City spending on hotel rooms when shelters are full spikes to almost $450K in 2017

What the city of Hamilton spends on hotel rooms for families when homeless shelters are full has ballooned to nearly $450,000 so far this year.

That's almost double what the city spent last year. And it's six times what the city spent in 2012.

The 2017 total is likely to be higher, as the city had already spent $446,700 by Oct. 31.

Across the board, shelters have been full – they've been at capacity or over capacity.- Yolisa de Jager, women's services, Good Shepherd

The sharp increase in hotel room costs illustrates an urgent and growing need for housing that is affordable and suitable for households that comprise more than one or two people.

"It does validate the pressure that we're feeling," said Yolisa de Jager, who runs women's services including two shelters for local nonprofit Good Shepherd.

"Across the board, shelters have been full – they've been at capacity or over capacity," she said. "We've basically been operating at over 100 per cent capacity for the majority of the year."

'The winter's just begun'

The hotel room referral program is used as a last resort for families. The city doesn't pay for single women and men to stay in hotels; the shelters have contingency plans when an alert is issued for an exceptionally cold night, for example.

While the city's network of homeless services agencies have been collaborating on creative new projects and trying approaches with proven track records like "housing first," they're up against a torrent of need.

"While we're making gains in some areas and moving toward a more coordinated response to addressing homelessness, at the same time, we're seeing new people emerge at the door at the shelter," said Katherine Kalinowksi, Good Shepherd assistant executive director.

"And the winter's just begun," she said.

Pressure on shelters for women and families

The pressure is acutely felt in services for women and women with children.

Men's shelters are often at or close to capacity, but Shawn MacKeigan, men's services director for Mission Services said he couldn't think of a time in the past six months when a man has been turned away because there's not a single bed available anywhere.

"Despite the fact that we often are near or at capacity in the men's system, we almost always able to locate a place for people to go," MacKeigan said.

City housing staff attributes the increase in hotel room costs this year to:

• larger families finding it difficult to find a home
• families spending longer in shelters, which impacts the length of stay in hotel rooms
• an increase in newcomer families requiring help
• an increase in the number of families referred through the city's shelter system for people who've experienced violence against women.

Local shelter providers say they're beginning to see people coming to Hamilton who have come to Canada seeking asylum, some of them among the thousands who entered the country this year at an illegal crossing in Quebec.

Apartments are harder to find and more expensive

And anyone looking for housing in Hamilton is facing higher costs and harder-to-find units than last year.

Hamilton's vacancy rate for apartments dropped nearly 40 per cent this year, according to recently released numbers by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. 

For two-bedroom units, an increased average rent of $1,103 from $1,037 represented a jump that was much higher than the jump for the provincial average.

Linsey MacPhee directs Mission Services' women's shelter. She said shelter staff are hearing from women that they're losing their housing because of rising rents, or because the owner wants to reconfigure a house that used to have apartments in it back to a single-family building.

This year, the effects of a housing market that's been heating up for years seem to be showing up in force.

"I think when there's a changing housing market, there's a lag until it starts affecting those parts of the cities that have been more affordable," she said.

Hotel stays stretching up to three or four weeks

Even when shelter staff are able to find a place for families to move, sometimes the units aren't available for a month or more.

As a result, the 215 families that have been referred to hotels so far this year have been staying longer, on average, than in previous years, said Rob Mastroianni, the city's manager of emergency shelter services.

"Three or four weeks is the highest that we've seen," he said.

He said the city is focusing on providing case management support to people who are staying in hotel, in concert with the people they might be in touch with at shelters, to try to get them into shelters or stable housing.

The city pays for the rooms through Consolidated Homelessness Prevention Initiative funding, from the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. The allocation is given to cover a range of services, including street outreach, emergency shelters and homelessness prevention programs. 

Mastroianni said while the hotel overflow costs have been higher than the city expected, they have found ways to save money in other programs under that funding to offset the increase.

'More shelter beds is not the answer'

The city has a network of social service agencies that provide shelters for women escaping violent situations, single women, single men, families, youth and Indigenous people.

While the knocks at the door aren't subsiding, the network is working with the city to focus attention on providing housing and supports to people who've been experiencing homelessness for a while, sometimes known as the "chronically homeless" population.

"Hamilton is really working hard at building our 'housing first' responses to homelessness," Kalinowski said.

Val Sadler, associate executive director at Mission Services, said "there are no easy answers" to the pressure the system is under.

"Most people who work in the sector would agree that more shelter beds is not the answer – it's finding affordable housing for people and supports for those people," she said.

kelly.bennett@cbc.ca