County of Simcoe officials say they’re ready to help the homeless again this winter.
At county council’s committee of the whole meeting Tuesday morning, staff presented a plan including warming centres, transportation, alternate spaces, and temporary overflow beds in shelters.
“We’re really confident that we are prepared for the winter season,” said Wendy Hembruff, the county’s director of community engagement and partnerships. “We’ve got more options available in this system than we have ever had before. Those include our warming centres, our alternate spaces.”
This also means as many as an additional 107 available spaces beyond the 224 shelter beds already in the county’s system.
In Barrie, the 20 Rose St. modular units will have an additional 35 to 40 overflow beds available this winter, from Nov. 15 until the end of next April, operating 18 hours a day, from 6 p.m until noon the following day.
Barrie will also have warming centre services from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m daily from Oct. 31 to the end April. The Gilbert Centre, which also led cooling centre services this past summer, will operate the warming centre at 80 Bradford St.
Barrie has shelter beds at private and not-for-profit shelters in the city, including the Elizabeth Fry Society, serving women and gender diverse individuals, Salvation Army Bayside Mission, serving men, Busby Centre, and Youth Haven, serving youth 16 to 24 years old.
The number of regularly funded shelter beds in Barrie is 125, with as many as 40 additional overflow beds available as of Nov. 15 at the Rose Street facility as one part of the county’s 2023-24 winter response. Effective Oct. 15, individuals can come into shelter settings to warm up, even when all shelter beds are full.
County officials also unveiled the new shelter system flow and capacity dashboard Tuesday, to assist the public, shelter service providers, municipalities and the county in accessing live, up-to-the-minute data on homeless shelter bed capacity.
“It starts to tell us the chronic homelessness numbers … this is our measure,” said Mina Fayez-Bahgat, the county’s general manager of social and community services. “We want to see if that number is going up or down, and what the housing outcomes are.
“We need the information to make the decisions and we need to see the trends over time to be able to measure how we’re doing, then hold everybody, including ourselves, accountable for those outcomes," he added.
On Oct. 3 in Barrie, for example, 115 people were in emergency shelter (capacity 125), zero in temporary beds, and 34 in motels using vouchers, for a total of 149.
On Oct. 9, there were 204 individuals in Simcoe County shelters, of the 224 total beds, with an occupancy rate of 91.1 per cent and 77 people in motels or hotels.
“This is incredible, to actually have data, to be able to analyze (it),” said Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall, a voting member of the committee’s human services section
“I think this data is so powerful and so meaningful,” said Barrie Coun. Bryn Hamilton. “Aside from having this dashboard, I think it’s what we’re going to do with the data that’s going to be of critical importance.”
The dashboard won’t officially launch for another week or two.
It is part of the County of Simcoe’s 10-point homelessness prevention strategy, designed to provide a strong, data-driven plan to help vulnerable residents in communities. It's making affordable housing more attainable by increasing supply, creating deep rent subsidies, increasing eviction prevention and improving available shelter.
The strategy also commits the county to find new housing opportunities, enhancing community shelter services and standards, and improving safety and well-being throughout the community.
