The Decibel - City Space: How Halifax’s unhoused crisis got so bad

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

The Globe and Mail’s City Space podcast takes on the big issues, questions and stories of urban living. What makes a city function? Why was it built that way? How will it change in a tech-powered society? This episode takes a look at the unhoused and encampment crisis in many cities and towns in Canada. In Halifax, the homeless population has tripled in the last three years. Emergency shelters aren’t enough, and building new housing takes time. Real fixes will require money and policy solutions. The city finds itself caught in the middle – between those who just want the problem to disappear and those trying to find long-term answers. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, everyone. Today, we're bringing you something a bit different, an episode of the Globe's podcast, City Space. It's a show about how we make our cities more livable, more affordable, more walkable, and how they can meet the needs of a changing society. This episode is from Season 4, which is out now. It's about park encampments in downtown Halifax, and the sprawling protests that sprung up against their removal. If you're interested, you can find other episodes from Season 4 wherever you find the decibel. Just search for City Space. On August 18th, 2021, the city of Halifax did something it would later regret. Thank you for joining us. We begin with developing news in Halifax, where police and city crews are removing temporary homeless shelters in a joint release.

The city and police say this is a health and safety concern and comes after offering months of support. The police started before 8 a.m. And staff went in early in the morning on August 18th and they were supposed to clear three encampments. Councillor Waymason represents the Halifax South Downtown District. And the first three went reasonably well. People had been told that coming up, you have to be somewhere else.

You have to go to one of these shelters. Most of them had gone. And it went okay. But police and city staff made an on-the-fly decision to continue to a fourth location, an encampment opposite the old library on Spring Garden Road. There were tents and two temporary wooden structures, not much more than sheds. an encampment opposite the old library on Spring Garden Road. There were tents and two temporary wooden structures, not much more than sheds. The police moved there to dismantle those structures and tents.

They gave out fines of over $200 for illegal camping. It was now around 10.30 in the morning, and word had gotten out. People were angry. I saw some very passionate but scared people. Gail Colicutt was one of hundreds who gathered in protest. People were like stepping out like, no, you can't do this, this is wrong. The people who are here protesting formed a human chain. They were trying to prevent police from moving the temporary shelter with the forklift.

And it got very tense. People fell to the ground. People were arrested. People were yelling. It was extremely, extremely intense. The protesters wanted to stop the removals. They had signs that said things like, these homes are not yours to take.

Behind me, you can see there's a man on top of one of these shelters, They had signs that said things like, these homes are not yours to take. Police formed a line around the shelter, and a negotiator was deployed to get the man down. Hours later, when he eventually climbed down, he was arrested. Protesters tried to stop it, putting themselves between the arrest and the waiting police van, but he was detained nonetheless. At least 23 other arrests were made that day. Someone's being arrested right now in front of us, if you can see this. This is the type of sea that we've been seeing here throughout the last hour and a half. Extremely tense. People being ended up on the ground. People

being on the ground. As you see, there's a person right now on the ground. They're being arrested. It was now around 3.30 in the afternoon. Things escalated. The police used pepper spray in a wide arc on the crowd, including a 10-year-old child. In the police report, one officer admitted to having sprayed at least 30 people. Many needed medical attention.

It made me very angry to see so many people be targeted and brutalized and then the pepper spray. Just spraying it wherever indiscriminately, no targets, just like let's spray the entire crowd. In this video from a local newspaper called The Coast, you can see water bottles being thrown at armored police by protesters as the wooden structure is carved up with a chainsaw before eventually coming down. It was not something anybody wanted to see, and it's not something our closest friends and family endorsed, seeing it go down like that. Days like this have happened in other cities. Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton. They've all had encampments appear, and the city has had them cleared while protesters try to stop it.

