Five years after COVID, Sarah Mills still pondering life's mysteries
Sarah Mills looks back at the COVID pandemic and some of the questions she asked herself to stave off boredom. Mills say...
A snapshot of people experiencing homelessness in Saskatoon said they’ve counted at least 1,499 people.
The 2024 Point-in-Time Count has identified individuals and families residing in emergency shelters, transitional housing and unsheltered locations (encampments, systems, and experiencing hidden homelessness), according to a news release.
“These numbers and demographics will improve our understanding of the needs and circumstances of the people who are affected by homelessness in our community,” said Lesley Anderson, Director of Planning and Development. Adding the count represents the minimum number of people affected.
The count took place on October 8 and included the following in partnership with the City of Saskatoon.
- Saskatoon Housing Initiatives Partnership
- Reaching Home Community Entity in Saskatoon
- Community-University Institute for Social Research at the University of Saskatchewan,
- along with numerous community organizations
- and well over 200 volunteers.
Since the last count in 2022, the homelessness count has tripled. Anderson contributes the big jump in homelessness to a couple of things.
“There has been the growing affordability crisis. Income rates aren’t necessarily keeping pace with that,” Anderson said. “We have seen some issues coming forward that our community partners have identified around how income assistance operates around the province, so that has caused a challenge for people and it’s contributed to a very drastic increase when that change in the income was done.”
Anderson suggests by having more volunteers and counting people who were in encampments this time around, is part of the reason why they were able to get a more accurate number on the city’s homeless population.
“We just had a much more extensive group of volunteers this time to get out there. In encampments in 2024, we had 62 people that we counted that day. We also had a number of locations where we had stationary volunteers and they attracted a lot of people to those locations and spoke with the volunteers,” Anderson explained. “We made sure we counted all the emergency shelters and we gathered the data on our transitional housing as well. We wanted to make sure we got the best numbers we possibly could to understand the situation that we have in our community.”
Mayor Cynthia Block said the new data collected was shocking but further added that it wasn’t something that surprised her.
“Anybody who has been living in our city for the last few years has been able to see how much the situation on the ground has changed,” Block said. “Municipalities are really on the front lines of this crisis. We need that partnership from the federal and provincial government if we’re going to make change and I hope that those numbers will help to underscore that urgency for other orders of government.”
More data will be released from the Point-in-Time Count survey in early 2025.
