Public Meeting Calls For Distinct Frontenac County Homelessness Strategy

Jeff Green | Jan 17, 2013

In a signal that rural homelessness was a mere afterthought in the initial planning of a Kingston and Frontenac County Homelessness Plan, three public consultation sessions were planned in November by the consultants preparing the plan, one at Kingston City Hall, one at the Invista Centre on Gardiners Road, and one at the North Kingston Community Centre.

When the consultants made a courtesy call to Frontenac County Council in November, it was suggested that homelessness is a rural issue as well, and a meeting was convened at the Grace Centre in Sydenham for January.

The Sydenham meeting drew a larger crowd than any of the three Kingston meetings, and ran over its two-hour schedule.

The opinion of many of the participants at the meeting was summed up by Joan Cameron, the chairperson of Southern Frontenac Community Services, who suggested to John Whitesell of OrgCode consulting that “Two plans need to be prepared, one for Kingston and a separate one for Frontenac County.”

In his initial presentation, Whitesell talked about the complexity of the issues that relate to homelessness, including the overall cost of housing in a community and a range of affordable housing options, poverty, mental health and drug dependency.

The presentation included the following statistics about the complex needs of people experiencing homelessness: 54% have addictions, 47% have medical conditions, 36% have physical disabilities, 35% have mental illness, and 62% have more than one of the above categories.

Whitesell also said that eliminating homelessness requires a broad-based community-wide commitment.

The suggestion that the assembled group be split into smaller focus groups for the consultation part of the meeting was nixed by John McDougall, a member of Frontenac County Council and its representative to the Kingston/Frontenac Not-For-Profit Housing Committee.

“I think people came here today to express the unique perspective on rural homelessness in a public forum. Is it possible to have people speak to the group as a whole?”

Whitesell said he would be happy to accommodate that request.

The first person to speak was the mother of a developmentally disabled adult, and one of the directors of New Leaf Link, a Sydenham-based program for the developmentally disabled.

"This is a group that faces a threat of homelessness as parents find they can no longer care for their children as they get older,” she said. She said that she has been involved with a number of young adults who have been shuttled from home to home as families struggled to care for them.

“We have found that in the case of this population, the option of seeking support in Kingston is not viable because nothing is available,” she said.

Another woman talked about a situation she and her husband ran into when they had financial and other difficulties while they were trying to build a house on a lot in South Frontenac. They ended up living for nine months in a weekend trailer.

“We wanted to put a mobile home on the site, but the Township of South Frontenac would not permit that. It put us right on the edge, living with no running water and a port-a-potty for months,” she said.

Tom Revell, an addictions counselor who works in Kingston and in Frontenac County, said that he has seen a number of high school-aged youths move from one couch to another when they start facing addiction problems. “It would be helpful if there were some type of mechanism in place for kids who are headed to homelessness while they are in high school,” he said.

He also said that the two agencies that serve families in Frontenac County - Southern Frontenac Community Services and Northern Frontenac Community Services - both have strong connections with the people in the communities and with the social resources that are available. “Any strategy to deal with the issues around homelessness should be looking to the two agencies. Their secretaries know more about the community needs and services that are available than just about anyone else,” he said.

Ron Vandewal, a long-time member of South Frontenac Council, said that if money is required to address homelessness, the local councils are not a likely source of funds.

“Our tax base is only residential. We have no commercial taxation, so we have very little in the way of funding that we can devote to these issues,” Vandewal said.

Social services in Frontenac County are provided through the Social Services department of the City of Kingston.

Frontenac County Warden Janet Gutowski said that the delivery mechanism for social services is a problem for people facing housing issues.

"I think the issue is that having Kingston as the Consolidate Service Manager delivering services in Frontenac County is a challenge, because it is local agencies that can best deliver the service, but the programs all are delivered from in Kingston,” she said.

A number of people made the point that people who have lived in rural Frontenac County for years, even decades, are extremely reluctant to move to Kingston or another city even if they are facing housing problems.

“People live in rural areas for a reason,” said Alan McPhail, also a member of South Frontenac Council. “It is important to recognize that. A solution that involves a move to the city is often not viable.”

OrgCode will be taking the input from the meeting in Sydenham, combining it with the input from the meetings in Kingston and the other research that they have conducted, and will present a report in April.