But it was what Halifax did next that was different. Councillor Mason says they realized they screwed up. We should not have gone in. The city should not have gone in. The police should not have gone in. This is more than the story of that day on August 18th, 2021. It's the story

of park encampments, how the city's homelessness problem got so bad, and how Halifax changed its mind on homelessness. It's about how our emergency shelters aren't doing the jobs they're supposed to do. Because building new housing takes time. It takes policy changes and money. Until we've got that in place, is leaving people to camp in parks really the best we can do?

This is City Space from the Globe and Mail. I'm Irene Gallia. 20% of people in Halifax and everywhere can't afford to pay market. The market will not build below-market housing. I remember going to the smoking room of the first shelter I was at and seeing two residents smoking crack and I had no idea what it was. There's anger at these people. How dare you turn down this offer of a shelter?

It's time to sick the cops on them again. It's time to clear out our parks, you know. This isn't a one and done. This is a process that we're going to be in, and the amount of money they've been spending this year, they probably need to spend every year for the next 10 years. How Halifax is tackling homelessness after this. Homelessness is increasing dramatically in Canada. It's most visible in our big cities. Montreal's homeless population grew by a third between 2018 and 2022.

In Vancouver, it's risen by half in 10 years. In Hamilton, homelessness is up by 69% in just three years. But perhaps no Canadian city's homeless population has gone through a change as dramatic as Halifax. According to the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, the city's homeless population more than tripled in the last three years. Many of these people are living in tents in encampments across the city. And just a note here, we know that there are some different terms for homelessness. Some people use the term unhoused, for example. We're using homeless because when we interviewed someone who experienced homelessness herself,

she told us that's the word she uses. We'll hear more from her later in the episode. Until recently, Halifax didn't have a lot of experience dealing with encampments. 20 years ago, if you had a job, you could find a place to live. It may not be the ideal place to live, but, you know, you could have a roommate or two. This is Tim Bousquet, editor of the Halifax Examiner. He's been reporting on Halifax's homelessness problem for years. Tim says that when he moved to Halifax from the U.S. in 2004, it was a very different city. It wasn't this big metropolis where homelessness was kind of in your face

when you went about your day from day to day. There were homeless people here, but they were on the margins. And by that I mean on the physical margins. They were hiding, basically. They were on the margins. And by that, I mean on the physical margins, they were hiding, basically. They were in the woods. They were in the railroad cut that cuts through town. They were out of sight. There wasn't an acceptance of homelessness on the street. You know, someone sleeping in a doorway or in a park would immediately be scooped up one way or the other, either by police or by the agency's test to care for them, and removed. Councillor Mason says that in 2012, there were between 15 and 25 people living in tents in the city.

When he describes it, you hear evidence of a very different relationship between the city and its homeless residents. So it's kind of more like bespoke. There were people, we knew they were there, but it was so much smaller that at one point I got a call about a guy sleeping on a bench in what's now Peace and Friendship Park in front of the Westin Hotel on the train station from the manager who was worried about him sleeping overnight. And the area community response officer called me back immediately and said, that's so-and-so. He has an apartment in three days, and we're keeping an eye on him and making sure he's safe. During the early to mid-2000s, Halifax's population was growing,

but relatively slowly. Until 2016, it was increasing by roughly 2,000 to 3,000 people a year. At that rate, housing supply wasn't a big concern for the city. Developers don't invest a bunch of money if they don't think there's demand, and so when our population was stable, you weren't going to see people building, speculatively, thousands of units just in case that changed. For those who couldn't afford to pay the market rate for housing, there was affordable 1960s, there was a very significant government investment in public housing in Halifax. To this day, these large projects still exist. We call them the pubs here, Mulgrave Park, Uni-X Square, housing a couple thousand people.

