Christine Nayler takes us through the numbers of the current shelter situation, and describes how this lack of shelter space (let alone accessible shelter space) would make a potential encampment eviction illegal in the City of Barrie
Posted by Christine Nayler, Contributing Member
Let's look at the numbers!
The County of Simcoe has a total capacity of 239 shelter beds. Some of these beds are for a specific demographic, youth, family, ...
Last night across the County there were 240 people in shelter. That puts the Simcoe County Shelter system over capacity.
In Barrie where we have a total of 137 shelter beds we had 167 people accessing shelter last night.
That is as an overflow of 30 people. And that is not counting those that tried to access shelter and were turned away.
If it were merely a matter of having enough shelter beds to accommodate the encampment residents sheltering at Berczy Park the City of Barrie cannot even meet that requirement. Let alone meeting the legal requirement of truly accessible accommodation needed to make a eviction of encampment residents legal.
So if the City of Barrie were to show up at Berczy Park, say tomorrow or Tuesday to evicte encampment residents I am confident we would have no trouble proving the eviction illegal in a court of law.
I really wish the City would work with advocates in being a part of the solution instead of opening themselves up to a costly legal battle that does nothing to solve the problem or make our city safer for anyone.
Daily Shelter Utilization Data can be found at https://gisportal.simcoe.ca/arcgis/apps/sites/#/county-of-simcoe-data-portal/pages/shelter-utilization.
Engage Barrie Organization encourages our members and guests to contribute blog posts on a variety of topics that fall under our "equitable, empowered, engaged" umbrella, in the hopes of sharing a variety of perspectives and experiences.
Please be aware that the views and opinions expressed by our blog contributors do not necessarily reflect any official position of Engage Barrie Organization.
Kommentare