Mayor of Kamloops: Yes to tiny houses, but not without wrap-around-services
The City of Kelowna is moving ahead with plans to build 120 tiny homes to help address the growing homeless crisis in their streets, and Kamloops residents may wonder if the model could be a possibility for the tournament capital.
Kamloops Mayor Reid Hamer-Jackson said he’d support the construction of tiny houses — but it isn’t that simple.
“I’d love to have 120 or 200 tiny homes but who is going in the homes and who’s looking after them?” he said. “If the people are struggling with mental health and addiction issues, we need to have supports for them.”
The mayor said adding more houses, tiny or big, would not improve the homeless situation unless the homes had wrap-around-services which are lacking in the shelters, supportive housing units and motels that are already operating in the city.
“We have a lot of supportive housing and very little services in them,” he said. “If you have a tiny house or a big house… if people are getting the help they need to support them in their mental health and addiction it would be a great idea.”
The mayor’s place of work is downtown across the street from two shelters and a supportive housing unit. He regularly has homeless people camped on his lot and has had fires lit on the property multiple times.
“Last night I get a phone call that a guy lit a fire right under my ramp in front of my store and again this morning there is tents on my property. Right across the street there’s open space at the shelters, and open space down the road. Where are our outreach teams?”
“I’ve been on the streets in the middle of the night and we don’t have enough outreach workers on the streets, we’ve got to work on that.”
Hamer-Jackson has been reaching out to provincial ministers about getting a review or audit for most of the harm reduction shelters for the clients and staff in the buildings and the surrounding communities to pinpoint what the exact needs are and what resources are available for future projects.
“We’re making steps in the right direction and I think that is why it’s so important to get a review.”
The mayor recalled a time he went to the former Northbridge Hotel to get a resident who wanted to go to detox.
“I went into that building to try to talk to him and get him out of there and he lived in a tiny room,” Hamer-Jackson said. “His toilets were backed up, the windows smashed out, the sink was ripped right off the wall. There wasn’t service for them in there.”
He said he recently talked to a woman who was sitting on the porch of the North Shore Business Improvement Association who was crying because she wanted to go to detox and recovery.
“She wanted to get her child back," he said. "I talk to people at 4 a.m., a lot of people say they (homeless) don’t want to get better but a lot do but we’ve got to give people the opportunity.”
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In 2019, then-city councillor Denis Walsh put two motions forward for a treatment and recovery facility to go into the Raleigh neighbourhood away from the downtown core, an idea largely supported by Hamer-Jackson. But it was rejected both times by council. Hamer-Jackson is still interested in the idea. If tiny houses were built, he envisions them also being put out of town.
“We have to try to get them (homeless) into an area where they have a chance at getting better.”
In a news conference on Oct. 12, Kelowna Mayor Tom Dyas announced his city was building 120 tiny homes on city property to reduce the number of people sleeping rough. The tiny homes will be operated by non-profit groups who will provide 24/7 supports with daily meals and access to skills training. The homes come with heat and light and locks on the doors, with washrooms and eating areas separate.
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The latest data from the city said there are roughly 265 people sleeping rough in the City of Kelowna, many of those in a city-supervised tent camp along the Okanagan Rail Trail. In Kamloops, the latest count shows 312 people are living rough.
“There’s a whole bunch of small steps that we’ve got to do but I really think we’ve gone from harm reduction facilities right to complex care which we do have some going now after two years of kind of being on hold, we got them going but I really think we have to have a recovery focus,” Hamer-Jackson said.
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