In the town of less than 10,000 people, homelessness is getting worse
Dwayne Hawkes didn’t think of himself as homeless until he gave it a lot of thought.
The Amherst, N.S., man had no electricity in his apartment for a month because of a disagreement about the lease on his rental unit. He had to move into a trailer on a friend’s property.
“Without them, I would have had nowhere to go,” Hawkes said. “They are kind enough to let me stay here, which is really helpful right now. But you’re pretty much homeless, that’s what you are.”
Hawkes said that after the power was turned off to his unit, he looked for a new place to live for weeks but couldn’t find anything in his price range. After moving to a friend’s house outside of town, he lost his job because he couldn’t get to work without a car.
Community service providers say that some people in the town of less than 10,000 are becoming homeless for the first time because there isn’t enough affordable housing and because of things like renovictions and fixed-term leases.
Aidan Kivisto, who is in charge of Community Development at the YMCA of Cumberland, says that his team is struggling to find affordable units for their clients as housing prices rise.
“There aren’t enough places to live,” Kivisto said. “There are almost no empty apartments, and rents are very, very high. People who are looking for apartments can get help from our program, but it’s very hard to find a place to live because there’s nothing available.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation doesn’t keep track of data about the rental market in cities with less than 10,000 people.
But Kivisto said that, in his experience, Amherst’s vacancy rate and average rents are similar to those of Halifax, which had the biggest increase in residential rent in Canada from 2021 to 2022.
During that time, the average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Halifax went up 9.3%, and the vacancy rate stayed around 1%, which is the second-lowest in the country.
Hawkes said that he got a two-bedroom apartment for less than $1,000 per month when he moved back to his hometown two years ago. Now, he is seeing ads for places to rent in Amherst that cost $2,000 or more.
“I don’t think it’s fair for us in our community to have to fight to stay in a place we grew up in,” he said.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, says Leon Landry, deputy mayor of Amherst and chair of the county’s inter-municipal poverty advisory committee, there are more homeless people in the area.
“I think there was always a demand, we just didn’t know about it,” said Landry. “There were people who couch surfed and lived in places that were not safe or healthy. And, for one reason or another, the pandemic and its effects kind of showed that.”
Kivisto said that the last homeless count in Cumberland County was done by the YMCA in 2021. It showed that 48 people were homeless, and 79% of them were staying in some kind of temporary shelter because they had no chance of getting a permanent place to live.
The next count will be in November, and Kivisto thinks that the number will have grown since then.
The Cumberland Homeless and Housing Support Association Community Hub says that from May 15 to July 12, they helped 39 different people during a total of 479 visits.
A fixed-term lease was the first thing that caused trouble
Hawkes had lived in his downtown Amherst apartment for 18 months before his landlord told him he had to leave because his fixed-term lease was coming to an end and wouldn’t be renewed.
According to Nova Scotia’s Residential Tenancies Act, a fixed-term lease is one “entered into for a fixed period of time, which includes the day the lease starts and the day it ends.” This means that it doesn’t renew itself every year.
But Hawkes didn’t know this at the time. He thought that if he kept paying his rent, his lease would become month-to-month.
When the end of his lease came, he paid his rent and stayed. But his landlord turned off the electricity.
Hawkes fought to stay even though he moved out of town into a trailer. He finally won his case in small claims court, which told the landlord to turn the power back on and pay him more than $1,000.
But a later ruling on residential tenancies said the fixed-term lease was over and Hawkes had to leave. Now, he is trying to change this decision.
He says he won’t have many choices when it gets colder because he is now unemployed and getting help with money.
He said, “You might want to move into an old hotel room with a hot plate, but that’s not how you want to live.””You know, I had a nice place to live, so what else am I going to find? “Where will I get the money?
Amherst working on solution
The Amherst town council and its staff have been working on getting the town more affordable housing and services to help people with housing.
Landry said that the town bought a property in downtown Cumberland at a tax sale and gave it to the Cumberland Homeless and Housing Support Association to build the first emergency shelter in the town. The building will also have some affordable units and help services.
The town has also given developers more reasons to build new housing, such as the new housing infrastructure investment policy that was approved by council at the end of January.
“I think the only real way to deal with it is to try to make the housing market less volatile. “There are a lot of other problems here,” Landry said.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a clear answer that works for everyone. I think we’ll get out of this mess if we all work together and look at the whole picture.
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