A 24-hour snapshot of the number of homeless in Quesnel done back on April 2nd of this year shows that there were 131 people without a place to live.
Sherilyn Vanhalderen, Shelter Coordinator at Seasons House, says they just don’t have enough space for all of those people.
‘Absolutely not. Our shelter, we have a 25 bed shelter and there is a 131 homeless people. We get a lot of complaints that you can see the homelessness that’s outside. There are people in tents everywhere but we don’t have the space for them. So unfortunately that’s where they’re going to be.”
Vanhalderen says there is probably even more homeless than that as well.
“During that time you could have people who are maybe out-of-town, maybe doing something else, at a medical appointment, funeral, what have you, so those people get missed. You often have people that are hiding out or in camps, places that we don’t know about, so those people can often get missed. Sometimes you have people who are sleeping on someone’s couch, like couch surfing, but they don’t really believe that they’re homeless, so they don’t believe they qualify so they might not come and do the survey because they like they are not homeless.”
Overall though, she says the numbers are fairly accurate and are useful.
“I think definitely the funding piece is huge, but I think just kind of awareness is huge. If we know we have 131 people and we only have 25 shelter spots then we can see the gaps in the community right ? So I think it’s for programming, that kind of thing and seeing what the trends are. Are we doing better ? Are we doing worse ? Are more homeless people coming to this area ? Are they going to other areas ?”
Vanhalderen says there is no stereotype for a homeless person.
“Last week we had an 87 year old man who was staying at the shelter. Youth aging out is a huge thing. So many people here show up at 19, just being aged out of the foster care system and they have nowhere to go, no alternate plan.”
Vanhalderen says the 25 shelter beds at Seasons House includes what used to be overflow areas for when it got cold outside.
She says they used to have 15 beds and 10 for overflow.
We asked her what will happen to the people that used to use the overflow.
“We don’t have the answer completely for that yet. There is always talk about looking for temporary shelters and warming stations and stuff but those are conversations with the city. It’s a bigger job than just me saying lets open a temporary shelter right. There is definitely conversation about it but we do not have anything confirmed right now.”
She says there also isn’t really a firm long term plan for increasing the number of shelter beds available in Quesnel.
