The closing of a troubled Albert Street rooming house has caused displaced people to set up camp in one of the Sault’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, people with knowledge of the situation say.
The Compassion Hub has become a hub of activity since several people set up camp on the corner of Gore Street and Albert Street East over the summer.
That camp withdrew Thursday, as Sault Ste. Marie Police Department, along with social services, community outreach, paramedics and the city’s public works department, participated in what has been called a “cleanup” of the camp, citing “growing concerns about the public safety and health of the residents of the area and those in the camp” in a press release issued after the much discussed dismissal.
“They come to eat every day, they come for a lot of different things,” said Donna DeSimon, president of Addiction and Mental Health Advocates, the group responsible for the Compassion Hub on Gore Street. “We are trying to find them housing. We have people working with them. We have different counselors that come in and see them.
“They’re here all the time.”
The regular Sunday night dinners hosted by DeSimon’s grassroots group have seen more and more people show up for a meal in recent weeks as a result of the campout.
This past Sunday, the food sold out in just 40 minutes.
“Now we can’t follow it. We just can’t,” DeSimon said of the demand for food at the Compassion Hub. “It’s almost impossible.”
DeSimon says the closing of the multi-family property at 314 Albert Street East last month prompted the encampment to settle at the corner of Gore and Albert.
The property was the subject of a SooToday exclusive earlier this year, which revealed that Jim Brogno, the operator of a numbered company listed as the owner of the property, was hit with $120,000 in fines last February for various violations of the Ontario Fire Code related to the building. The local provincial infringement office has confirmed that Brogno’s company still has to pay the fines.
According to an inspection order placed on the front of the Albert Street structure, the property posed “serious life safety concerns” due to severe damage to natural gas-fired hot water tanks and badly damaged or removed copper cables and pipes.
Another order instructed owner Jim Brogno to secure the vacant building after a July 12 review of the property by a city official.
A notice on the front of the building also states that an Ontario fire marshal’s assistant entered the property on July 22 with utility providers, pursuant to the Fire Prevention and Protection Act , to shut off electric, water and natural gas services due to “open end and live wiring, natural gas appliance leaking into structure and constant water pouring throughout structure.”
Addiction and mental health advocates have been busy dealing with the “aftermath” of people living in the displaced rooming house, DeSimon says.
“When they closed the building … there are people we hadn’t seen before that we’re seeing now,” DeSimon said. “It just says there’s more stuff on the street now than there used to be.”
That influx of people to the corner, he adds, has also prevented Addictions and Mental Health Advocates from moving to its new location: the former site of the Neighborhood Resource Center, a community outreach center on Gore Street that be permanently closed in 2020 due to violence, theft, open drug use and problems with the building itself.
“Now, what’s happened since they’ve been across the street on the corner, unfortunately, they’ve been breaking into the resource center … and they’ve been busy,” DeSimon said. “There was even a tent on the roof.
“We were supposed to move across the street; we were going to take over the resource center, but it’s torn down. There’s been squatters in there, it looks like they took out pipe. So it won’t be ready. We were supposed to move at the end of this month. Now we can’t.”
The executive director of the district of Sault Ste. Marie Social Services Administration Board says an outreach team has been going to the site daily to advise people camping at the corner of Gore and Albert of available services. This includes encouraging them to move to Verdi Hall and Pauline’s Place shelters. They are also encouraged to participate in services and complete the homeless waiting list application in order to secure stable housing.
“We can’t mandate whether people participate in services or not,” said Mike Nadeau, speaking to SooToday on Friday. “Our job as a social service agency is to make sure community members know what services are available to them.”
Three years ago there were 14 beds in the men’s shelter. Now, says Nadeau, there are 40 beds.
But demand continues to grow.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the foster care system right now,” he said.
In surveys of people in the camp, social services discovered that not all people living there were homeless.
“We found that about 50% of people actually had a place to go. It might have been a friend’s place, it might have been a roommate or somewhere, but not everyone was classified as homeless,” Nadeau said.
Social services CEO says demand for affordable housing in Sault is “unparalleled.”
“Supply is shrinking — there’s been a lot of investment out of town, and we’re being told that some of those properties are sitting vacant. There’s a huge need for affordable housing in our community,” Nadeau said. “There is a strategy that we are trying to develop, but we also need support. Our health partners are great partners, but they need additional resources to provide these supports.”
Ward 2 councilor and social services board chair Luke Dufour says removing the camp, which was located in his ward, was never a solution.
“I think it’s very important, when things like this happen, to acknowledge in the community that there was no solution to what happened there,” Dufour said, speaking to SooToday on Friday. “We have systemic problems in Sault Ste. Marie with the availability of needed mental health services, supportive housing, very affordable housing — these are the solutions to those problems.”
Dufour agrees that most of the people who spend their days at the corner of Gore and Albert previously lived at 314 Albert Street East before it closed in June.
“This is kind of a window into an ecosystem of the problems we’re seeing on the streets of Sault Ste. Marie: people living in deeply deficient, unsafe, unsanitary buildings,” he said.
Dufour says social services deployed its homelessness prevention team to 314 Albert Street East, which was available until the people who resided there were displaced.
The homelessness prevention team followed the group of people (DeSimon estimated there were about 40 people living in the rooming house on Albert Street) to the corner of Gore and Albert.
“It’s a real challenge, so when you see things like the big picture of public works taking things down for health and safety reasons, it’s easy to lose sight of all the things in the background,” Dufour said.