SPC to hear about issues impacting shelter capacity

By Lethbridge Herald on June 15, 2023.

Herald photo by Al Beeber An individual stands out in the rain early Wednesday morning in the downtown core. An SPC today will hear a report on the issues facing efforts to increase shelter space in Lethbridge.

Al Beeber
Lethbridge Herald

Several issues impact the ability to increase shelter capacity here, the Cultural and Social Standing Policy Committee of city council will hear this afternoon.

The committee meets at 1:30 p.m. in council chambers and consists of councillors Mark Campbell, Jenn Schmidt-Rempel, Jeff Carlson and Nick Paladino.

Andrew Malcolm, general manager of Community Social Development, is scheduled to make a presentation to the SPC.

In his report, Malcolm states that “despite a great deal of discussion around the need to increase shelter capacity in the community and several recent unsuccessful efforts to do so, the demand on shelter beds has outpaced supply in our community. Through analysis, the City has identified three major restrictions that have impacted the ability to increase supply. While any one of these restrictions may be difficult enough for an applicant to overcome, the reality is that often all three are typically stacked, compounding the challenge at hand.”

Those three restrictions include:

* Lack of available and appropriately zoned land to purchase, develop or redevelop.

• Access to funding.

• Availability and willingness of operators.

Lack of property is one of the first hurdles organizations face when developing social services here, says Malcolm’s presentation. In Land Use Bylaw 6300, no land use districts exist that allow ‘shelter’ as a permitted use and only two districts exist where ‘shelter’ is a discretionary use, those being Downtown Commercial and Public Building.

“This typically means that an organization wishing to develop a shelter in Lethbridge will have to either go through a contentious rezoning process, or likely have their discretionary development appealed – all of which creates uncertainty both operationally and financially. Lastly, even if a property is properly zoned, it must be available at the right moment for lease or purchase,” says the report.

 Access to funding is a two-fold issue, says the report, with organizations having to find capital funding for their projects and then operational funding to sustain their activities.

“Without upfront government funding commitments, organizations will see the development of additional shelter capacity as risky. The City does provide capital funding to housing projects along the entire housing continuum through the Affordable Housing Capital Grant; however, the City has historically not provided operational funding to housing providers in the community,” the report states.

The report says development and operation of shelters is often a contentious topic with members of the community having varying and opposing views on the subjject.

“Because of the rapid rise in visible homelessness throughout the country, the topics of homelessness, encampments, substance use and more have seen an increased focus by the public. Developing and operating a shelter is often a politically complicated endeavour that includes a large amount of reputational risk for organizations. Because of this reputational risk, organization’s may be hesitant to develop or operate a shelter as they might experience slander and defamation as a result of going through the rezoning and/or appeal process,” says the report.

There are ways the municipality could reduce barriers including by increasing the number of parcels of land that allow shelters as a permitted use via amendments to the land use bylaw, which would decrease uncertainty for developers of shelters and provide clear direction on where such facilities are appropriate.

The report notes that even if appropriately zoned land exists it must be available at the right time so the City could look “to actively bank land for infill and redevelopment purposes for a variety of short, medium, and long-term opportunities including shelter and social service opportunities.This provides the opportunity for the City to lease properties and/or negotiate the sale of strategic properties to facilitate shelter development.”

Future funding through the Affordable and Social Housing Capital Grant could be used to incentivize development of shelters, says the report.

These three strategies are recommended by CSD.

Two strategies that aren’t recommended are providing ongoing funding for operations which “can be costly and risky for a municipality and could set a precedent for funding other social operations” and taking on ownership and operation of housing of all forms which includes shelts.

“This would result in considerable ongoing capital and operational costs

including considerable additions of full-time employees to manage increased workload,” adds the report.

The report says no single reason exists why the numbers of people experiencing homelessness has increased in the last four years by nearly double.

Some potential reasons are the opioid crisis, inflation, the COVID-19 pandemic and cost-of-living.

And while numbers of homeless have increased, shelter capacity has not changed since the early 2000s – there is an average shelter capacity in Lethbridge of 157 beds, which means based on the 2022 Point-in-Time count, there is gap of about 270 beds in Lethbridge.

The Blood Tribe Department of Health shelter has 125 beds, YWCA for women and children 24 and Wood’s Emergency Youth Shelter has eight.