Saskatoon can no longer afford to keep making the same mistakes regarding homeless shelters. We also have to also understand that many people we deem as “homeless” are actually “unhousable”. What that means is that you can’t simply provide an apartment or suite to a large number of these persons and expect anything less than a disaster to follow. In their current addictions or mental health state, these people cannot safely live in traditional housing in a residential area of our city. We spend money endlessly on poorly conceived band-aid solutions which do not offer any real hope of success. Then we go even further to break our own planning bylaws for public safety to allow a massive shelter to go into the residential area of Fairhaven and then we are surprised that violence and community despair have followed closely behind? Enough of this right now.
We work with the Province so any money spent going forward will be for a longer term solution which provides safety for existing residential and commercial areas while giving the added supports actually needed by these people in need. To create a modular shelter system in the north light industrial area in a similar fashion to the newly opened operation in Red Deer. There was never any case that the Fairhaven Shelter or the proposed Sutherland Shelter was close to “services”. The same will be true for the light industrial location but I propose that we work to push that services come to that location, if not already sited there in the initial design and build. And the design and build will be modular in nature. Moveable and reconfigurable as needed over time. No more buying random properties not suited to the task (even after expensive renovations). While this is the Province’s to fund and operate, the City can help with the lease of civic land for this purchase. The Land Branch has been spending years and nearly 60 million dollars to buy up taxpayer funded purchases for a proposed future DEED site, so creating and offering our own land for this purpose should be much easier. If over time, this location needs to move, then the Province takes apart the structural units and moves them where they wish while removing the screw piles along the way. We then take our vacant site and sell it to a business interest like we would normally do regardless. The land remains the City of Saskatoon’s.
Looking at the background, public outcry pushed the Province to close the Lighthouse. Then the STC opened an Emergency Temporary Shelter on First Avenue in a City owned structure. That failed. So the STC found a location for sale in Fairhaven. The province purchased the site and the STC took their Emergency Shelter Beds and Programs from downtown and they combined that with the remaining Emergency Shelter Beds from the Lighthouse and all this was pushed into the Fairhaven location. The same land use, with the same basic services (according to the STC Chief himself), was situated at the new location within the safety buffer required for a residential area from such a land use. That would have been obviously illegal so the City Administration just called it by a different land use name instead of what it really was. The Province played along, even to the point that they ignored the legally required licensing for this new proposed land use “Special Care Home”. Of course, now nearly two years later, the failure is impossible to hide. There have been at least two murders and hundreds of violent events since this operation moved in.
In summary, the City should provide the land and develop a plan for the Province to build high quality modular shelters that can be sited in the north end. Give people a dignified place to get proper assistance and get their lives back on track, where existing residential communities are not at risk. It’s time for a change in thinking!