The province has offered up emergency hotel rooms for dozens of tenants suddenly evicted from a College Avenue apartment building last weekend, but some have yet to be accounted for.
The residents of Stratford Hall, a three-storey apartment at 285 College Ave., were abruptly ordered to leave July 12, resulting in an investigation by the Residential Tenancies Branch.
Many of those tenants had “pre-existing relationships” with organizations supporting homeless Winnipeggers such as End Homelessness Winnipeg, St. Boniface Street Links and the North End Renewal Community Corp., and emergency social services staff members have been deployed to set anyone up with housing who needs it, a provincial spokesman said Friday.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Marion Willis at the cold weather pop-up shelter run by St. Boniface Street Links at 604 St. Maryճ Road on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024. For Nicole Buffie story. Winnipeg Free Press 2023
”Some displaced tenants have been given short-term emergency hotel stays and standard government per diem, but only if no alternative accommodations can be found,” the spokesman said in an email.
Some have already found housing without help from the province, he said.
Others have not. Outreach teams from Street Links began visiting homeless encampments and other areas Friday in hopes of finding some of the people they worked with who have fallen through the cracks, offering them hotel stays.
“I think (the hotel rooms) are a really good thing. Does that mean that everybody’s in hotel rooms? Absolutely not.” executive director Marion Willis said. “We have to go find people.”
She said her clients were calling her over the weekend, asking for copies of their rent agreements to prove they had a right to live there.
Street Links arrived to “chaos” at the building Monday morning.
Willis described the building as low-barrier housing that accepted month-to-month rent payments. She’d like to see the city work on incentivizing property owners to work with organizations serving vulnerable people.
“If we spent as much time getting people housed and retaining them in their housing as we do trying to protect people living in encampments, you might get somewhere in the city,” she said.
The people on Street Links’ radar that lived in the building were doing well, Willis said, adding several had reported making contact with family recently after being estranged.
She said the re-housing process will be a long one that requires more than just a shelter.
“People end up feeling quite defeated,” Willis said.
“They’ve been evicted and removed from that place through no fault of their own … It’s just been really traumatizing and a huge setback for those that have stopped using drugs.”
The College Avenue building came under new ownership the day before the eviction began. It was purchased alongside another apartment block at 583 Furby St.
malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca
Malak Abas
Reporter
Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.
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