AHANS Responds to Recent Actions Around Emergency Shelters
New Glasgow Town Council’s recent motion to close the Northstar Shelter immediately reflects a growing, province-wide frustration. We hear it not only in New Glasgow's chambers; we also see it in the urgent petition from Kentville residents and business ownersconcerned about the safety and sustainability of their downtown cores. At the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, we understand this perspective.
But we also know that two things can be true at the same time. The fact is, communities have a right to safe, thriving commercial centres. Also a fact: some in those communities desperately need emergency services. The tension between these two realities stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the system: shelters are not housing, they are an emergency response. Shelters are a stop-gap measure — they are the hospital emergency rooms of the housing sector. People use ERs when disaster strikes out of the blue. That’s why they are there. And they also use ERs when underlying conditions go untreated — they come back through the ER doors again and again, because the core issue isn’t being addressed. Closing ERs doesn't stop car accidents and heart attacks. It doesn’t solve underlying health issues like untreated high blood pressure.
And closing shelters doesn’t solve homelessness. It simply forces it out onto the street,
amplifying the exact public safety and business concerns communities are raising.
Housing solves homelessness.
This is not just a humanitarian issue; it is a profound economic inefficiency. Relying on
limited-capacity emergency shelters is a financially unsustainable crisis response that drains public resources. By contrast, investing in permanent supportive housing requires a fraction of the ongoing operational funding while generating significant, compounding returns in direct government savings across our healthcare and justice systems. These investments address the underlying conditions.
The province and our municipalities are working incredibly hard and carrying the significant burden of a problem facing communities and residents across the country. But the inflow into homelessness in Nova Scotia currently outpaces these successes. The path forward requires an urgent, evidence-led shift away from temporary fixes and toward large-scale investments in fiscally sustainable, permanent supportive housing.
Abandoning emergency services like shelters now is a moral and economic dead-end that leaves local businesses and residents to bear a fallout that will only worsen because of that very decision.
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