And that provided a baseline of affordable housing when the market wasn't supplying it. Those policies ended in the 70s and 80s, and no new public housing was built at all after that. In Nova Scotia, the province is responsible for public housing, but approvals for private development fall to the city. In this case, that's Halifax Regional Municipality. Like many Canadian cities, they have strict zoning laws which protect neighbourhoods. Halifax has always been very cautious, and I would argue overly cautious, about approving new housing. We had not been approving enough housing for a really long time and that we'd kept the available rental market very tight. There just wasn't a lot of wiggle room in case a lot of people started moving to Halifax. We had some economic success by 2015, 16, 17. We started to see increases of 4,000 people or

5,000 people, which for us was huge. And we felt like we'd really succeeded. And then in COVID, two years ago, it was 20,000 people. And this last year, it was 29,000 people. And just to give some scale to people who maybe don't know, Halifax is around 460,000 people. So that's a 10% increase in two years. To put these numbers in context, Toronto grew by 2.3% in the five years between 2016 and 2021. Halifax grew four times as fast in less than half the time. I don't need to tell you there's a housing crisis in Canada's biggest cities. The short version of that is house prices are way out of line with salaries in our major urban centres.

That was pushing some people to look to Halifax for the opportunity to own a home, even before the pandemic. At the start of 2020, the average house in Halifax cost about $330,000. A house in Toronto would have cost you two and a half times that at over $30,000. A house in Toronto would have cost you two and a half times that at over $800,000. Then COVID and its lockdowns arrived

and suddenly remote work became commonplace. You could do your Toronto job and live in Halifax. Today, that average house price in Halifax is over half a million. In Toronto, it's just over a million. The homes may still be cheaper in Nova Scotia, but they're getting more expensive faster. You never saw houses going for over asking here.

And suddenly you saw houses hitting the market for $100,000 or $200,000 more than you thought they would, and then selling for $300,000 on top of that. Like a house that in 2018 would have gone for $400,000 and the North End was going for $799,000 more than you thought they would, and then selling for $300,000 on top of that. Like a house that in 2018 would have gone for 400 grand and the North End was going for $799. And that's still low compared to Vancouver and Toronto. And I have friends who are from here, who moved to Toronto, had careers and are now in their 40s and sold their, you know, 14 foot wide crap box in Parkdale for $1.5 million and came back and bought a really nice house out of equity. So there were a lot more people competing for the same amount of housing. Some of those people had more money, and others found themselves being pushed off the

bottom of the ladder. Almost overnight, a big chunk of our population found that it was impossible to find an affordable place to live. By 2021, there were over a thousand homeless people in Halifax, according to the city. Around a fifth of those were living outside. What was a small hidden population of homeless became very visible and they were taking up public spaces where they could find them, close to services that they could use. So that meant in the urban core. This was a rapid increase in a city that was used to being able to find some sort of shelter for every homeless person if they wanted it.

The government and policing powers did not make the shift. They continued with the old attitudes. Tim says that when these encampments, these new, bigger, more visible encampments, started to look more permanent, the city took notice. What set the municipal government off was when suddenly this ad hoc group called Mutual Aid Halifax decided to start building a couple of semi-permanent structures. These are at best sheds, little lean-tos made out of plywood, have a little roof on it, a door, and that's about it. It's a place where someone could go and stay out of the rain. And when they started moving those to public parks, it rang some sort of bell in City Hall that the police were directed to take those down.

On August 16, 2021, two days before the eviction, notices were posted on tents and wooden structures. They told the people inside that living in parks is illegal and they have to move out or risk being fined or arrested. No deadline was given. The city council believed that those being evicted would be offered temporary housing, like a hotel room. They were not, and I know that because I interviewed quite a few of these people. And I interviewed the street navigators, the government employees who helped connect homeless people to temporary housing. And they said there was no such accommodation made.

