The Compassion Hub has been a hive of activity since many people set up camp on the corner of Gore Street and Albert Street East over the summer. That camp was removed Thursday, as Sault Ste. Marie Police Service — along with social services, community outreach, paramedics and the city’s public works department — participated in what it described as a “cleanup” of the encampment, citing “heightened public safety and health concerns for the residents of the area and those in the camp” in a press release issued after the much-discussed removal.
“They come to eat every day, they come for a lot of different things,” said Donna DeSimon, president of Addiction and Mental Health Advocates, the group responsible for the Compassion Hub on Gore Street. “We are trying to find them a home. We have people working with them. We have different consultants that come in and see them. “He’s here all the time.” Regular Sunday night dinners hosted by DeSimon’s grassroots group have seen more and more people turn up for a meal in recent weeks as a result of the camp. Last Sunday, the food ran out in just 40 minutes.
“Now we can’t keep up with it. We just can’t,” DeSimon said of the demand for food at the Compassion Hub. “It’s almost impossible”. DeSimon says the closing of the apartment building at 314 Albert Street East last month ultimately led to the encampment at the corner of Gore and Albert. The property was the subject of a SooToday exclusive earlier this year, revealing that Jim Brogno — the operator of a numbered company listed as the property’s owner — was fined $120,000 last February for various Ontario Fire Code violations related to the building . The local provincial offenses office confirmed that Brogno’s company has not yet paid the fines.
According to an inspection order affixed to the front of the Albert Street structure, the property raised “serious life safety issues” due to severe damage to gas-fired hot water tanks and severely damaged or removed copper wiring and piping. Another order ordered property owner Jim Brogno to secure the vacant building after a July 12 inspection of the property by a city code officer. A notice on the front of the building also states that an Ontario fire marshal’s assistant entered the property on July 22 with utilities, pursuant to the Fire Prevention and Protection Act, to shut off electricity, water and natural gas services. gas due to “open and active wiring, gas appliance venting to the structure, and continuous water flow throughout the structure.” Addiction and mental health advocates are preoccupied with the “aftermath” of displaced people living at home, DeSimon says. “When they closed the building…there are people we hadn’t seen before that we’re seeing now,” DeSimon said. “It just tells you there’s more on the road now than before.” That influx of people on the corner, he adds, also prevented Addictions and Mental Health Advocates from moving into its new location — the former site of the Neighborhood Resource Center, a Gore Street service center that closed permanently in 2020 due to violence, theft, open use drugs and problems with the building itself.
“Now what happened since they were around the corner, unfortunately, they broke into the resource center … and they were squatting in there,” DeSimon said. “There was even a tent on the roof. “We were supposed to move across — we were going to take over the resource center, but it’s destroyed. There were squatters in there, they took out a pipe apparently. So, it’s not going to be ready. We had to move at the end of this month. Now we can’t.” The CEO of the District of Sault Ste. Marie Board of Social Services says an outreach team visits the site daily to inform people camped at the corner of Gore and Albert about the services available to them. This includes encouraging them to relocate to shelters at Verdi Hall and Pauline’s Place. They are also encouraged to participate in services and complete the homeless waiting list application in order to secure stable housing. “We can’t mandate whether people participate in services or not,” Mike Nadeau said, speaking to SooToday on Friday. “Our job as a social service provider is to make sure members of the community know what services are available to them.” Three years ago there were 14 beds in the men’s shelter. Now, Nadeau says, there are 40 beds. But demand continues to grow.
“There’s a lot of pressure on the shelter system right now,” he said. While investigating the people in the camp, social services discovered that not all the people living there were homeless.
“We found that about 50 percent of people actually had a place to go. It might have been a friend’s place, it might have been a neighborhood or some place — but not everyone was classified as homeless,” Nadeau said. Social services CEO says demand for affordable housing in the Sault is “unparalleled.” “Supply is going down – there’s been a lot of investment out of town and we’re being told that some of these properties are vacant. There is a tremendous need for affordable housing in our community,” said Nadeau. “There is a strategy that we are trying to develop, but we also need support. Our health partners are great partners, but they need additional resources to provide these supports.” Ward 2 councilor and social services board chair Luke Defour says removing the encampment, which was in his ward, was never intended to be a solution in the first place.
“I think it’s very important when things like this happen to acknowledge in the community that what happened there was not a solution,” Dufour said, speaking to SooToday Friday. “We have systemic problems in Sault Ste. Marie with the availability of needed mental health services, supportive housing, deeply affordable housing — these are the solutions to these problems.” Dufour agrees that most of the people who spend their days at the corner of Gore and Albert used to reside at 314 Albert Street East before it closed in June. “This is a window into an ecosystem of the issues we see on the streets of Sault Ste. Marie — people are living in deeply run-down, unsafe, unsanitary buildings,” he said. Dufour says social services deployed the homelessness prevention team at 314 Albert Street East, which was on standby until the people who lived there were evicted. The homeless prevention team then followed the group of people — DeSimon estimates there were nearly 40 people living in the Albert Street rooming house — to the corner of Gore and Albert. “It’s a real challenge, so when you’re looking at things like the big picture of public works taking things down for health and safety reasons, it’s easy to lose sight of all the things in the background,” Dufour said.