Red zones: Saint John introduces areas where encampments won’t be permitted

Saint John, N.B., has established red zones as places that cannot have tent encampments.

Saint John is rolling out the next phase of it’s Housing for All Strategy, which involves implementing areas within the city that encampments won’t be allowed.

During Monday’s city council meeting, council was presented how red zones will be implemented within the city. Red zones will be areas where tents, encampments, or other types of temporary shelters will not be allowed.

“We’ve been researching over the last few years and having discussions with how other municipalities have approached this and looking at some of the things that have gone well and things that haven’t gone well,” Community Support Services Senior Manager Cara Coes told reporters Tuesday.

“Working with our partners, we came to the conclusion that this is how we want to implement the plan to move forward.”

Coes says the document is not set in stone and will see adjustments or improvements as the city and its partners go through the process.

The city says red zones are being introduced as a coordinated approach to homelessness. Earlier this year, the city established its first green zone which provides safe temporary housing with on-site services and support for people.

“Every person in our city deserves dignity, safety, and the chance to move toward permanent housing,” Mayor Donna Noade Reardon said in a press release. “By creating both Green and Red Zones, we are balancing compassion with responsibility and ensuring that those experiencing homelessness are supported with real alternatives, while protecting the safety of our neighbourhoods, schools, and community spaces.”

Red zone areas will include schools, daycares, playgrounds, sports fields among a slew of other locations. No encampments will be permitted within 200 metres of any schools, childcare facilities, designated green zones and crisis care centres.

The buffer zone shrinks down to 100 metres around playgrounds and splash pads, 30 metres along sports fields, parks, highways and railways. Along the Harbour Passage walkway the buffer is five metres.

With red and green zones also comes yellow zones introduced by the city. Yellow zones are available on some vacant properties owned by the city.

The city is laying out some rules with these approved encampment sites. Tents must be a minimum of three metres apart, no more then five tents are permitted in a cluster, and clusters must be at least 50 metres apart.

The city also says the sites must be kept clean. Wooded structures will not be allowed due to fire hazards.

Mayor Reardon told reports the yellow zone sites may have some amenities available on site, but a final decision has yet to have been made. She also couldn’t confirm who would be responsible for ensuring the new rules are followed.

“We’re always, always advocating for the provincial support,” says Reardon. “What would be great is if we could get a provincially led plan for all of this would make it a lot easier for us.”

The implementation of the new zones will take time according to the city. The first phase begins immediately, which entails letting people know that red and yellow zones are coming, especially to those living on the streets.

The next two phases, expected to be complete by October 17, will see outreach teams working with individuals to help relocate them off of red zone areas.

“It’s always the outreach team,” Coes says when asked who will be leading the relocating efforts. “They’re trauma informed, they have the relationships with the clients. It’s not the city stepping in to do relocations.”

“We’re not going in there with the police to move people,” confirms the mayor. “We’re trying to create relationships with people and we’re trying to do what’s best for them, because there are people that are in situations where they actually have nowhere else to go. We’re the advocates for them.”

The city says its goal is to have no tents, encampments, or shelters in any red zones by the end of October.

‘It’s not a helpful measure’

While the city is touting its latest steps to mitigate encampments within the city, those who work directly with the city’s homeless population are fighting back on the plan.

Ivan McCullough is a co-founder of Street Team SJ, a non-profit organization who works to provide food and necessities to displaced residents in Saint John.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” McCullough says on the purposed red zones. “It’s not a helpful measure. It’s marginalizing, it’s dehumanizing, and we weren’t even given a clear picture of where the supposed yellow zones were going to be.”

McCullough admits the city’s plan kind of feels like one that more appeases the general public’s concerns around encampments rather then the needs of those living on the streets.

The red zones, as they are laid out, will move most encampments away from the uptown core. That would take homeless individuals farther away from accessing essential supports and services like Avenue B.

The core of the homeless crisis comes down to a lack of affordable housing McCullough says. Understating a solution down that path is years away, he says he would have at the very least like to have seen a clearer picture of where encampments would be permitted.

He says without knowing where people may be, it will be difficult from Street Team SJ to access unhoused individuals and provide essentials to them.

An interactive map outlining where all the different zones within the city is expected to be available by days end.

“It’s frustrating,” he says. “It seems like a half-formed plan, right? It’s a start of a plan, but we don’t have the information that we need to act on.”

The sentiment is shared by Fresh Start Services executive director Melanie Vautour. She thinks the plan will only move unhoused people away from the uptown area for a short time.

“The map looks like there’s a lot of yellow zones, but really there aren’t,” says Vautour. “It’s primarily urban households, it’s private property or it’s businesses. Because they’ll keep being pushed out uptown, they’ll pop away, then to go back uptown. We’re literally just playing this game of moving people around the city, nonstop.”

She says unhoused individuals are aware of the city’s intentions and it’s creating some angst.

“It will be extremely harder to find [unhoused people] because they will hide from us if they believe that we are part of removing them and moving them,” Vautour says. “They’ll actually hide from those support agencies with the belief that we’ll be the ones to say where they are, and then that will make it even more challenging to find them.

“This really is just going to lead to more desperation, more crime, and also, unfortunately, an increase in the risk of death.”

Vautour reminds residents that unhoused individuals are not all to blame for the rise in instances seen around the uptown core. She plans to continue conversations with the city about making amendments to the plan.

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