Regina homelessness, housing shortage worsens, says advocate

For some residents in Regina, the line between having a home and losing one is getting thinner.

Rising rents, limited income support and a shortage of affordable housing are pushing more people toward homelessness – including some who have jobs.

Read more:

• Regina City Council adopts ‘person-centred’ framework to manage encampments
• Regina Street Team helps fill service gaps for city’s most vulnerable
• ‘Opportunity to connect’: Regina homeless count sees slight decline in 2025

Peter Gilmer, an advocate with The Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry, joined The Evan Bray Show this week to discuss Regina’s crisis and what he thinks the city needs to do in order to help solve it.

Listen to the full interview, or read the transcript below:

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

EVAN BRAY: Can you give us a sense of the current state of homelessness, specific to Regina?

PETER GILMER: What we’ve seen is a really big growth in the unhoused population, post-COVID in particular. But we’ve long known that there have been many people on the cusp, and what we’ve seen in recent years is that people who are having difficulty being able to afford and maintain housing have fallen through the cracks in recent years.

We continue to make the point that this is the result of a real crisis in terms of lack of quality and affordable housing, and also a lack of adequate income support.

Our office deals primarily with doing income assistance advocacy for people on the Saskatchewan Income Support Program and the Saskatchewan Assured Income for Disability Program for people with significant and enduring disabilities, and if we just start there what we see is that somebody in Regina or Saskatoon is only receiving $675 per month for all of their shelter-related needs.

That’s not just for rent. That’s also for all their utility needs and for people in that program there’s been a big growth in the number of utility cut-offs and arrears over the years, and it’s very difficult to gain and maintain housing if you can’t gain and maintain utilities.

BRAY: Have you seen people who are working full time homeless and searching night after night for a place to stay?

GILMER: Yes. On the one hand we certainly know of working poor folks who are couch surfing, but I also know, in terms of a local encampment to our location, that in the early years there were people sleeping outside and travelling every day to work. So we certainly know that that’s a portion of the folks that are finding themselves unhoused today.

BRAY: Is there anything that is happening today that is working? Can you point to any program, any initiative?

GILMER: I certainly do believe that housing-first models or models that look at the wrap-around supports have been effective to a large degree, and I think that that’s part of the issue.

I do think that one of the reasons why the crisis has grown so much is that we have allowed too much social housing to fall into disrepair.

A first step in terms of dealing with the houselessness crisis is ensuring that the vacant social housing units under Saskatchewan housing programs are filled with occupancy again, and that would certainly go a long way towards easing the problem. Beyond that, expanding social housing where rent is geared to income is absolutely necessary.

BRAY: Why do we have some of these vacancies? What is the problem? 

GILMER: There’s no doubt that the overall numbers of vacancies have had a slight decline, because we were as high as 3,100 vacant units a few years ago across the province and 700 in Regina alone.

Certainly there’s some decline there, but one of the questions that we’re asking is how much of those are really based on the fact that they’re now occupied, as opposed to being taken off the market or demolished?

What we really need to be making sure is that we’re not only putting those in play that we have at our disposal, but that we make sure that we’re expanding the sector on the whole.