A Sudbury homelessness advocacy group says it's shocked that there was no warning given about the April 1 closure of the Memorial Park encampment prior to Tuesday’s announcement by the city.
Laurie McGauley is the chairperson of the Poverty and Housing Advocacy Coalition of Sudbury.
She said she doesn’t feel the closure is following the path that the city was laying out with the De Jong report and she feels this process was meant to be transparent and inclusive.
"Once again, the city is taking people by surprise. It's not preparing people for what could be actual death," McGauley said.
"When we are talking about this level of vulnerability, when you’re living in a park in a tent hanging on to the few possessions that you have and you’re being told that you need to leave, where are you going to go? And they say, you know, that we have shelters and the shelter beds are open. Shelter beds were never meant to be a long-term solution to homelessness."
Until the city can find more long-term solutions to the homelessness crisis, kicking people out of the park isn’t going to solve anything, she said.
"I understand that the city has been trying to find solutions for people. I understand that there’s lots of really good outreach workers out there that are really working with people trying to find solutions. The problem is, that we don’t have the services that can address the complex needs that these people have," McGauley said.
"So, yes, they might be able to find them a room in a rooming house somewhere and feel wow, yay we’ve succeeded, and well within three weeks to a month, by the time they have to pay the rent and do that kind of stuff without any supports, they’re back out on the streets and quite often in worse situations than they were before."
The coalition will be focusing on asking the city questions to figure out how and why it came to the decision of closure that it did, she said.
