.
The time period involved is from June 1, 2015 to Aug. 30, 2016.
Under the Resilience Initiative, the strong kids team hosted two community meetings that focused on mental health, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, as well as social media. But with many issues remaining, city staff are recommending that the strong kids team remain in place.
Also recommended to remain is the community standards enforcement team. That group is composed of RCMP, bylaws, the fire department, parks, social planning and the private security company Core Security.
According to the report, the community standards enforcement team has “changed the way that city staff work together to address social issues that impact the community …”
It does that by having weekly meetings, helping RainCity Housing in its operation of the temporary emergency shelter, and keeping an eye out to ensure no new tent camps form in Maple Ridge.
The group suggested the bylaw change that allowed camping in city parks, during evening hours only, while prohibiting camps near playgrounds or sports fields. That bylaw has prevented the establishment of another camp in the city.
The street action team, composed of Fraser Health, RainCity Housing, Salvation Army, Alouette Addictions Services, Alouette Home Start Society, the Canadian Mental Health Association and city staff will also carry on with bi-monthly meetings.
That team was focused on getting street people into housing.
The housing team won’t continue, however, as the city has already completed its housing action plan.
Social planning analyst Shawn Matthewson said that the money required for the teams to continue on will be presented in a future report, while the costs that have already been incurred have “significant financial implications for the municipality.”
In 2015, the initiative, launched in May of that year, cost the city $325,000.
Masse pointed out that provincial funds are covering much of the costs.
The report presents more statistics to show its progress in dealing with the issue of homelessness in Maple Ridge:
• B.C. Housing is now providing 60 rental supplements in Maple Ridge. That’s 15 more than 2015, and 60 more than in 2014, when there were no rental supplements provided.
• Maple Ridge now has a total of 6.7 street outreach workers, funded by B.C. Housing, who talk with people on the street and try to get them into housing or help. That compares to 3.7 two years ago.
• The temporary homeless shelter at 22239 Lougheed Hwy., also funded by B.C. Housing and which opened in October 2015 to allow for the clearing of the Cliff Avenue tent camp, has achieved a 35-per-cent success rate in getting people from the shelter to move into housing. That’s based on the shelter taking in 99 people since it opened. The capacity of the shelter is 40 people and it’s composed roughly equally of men and women.
• Currently, about 30 per cent of the people at the shelter have been there since it opened in October 2015, while 55 per cent of the people there now are new arrivals. About 13 per cent of the residents returned to the shelter after initially leaving.
Maple Ridge Workshop by Phil Melnychuk on Scribd