A middle-aged woman has finally gotten up the nerve to leave the abusive relationship that has been the fabric of her existence for the past decade or so.
But when she searches for suitable accommodation, she always comes up empty. There’s nothing out there for her, her two young children and their friendly, medium-sized dog named Sunny.
While the above situation is fictional, for many women escaping violence, it’s become all too real, according to Haily MacDonald, executive director of Huronia Transition Homes, which runs Operation Grow, La Maison Rosewood Shelter and a shelter for victims of human trafficking in Midland.
“The community is really identifying the lack of affordable housing,” MacDonald tells MidlandToday.
MacDonald, who notes that Rosewood gets great community support, says she’d like to see municipalities do more to ensure affordable housing is built rather than seemingly approving only large homes for development.
“We need more housing stock. Nobody wants to be in a shelter.”
MacDonald questions many of the new builds sprouting up in the area since more often than not they’re not suitable for lower-income earners.
“The question is who are these homes affordable to?” she asks, noting that in Simcoe County a living wage is $23.05 with housing costs easily chipping away more than what is deemed reasonable from one’s income.
While MacDonald estimates close to 1,000 women seek solace at area shelters annually nowadays, Rosewood is taking in 150 to 250 women a year.
Rosewood has 20 beds with five available at its human trafficking location. Fifteen of those beds at the main location are for women fleeing violence with five set aside for homeless women.
The beds are located in 13 separate rooms at Rosewood for women and women with children, which also features large common areas and a well-supplied kitchen. There’s also cat and dog kennels in the backyard to ensure a pet isn’t left behind with the abuser.
"Leaving your pets at home is a huge barrier for women leaving violence," MacDonald says. "In an abusive home, it's not just women experiencing abuse."
Another issue fuelling the crisis, according to MacDonald, is a lack of income since many women leave abusive relationships with so little.
“We’re fierce proponents of guaranteed personal income,” she says.
A recent Women’s Shelters Canada (WSC) report called Shelter Voices 2024: Crisis Within Crisis delved into the nation’s housing crisis and its impact on shelters while also surveying individuals working in these spaces and survivors accessing supports.
Among respondents, 99.5% felt that their community was facing a housing crisis, with 97% indicating that over the preceding 12 months it had become harder to support survivors to find housing.
“These findings have confirmed what we’ve been hearing anecdotally from women’s shelters across the country for years,” WSC executive director Anuradha Dugal said in a release.
“Since there’s no affordable housing, women are staying in shelters longer, which increases turn-away rates. It creates a bottleneck effect where new women can’t move in if women already in shelter have nowhere to go.”
While the majority of organizations have length of stay policies, only 3% abide by those timelines, according to the WSC report.
“Worryingly, compared to last year, respondents reported that more survivors are leaving shelter for housing that does not meet their needs, is not safe, is unaffordable, and/or often contributes to cycling back into a shelter,” it notes.
For Rosewood, MacDonald says that they previously had an eight-week, length-of-stay limit, which has since been extended to 12 weeks. But even that isn’t adequate nowadays.
“The average length of stay is now six months,” she says. “There’s still the same number of shelter beds. We’re at capacity all the time. That’s the reality of the housing crisis.”
MacDonald says that while the holidays can create heightened emotions, there really is no longer a high season for women's shelters.
"Before, we'd fill up during the holidays," she says. "Now, there aren't ebbs and flows. We are full all the time, but we will always find a way (to help). The door remains open."
Women’s Shelters Canada brings together 16 provincial and territorial shelter organizations and supports the over 600 shelters across the country for women and children fleeing violence.
According to the national report, some survivors are choosing to return to abusers rather than face homelessness.
“When survivors are faced with such decisions, their stress escalates, and their well-being suffers; 92% of respondents had seen survivors’ stress increase due to the housing crisis,” the report notes.” “Staff are also seeing decreases in their mental health due to the housing crisis.”
“This is the 10th anniversary of Shelter Voices. We’ve been talking about the lack of safe, affordable housing since our first edition in 2014,” adds Dugal.
“We need change. We desperately need adequate funding for affordable housing that is specifically allocated for women and children fleeing violence.”
