Crisis Care Society purchases Nanaimo bakery to fund its programs, provide work experience timescolonist.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from timescolonist.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Environment Canada issued sweeping alerts for Vancouver Island this week predicting the coldest weather of the year as arctic air and frigid temperatures descend along its east coast.
Yet the homeless in Parksville and Qualicum Beach have nowhere to seek warmth from the deep freeze after the region’s only cold weather shelter was closed last March.
Rev. Christine Muise of OHEART a coalition of nine churches in the region that ran the shelter has been advocating for a solution for close to a year after the shelter at St. Anne’s church had to close because the facility was inadequate to meet COVID-19 concerns.
‘It is desperate,” Violet Hayes, executive director of the Island Crisis Care Society, said Tuesday. “It’s really challenging. We regularly get calls from people that are asking us do we have any leads. It’s just almost impossible [for] people on fixed incomes. [It is] so hard to find a place.” The market is getting tighter as people move to Nanaimo, she said. The city estimated its 2019 population at 98,957 and anticipates reaching 106,254 by 2024. The vacancy rate in Nanaimo, which has 4,132 rental apartment units, has declined even though more than 400 new units were completed in 2020. Because demolitions and renovations took many of the existing rentals out of the total pool, the overall increase was only four per cent, or about 150 additional units, said Pershing Sun, a senior analyst with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.