Homelessness touches every corner of N.S., and the numbers prove it

After living in a hotel for more than a month, Lisa Dewitt's bank account is close to empty, she has no prospects for a permanent place to live and it's almost checkout time.

The 52-year-old had to leave her apartment in downtown New Glasgow, N.S., in September after part of the building caught fire. Her unit didn't go up in flames, but she was told the entire building had been rendered unsafe for living.

"Right then and there I thought, 'I'm in trouble,'" she said.

The trouble, she knew, would be in finding a new home. For the nine months leading up to the fire, Dewitt was on a month-to-month lease and was looking for a new apartment, to no avail.

Her struggle to find affordable housing is not unique. Data compiled by CBC News from community organizations in every region of the province clearly indicates homelessness is a problem that stretches from Yarmouth in the southwest to Sydney in Cape Breton, and everywhere in between.

The latest available numbers show 1,168 people recently sought help because they're homeless or on the verge of losing their home. Rural Cape Breton is the only area for which no data could be found.

Dewitt doesn't consider herself to be homeless, yet, but she fits most definitions, along with anyone else living in a hotel or car, crashing on couches or sleeping outside.

Community organizations try to keep track of the number of people experiencing homelessness, and the provincial government relies on those estimates to inform its response in terms of policy and services provided.

The people collecting that data generally believe their counts underestimate the actual scope of the problem. That's in part because of cases such as Dewitt's. She has been hesitant to seek help because she doesn't think she would qualify.

The latest count out of Halifax is 416. That number is updated and posted online weekly by the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, and is an aggregation of information from organizations across the municipality. 

The system the association uses is something of a gold standard, and several organizations in other regions are working to develop their own. 

For now, outside of the Halifax region, numbers are not collected regularly or in a consistent way, making it difficult to make direct comparisons between regions. Some of the figures provided to CBC are as much as a year old, others just days old. Some are from surveys involving multiple community organizations, while others are from individual housing support workers. 

On a single day in April, 119 people were counted as homeless in Cape Breton Regional Municipality. Over the course of one month last fall, 226 people across Hants, Kings and Annapolis counties were counted. 

Similar month-long counts were completed in Cumberland and Colchester counties this spring, yielding a combined total of 100.