That summer, Nova Scotia was emerging from lockdowns. Masks were still being required in restaurants. International travelers had to self-isolate for 14 days. There were restrictions on how many people could gather. COVID was still a big factor in daily life, which meant that shelters were operating at reduced capacity. The state response from the providers, from the social workers that are employed indirectly by the province, from the service agencies, became, and sanctioned by the province was, we have to cut the population in this shelter in half. We're going to keep the people most at risk in the shelter. But according to Councillor Mason, the city was under the impression that there was enough room for everyone. What we had believed was that the province had worked with and directed the service providers that they

fund and that the people in the parks that were to be shut down all had somewhere to go and there was adequate housing and shelter. This apparently was down to a miscommunication. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there had usually been enough space in Halifax's shelters. But during the pandemic, to protect staff and residents, shelters had reduced the amount of beds available. This information had not reached city council. Where that miscommunication began is unclear. Indoor shelters are run by the province of Nova Scotia, so according to Weymason, somewhere along the chain of service provider to the province to city council, important information was lost.

Which brings us back to August 18th, 2021. Tents and shelters stand on city property in four locations. They've been given eviction notices, but with no deadline and no clear information about where to go. The city has directed police and contractors to clear the encampments. It got violent. The scenes made national

and international news, and the city, the whole of the city, its people, its workers, its council members, took a step back and looked in the mirror. I think the public was broadly split on this for a long time.

I don't know if it's 50-50 or what, but one group of the public simply was clear out of the parks. And the other group of the public was understood that this was a crisis situation and that these these people living in tents had had and have no other option this is this is what they've been forced to do right they you know there's nowhere else for them to go and took that violent confrontation in aug August of 2021 for people to kind of step back and recalibrate. And I think that, somewhat to their credit, the city politicians, the mayor and the city councilors, went so far as at least to acknowledge that the police raids were not the way to go. The Halifax Regional Police defended their efforts.

This is their chief at the time, Dan Kinsella. Some of the protesters' behavior included throwing projectiles at our officers and municipal staff and damaging municipal property. This not only hampered the removal efforts, but could have led to serious injury for anyone in the vicinity. Council didn't want this to happen again, so in a unanimous vote, rare on any city council, Halifax designated four sites for camping. People could now camp in designated parks without fearing that they would be fined or that their shelters would be taken by police. The sites have toilets, water, and support staff.

In 2023, council approved more sites. The total rose to 11. It's not morally or ethically okay, and the courts have said it's not legal to tell people in an encampment, you gotta go when there's nowhere for them to go, right? That old kind of 1970s model of just go deeper into the woods so I don't have to see you is not acceptable. And I don't think that's moral. It's not safer to have people where no one can see them. It's actually better to have them in the middle of the city where they can be seen and where they can be helped. So for us, on August 18th,

when the conditions that council had been really clear about had not been met, and where the advance work had not been done, none of it should have happened. We should not have gone in. The city should not have gone in. The police should not have gone in. In the aftermath of August 18th,

the city decided it needed a new strategy. Canada is one of the few countries in the world to have put the right to housing into law. That happened in 2019. And in Ontario, courts have ruled that clearing encampments when there isn't enough shelter space violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So the only option now is to build more roofs or let them camp. But building new public housing takes time, money, and policy changes.

In Nova Scotia, shelters and housing are the province's responsibility. But there hasn't been any new public housing since 1993, when federal funding stopped. As recently as April last year, the housing minister said the provincial government wouldn't be building new public housing, and they were focusing on managing their existing stock. They'd do that by moving people who are overhoused, as he called it, to smaller units. They are still kind of ideologically bound to this philosophy that they cannot build government, finance, affordable housing. But you can't clear encampments if the people living in them have nowhere to go. We're on the front page of The Guardian, right? We're in The New York Times. Do you think

that's good for business? Like if you want to ignore all the human factors and the empathy and caring about your fellow man, but these are all like citizens of this country. Is that good for business? Is it good for business to look like that's the kind of thing that happens here and that we endorse it? The idea behind designating parks was to regulate and monitor the sites, make them safer, and to control where they sprung up. There's some common sense things around encampments. You don't want them in graveyards. You don't want them within 50 meters of a daycare or a playground or a public or a school, right?

