Imagine someone who doesn’t have a home. Imagine what this person looks like. Imagine where they sleep at night. Imagine how they spend their days.
Now imagine this person is a 34-year-old single mom. She worked as a server in Jasper for years, but her place and the restaurant she worked at were destroyed in the fire this summer. She’s staying in her parents’ crowded basement in Drayton Valley, and she doesn’t have enough money to move back out on her own. She’s looking for a job, but no restaurants in Drayton are hiring.
Emma Wallace, Project Manager at the Rural Development Network, tells TheRockies.Life that the situation outlined above is called hidden homelessness. It’s “people who are couch surfing or who are staying in housing, but it’s an unsafe situation – they are experiencing violence, or there is no electricity, and the house itself is unsafe.” And this kind of homelessness is happening more and more often in small-town Alberta.
Most people don’t have a home and a mortgage one day and end up on the street the next day. A whole spectrum exists between having a house and sleeping on park benches or in shelters. More people are living in the in-between state.
A Job is Not Enough
Last year, the Rural Development Network surveyed thousands of people across 45 small towns in Alberta. They found that at least 7,320 people in these small communities don’t have a proper roof over their heads or are at high risk of losing their place to live. Their house needs major repairs, they live with someone who puts them in harm’s way, or they can’t afford their rent or mortgage.
What’s surprising is how many people at risk of not having a home are also working: 69% of people who either had no home or didn’t have a proper home said they had a job. Most of them were working full-time. This is much higher than in 2020 when just 27% of people at risk of becoming homeless said that they were employed.
Low wages were the first reason people were experiencing housing insecurity. The second reason was not being able to afford their rent or mortgage, and the third was the increase in rent costs.
The cost of living in these small communities is often higher than in other parts of Alberta. Across Canada, people’s wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, but this is especially true in small-town Alberta, where wages are rock bottom, but housing and grocery costs are soaring.
A modest $50 thousand a year salary used to be enough for someone to pay their rent, buy themselves food, and even raise a family. Now, one in five people teetering on the edge of being on the streets earns between $30 and $50 thousand a year.
There are also simply too few houses. When affordable houses do become available, they are quickly snapped up. And most communities don’t have shelters. People who want to stay in a town to be close to friends and family or for work must live in uncertain or unsafe situations.
“We’re in a time right now where having a job is not enough,” Wallace told TheRockies.Life.
“People have jobs, but it is not enough or they are underpaid. We will continue to see experiences of housing insecurity among folks who are employed, who go to work every day.”
Community Solutions
What’s essential about the Rural Development Networks’s work is their individualized approach to helping towns help those in need.
Towns such as Canmore benefit from tourism and can have their transit system, but many towns are too small and too spread apart to have buses. In some communities, many people without secure housing are veterans. In others, there are many single moms.
Wallace and her team work with individual towns to understand their unique situations and needs. They then devise solutions that work for that area.
The Rural Development Network has received $4 million from the federal government to fund community projects. This money can be used to build shelters and affordable housing, to hire social workers, or to fund treatment programs.
Those in need will always be among us. When services open, people who need them use them and become more visible to the public eye. When services close down or don’t exist, these people remain but live in worse conditions.
Slave Lake had a homeless shelter, but it closed earlier this year. Barb Courtorielle, a resident of Slave Lake, told CTV News, “We still have them. They never left.”
The Rural Development Network reports that people “who are unable to access the necessary support will continue to experience housing insecurity at much higher rates than those respondents who can access the support needed to stabilize their housing situation.”
When towns learn about the needs of people living there, the town can benefit. Wallace said, “Addressing housing insecurity in a community benefits the community. We see decreases in crime, property values go up, and we see more robust communities.”
