The Sunshine Coast Community Foundation’s latest Vital Signs update says life is getting harder for many and that’s starting to be reflected in some of the indicators they track.
“The reason that we chose specifically to focus on vulnerability this time was at the request of the social services and health providers who said this is critical,” said Don Basham, the co-manager of the Vital Signs project.
“What Vital Signs tries to do is take all this anecdotal information that’s out there every day – we hear every day about homelessness, we hear every day about housing issues, we hear every day about child care – what we attempt to do is take that anecdotal material and bring it together with hard facts.”
The hard facts in the update released Monday include statistics around homelessness and housing affordability.
The number of people using the homeless shelter at St. Hilda’s Church in Sechelt has nearly doubled in the past year and the shelter clientele is now estimated at 72. The shelter was at or over capacity 175 nights out of 202 in 2016-17.
Basham said there are also other indicators that homelessness, or reliance on marginal housing, is a major issue on the Coast. “It’s impossible for us to track, but we know anecdotally that there’s a huge number of people living the woods, living in trailers, couch-surfing with friends and relatives that we can’t quantify but we know are happening.”
On housing, the Vital Signs update found more than half of the rental households on the Sunshine Coast are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter, and more than one quarter are spending more than 50 per cent, which is higher than the one-in-five reported nationally.
Vital Signs pegs the current average cost of rental housing on the Sunshine Coast at between $1,085 per month (before utilities) for a one-bedroom to around $2,600 for a four-bedroom unit.
For a single-parent family earning the median income ($46,048), $1,151 is considered an affordable monthly shelter cost.
The contrast between income and rental costs is more striking for individuals earning the median income of $29,341, which leaves just $734 per month for shelter before going over the 30 per cent threshold.
Basham said the Foundation has made a point in recent reports of telling the human stories behind some of the data. He pointed to the story the Foundation used to highlight issues around child care as a example of the way many of the indicators they follow are connected.
“If you look at the story we did on child care, we chose not a person looking for child care, we chose a child care provider. A single mother who lost her home and her livelihood and 17 families lost child care because she was forced out of her [rental] home because it was sold.”
Vital Signs also looked at a couple of areas that haven’t been as widely discussed in the community as child care, housing affordability and homelessness.
The update says the number of calls coming in to Yew Transition House indicates an upward trend in cases of violence against women and children, after a drop between 2007 and 2011. There were 981 calls to the 24-hour access line in 2016 and 993 in 2015, according to the report.
The number of Van-couver Coastal Health clients for psychiatric care has grown from 460 to 1,202 since 2013-14 and the number of clients at the community counselling program has risen from 186 to 346.
Basham said those numbers could be linked to the increasing stress of trying to make ends meet. “All of this is putting a huge stress on families, and this is where we’re getting a lot of the mental illness challenges and a lot of the violence as a result of these frustrations.”
Other topics in the Vital Signs update include seniors and immigration.
Vital Signs Sunshine Coast was released at the same time as a Vital Signs national report looking at community belonging, which highlighted similar issues.
Basham said when the Foundation first got involved in Vital Signs about a decade ago, the motivation was to get information it could use to identify areas of need to make better decisions about where grant money should go. He said that’s still the case, but local non-profits, community agencies, and governments are also using the information.
“We’ve had elected officials, both at the local level and even at the federal level,” Basham said. “Although we can’t put a finger on it directly, we know people are using Vital Signs to make decisions about what they’re going to concentrate on in the community.”
The next full Vital Signs report is planned for 2018.
See the Vital Signs national report at communityfoundations.ca/vitalsigns.