And what's interesting is in an urban setting, when you start laying down those rules, the number of places where you can actually have a designated encampment is actually very few. But almost as soon as the encampments were designated, they were over capacity. Tents that are technically illegal were still popping up in the city. And a designated site for camping is still not a permanent home. I make the analogy of you got a pipe in your basement that breaks and it's just spewing water and what do you do you grab a pail and a mop and you start mopping up all the water on the floor and no one's turning off the pipe you know it's just keep the problem just keeps getting larger and larger and larger. And by having all these non-profit moppers out there, no one is pointing at the pipe and saying, turn off that damn pipe. Even when there is enough space in indoor shelters,

many people prefer tents. The shelters can feel unsafe and there's not much privacy. It can be an institutionalized place with curfews and rules that grate when you've already lost so much agency in your life. But encampments aren't the safest places either. Even if you ignore the lack of a lock on your door, Nova Scotian winters are cold. Lighting a fire is one way to warm up, but that's also dangerous. Several tents have burned down in Halifax this winter. In Edmonton, two people were found dead after fires in November.

Shelters aren't perfect, and they aren't supposed to be a permanent solution. They're a band-aid. A place to stay overnight until you find something more permanent. Now, it seems, designated encampments are a band-aid for the band-aid. A temporary solution to an emergency response system that wasn't doing its job properly. So how does Halifax get out of this situation? How long can the patience of the housed residents of Halifax last when they can't use their nearby parks? How do we get roofs over heads? Those questions after this. After the 2021 clearance, the city of Halifax decided to take a slower, more tolerant approach to homelessness.

But today, public opinion, according to Tim Busque, is shifting. Patience is wearing thin. And okay, the government isn't acting fast enough. The government isn't doing what's required. They want their parks back. With designated sites over capacity, city council held a vote to designate another park, Halifax Common, for camping. Here's Councillor Waymason speaking at the debate. I have a crisis right now in Victoria Park and Grand Parade, and I need Council's help. And if we don't want to put more tents in the Common,

what are we actually telling staff today? The original vote to designate four sites was unanimous. This time, council voted 12 to 4 against a new legal encampment. Councillors, like Tony Mancini, blamed the province for the homelessness situation and said it's time they stepped up. How can you sleep at night, Premier? How do you go to sleep at night knowing we have residents And the province has changed their approach. They provided money for the city to open a new shelter at the Halifax Forum. It operates 24-7, providing meals and a place to stay. At least until August 2024.

That's how long they said it will be open for. We've added 170 additional shelter beds, which has gotten us to 375 in HRM and just under 500 for the province in total. Suzanne Lee is a director with the Provincial Community Services Department. They're responsible for shelters in Nova Scotia, including within the Halifax Regional Municipality. She says they've added hundreds of new beds, including within the Halifax Regional Municipality. She says they've added hundreds of new beds, including the new emergency shelter at the Forum. But this is still not new permanent housing. And for a lot of people, it's not the right solution at all. Shelters are a terrible option. First of all, they're degrading. You sleep in a common area. People

watch you sleep. You don't have a place to safely store your stuff. You have to live by a strict behavior code that might be outside your comfort level. And they're dangerous. One violent person can make a situation terrible for 70 people sleeping in a shelter situation. We're just seeing the fact of it that dozens and dozens, hundreds of people are choosing to live in a tent near other tents outside rather than live in this communal indoor space. And they're not doing it because they're into self-harm or want to hurt themselves. They're doing it because they have made the conscious choice that they're better off living in a tent. Who am I to question their assessment of that?

People in shelters are often experiencing mental and physical illness. Substance use disorders are common, and the risk of violence is always present. The province says they're putting up drapes at the Halifax Forum shelter in an attempt to introduce a little privacy, but a shelter is not an apartment, or even a hotel room. We know shelters are not ideal. We know that they're not a long-term solution for many people. We know they're not a solution at all, a solution for some people. The new shelter at the Forum often has empty beds. People just aren't going there.

