N.S. construction worker has been living in Dartmouth shelter hotel for a year

Gerry Ackroyd goes to work every day on construction sites, but comes home to a hotel room provided by the province through Community Services.

“There's people in here that work for a living, but they still have to come back to a room that's the size of a box,” he says.

CTV News first spoke to the 57-year-old about a year ago, several months after he’d moved into the hotel after being evicted from his apartment due to a dispute with the landlord.

“I’ve been here for a year, and I was told, 'Oh yeah, you shouldn't be here that long,’” he says, sitting on a park bench overlooking what’s been his home, a room at Dartmouth’s Doubletree by Hilton hotel.

The irony is, Ackroyd often works on major housing developments he can’t afford to live in himself.

“The building site, it’s not for low-income people, it's for people that afford $2,000 to $4,000 to live,” he says. “A one bedroom apartment in Dartmouth is like, $1,400 to $1,800, depending on where you're going. One person cannot afford that.”

Last year, the province spent $5.6 million housing Nova Scotians like Ackroyd in hotels as part of its shelter diversion program.

Hotels are often used because shelters are full and living in a hotel room is better than living rough.

Now the province is expanding the program, negotiating with the Doubletree’s owner, Manga Hotels, to convert all 204 rooms in the building into shelter rooms. The move means 80 workers represented by United Food & Commercial Workers Canada face unemployment at the end of the month.

The website for Manga Hotels includes a description of future residential projects on land right behind the hotel, a three-tower development.

Ackroyd says he wouldn’t be surprised if the hotel ended up as a parking lot in the end.

“I’m a construction worker, I know how (it works) for the big complexes,” he says.

Meanwhile, Nova Scotia isn't the only Maritime province to use so-called “shelter hotels.”

Prince Edward Island does as well; spending $785,000 in the 2022-23 fiscal year to shelter Islanders with what the Department of Social Housing and Development calls “commercial partners.” A spokesperson with the department says opening the province’s 50-bed emergency shelter last year, however, has reduced the province’s use of other spaces for housing.

York University associate professor Luisa Sotomayor says shelter hotels became common during the pandemic, when shelters were closed down over COVID-19 concerns.

She’s studied the use of hotels for temporary housing in Canada and around the world, and says they are not ideal as a long-term solution.

“There’s not an opportunity to build a life,” she says. “A measure like the hotel shelter is only meant to provide, in theory, emergency services, in the moment.”

“It’s prolonging the state of instability, it makes it really hard to overcome some of the situations that are associated with homelessness,” Sotomayor adds.

She adds their use is also expensive, both in the short-term, and the long-term.

Sotomayor believes governments would be better off investing in ways to keep people from losing their homes in the first place.

“Because then that unleashes a number of other crises for the individual, but also for us as a society,” she says. “It’s way more costly to address an exit to homelessness once people are living on the streets or living in a shelter.”

“At least you’re in out of the weather, and that’s the way I look at it right now,” says Ackroyd.

But he says the province needs to do more to help people find affordable housing.

“It’s a Band-Aid on a cut that's going to bleed forever,” he says. “You have to deal with it in some form, to help people get out of this situation.”