Poverty advocate and Hamilton’s mayor discuss encampments, housing crisis

On Wednesday, poverty advocate Angela Vos held a meeting with Hamilton’s mayor Andrea Horwath to discuss housing and homelessness in Hamilton.

The meeting follows a failed motion last month to build affordable housing on two municipally-owned parking lots in Stoney Creek which inspired a nearly month-long protest.

READ MORE: Motion to turn 2 parking lots into affordable housing struck down: Hamilton council

The protest is being held right outside Hamilton City Hall and according to a sign it’s called “Hamil-Tent.” The encampment started pretty small but has grown significantly and the tents have been at city hall for nearly a month.

CHCH News spoke with Cody Larsen, 27, a man who lives in the encampment, he says he’s looking for the city to provide more supports.

“I’m just hoping the city does something that’s gonna make a change. Nobody should drive into our city and see all of its f**king community people living in tents outside city hall,” Larsen said.

Larsen has been on and off the streets since he was a teenager and currently lives in a tent outside city hall.

“The weather out here, it gets really bad, like, friggin, nights are freezing. There are many nights I let certain individuals use my tent so they can get a good night’s sleep and stay warm and stay safe. When it’s windy, the tents get blown away, you know, we don’t have that stable housing.”

Larsen says the encampment is better than supports available in the city. “I get more help from this little area here than I do from many of the drop ins, shelter systems in the city at all.”

The encampment at city hall was set up last month in protest of a vote against a motion to turn a parking lot on Lake Avenue South in Stoney Creek, into a space for 67 new affordable housing units.

READ MORE: Opinions split ahead of final council vote on Stoney Creek parking lot

Mayor Horwath was in favour of the motions and says she understands the frustration.

“I think their frustration around the vote that went down on the parking issue in Stoney Creek is legitimate, I think a lot of councillors felt that frustration as well. It’s a signal that people clearly live in their community, and when something is going wrong, the first place they are going to look is the leadership in that community,” Horwath said.

Horwath said ahead of her meeting with poverty advocate Angela Vos that the city is working to address the housing crisis.

“We’re doing everything we can, and we’re making those investments, and we’re putting pressure on other orders of government, and we’re not going to stop. We’re not going to stop, we’re going to keep pushing and pushing.”

Vos said the meeting with Horwath was “really productive in the sense that we got to talk about what we’ve done, the wrap around services… but at the same time they’re not really willing to step up their protocol to offer the bathrooms, to offer showers. So I mean really it’s kind of a stalemate, and I guess we’re staying, because we’re going to stay until things get progressively get better.”

Hamilton city councillors will be discussing the Stoney Creek parking lot issue on Mar. 27.