Before the rise in homelessness in Halifax, there were enough shelters, but there also weren't that many people who needed them. So even if a few of them chose to stay outside, it wasn't very noticeable on the street. Then shelters dropped their capacity to prevent the spread of COVID. And at the same time, the homeless population was rising. Suddenly, you could see a lot of tents around the city. Now, in addition to the existing spaces, new shelters are opening up. But it's much more obvious that people are choosing to stay outside. To help us properly understand why those beds stay empty, we spoke to someone who has needed a shelter themselves

and who works with people who still do. My name is Gail Colligott. I'm the manager of supported housing with the Elizabeth Fry Society of Mainland Nova Scotia. Gail became homeless at 16, and after that she worked in harm reduction, going to encampments and helping the people who lived there so if there is an encampment in halifax she knows about it gail says it's a different city

than it used to be for the homeless population and the people who are homeless they're different too before it would be like when i ended up unhoused it was I was having problems at home as a teenager. So I ended up at Addsome House. But now we're seeing families hiding in tents, RVs, scared to accept support because they're terrified that means Child Protective Services is going to come and apprehend their children if they're under 16. We are seeing widows and widowers out in tents because their spouse passed away, their home foreclosed, or they couldn't afford the rent. And they had well-paying jobs too. Like there was a librarian out in this for a minute, retired librarian. Anyone can fall victim to it now. How has homelessness in Halifax changed between when you were homeless and now? So when I was homeless, I could get kicked out of a shelter and go down the street to the other

one and get a bed and then leave that one and go to another one. Referred to group homes, there would be two, three rooms available. So not hard to really bounce around until something permanent came along. And then I became pregnant at 18. So DCS had no choice but to offer me a lease. I want to pause for a second there because it struck me that when they really felt they had to, the Department of Community Services found Gil an apartment. They're admitting something there, if not openly. They're admitting that the shelter system is no place for a pregnant woman.

Gail's situation was rightfully treated like an emergency. But what does that say about how we view everyone else's place in the system? Because until she got pregnant at 18 years old, Gail was just a kid finding her way around a new city. So I remember being very overwhelmed because I'm from Chester, Nova Scotia. And so even to me, Halifax was this big, huge city. Chester's not very diverse. I was very thrilled about all the diversity, meeting different people, exploring every bus route imaginable. It was very exciting because I had this independence. I thought I wanted so bad, and I didn't have my parents controlling me anymore,

but there was still barriers of control, like the curfew, sharing rooms with, like, three other people you may not get along with, being exposed to things you didn't think you'd ever be exposed to. I remember going to the smoking room of the first shelter I was at and seeing two residents smoking crack and I had no idea what it was. And them getting very angry at me for walking in that communal smoking area. Now there's no more smoking rooms in these places, but it was just kind of like, okay. One time when I was walking home to Phoenix House, I got jumped by two people that had been my friends presenting as my friends. The police broke up the fight. The police would not help me whatsoever. So I had to walk home to my group home, very upset that people would do these kind of things. But I'm really

grateful for the exposure of everything. I learned a lot. I wouldn't be who I am today. So there's some comfort in it. What would you say is something that people get wrong about homelessness? Well, there's a big stereotype of all of them are on drugs, which is not true, even when it wasn't that bad in the early 2000s, late 90s. The welfare queen label, people are lazy, they just don't want to work. Well, there's working people literally out in this. People that work for the province, these are people with pretty decent salaries, but they got hit with a fixed term lease or they lost child support payments. There's so many layers to people's situations, even if it's just an income issue. And there's also a lot of

discrimination. This market is so competitive now. Do you ever get asked why people living in tents don't just go to shelters? Oh, all the time. We just had a winterized shelter open up at the Halifax Forum, and it's not at capacity. And of course, people are judging them for not going. I don't blame people for not wanting to live in a shelter space, whether it's one where you get a bedroom, whether it's a pallet shelter, when there's rules or you have experience with like, you have trauma from shelter stab, I can understand why people don't want to go. So I think a lot of it has to do with like curfews. And if you're not, if it's a dry

shelter and you're navigating a substance use disorder and people don't view it as a disorder, they just view it as like you're a junkie, then why would you go there? Members of the Halifax City Council have said that the province was slow to act and that solving this problem is outside the municipality's jurisdiction. Here's local journalist Tim Busque again. Technically, city councillors are right that it's not within the city's mandate to take care of public housing or homelessness.

But I would just turn it around to the city councilors and say this, okay, there's this division of mandates, and you're pointing at the province. The province has to do more. The province isn't doing more, isn't doing enough. What's to stop you? What's to stop you from spending real money to build real housing, spending real money to help people transition into their housing to improve the situation? Are you going to get arrested? Is the

province going to sue you? What's going to happen? Do something and let's see what happens. By taking a bold stand, the city could be drawing attention to this issue. Instead, they're just washing their hands of it. Like Tim says, housing is the province's responsibility, but that doesn't stop the Halifax Regional Municipality from going above and beyond in times of crisis. So we asked Councillor Mason, what is stopping you? We don't have the money, right? We would have to take money away from the rapid transit system we're trying to build and the fast ferries we're trying to build and the library expansion and all the other things.

And we don't have any staff or any capacity. We don't own a single unit of housing right now. So you're building a parallel structure to the housing authority the province owns, which means a large percentage of the money you're investing is being consumed on administration. Nova Scotia is currently governed by the Progressive Conservatives. They didn't get a lot of votes in the core of the city. So a cynic might say that they know that in the regional center where most of this housing and homelessness stuff is happening, they only got 16.5% of the votes and they're not going to ever get a seat here, right? So why invest the money? But as the housing crisis got worse, homelessness became visible outside of Halifax as well. It was getting harder to ignore.

Homelessness has spread beyond Halifax now. There's significant homeless populations and issues in towns like Truro and Amherst and Bridgewater that we weren't seeing ever. You know, like homelessness would have been counted on one hand previously. And now you have shelters in towns of 10,000 people in rural Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia is now building public housing for the first time since 1993, partly with funding from the federal government. The new project will provide Nova Scotia with 222 units that have their rents geared to income.

That means residents' rent will be set based on what they earn, not the market. In the meantime, the city of Halifax has changed its mind again. As we put this episode together, eviction notices were issued at some of the designated campsites. Five of the 11 will be closed. We emailed Councillor Way Mason to follow up. He told us that he's confident the province has now provided enough options, and that for people unwilling to go to shelters, he believes the province is offering hotels. With heavy snow falling, they felt they had to get people out of the encampments. But he said, if the shelters become full, we will be right back to people camping in parks.

The housing crisis is complex. It has many roots, but it's clear that it has led to more people living outside. And once you're in that state of homelessness, that's a complicated existence too. The stories of people living in tents and wooden structures are as varied and individual as people themselves. Their desires and needs are all different. But everyone needs somewhere safe to go. And maybe a good place to start is by talking to people who are living without homes and listening to them. That's what Gail says. I think we focus on a lot of things we don't like to not look at what we don't like about ourselves and our own lives. It's easier to judge people instead of taking the time to get to know them and maybe finding out why they ended up in the park by your house.

On the next episode of City Space, we're asking what booze brings to a city. We'll go to the only neighbourhood in Toronto that was dry for nearly a century and hear from the people who led the charge to change that. This isn't just a story about the temperance movement or a bunch of boring buzzkills. It's about how a neighbourhood was split down the middle by wildly different beliefs about who they are. We'll ask, who gets left out when a neighbourhood was split down the middle by wildly different beliefs about who they are. We'll ask, who gets left out when a neighbourhood transforms overnight? City Space is produced by Jay Coburn, Kyle Fulton

and Kate Helmore. Our theme music is by Andrew Austin. Our executive producer is Alicia Sani. Many thanks to Tim Bousquet, Councillor Way Mason, Gail Collicutt and Suzanne Lee for their contributions to this episode. I'm Irene Gallia. Thanks for listening.