The City of Victoria will spend $130-thousand dollars to help Our Place build storage spaces for the homeless.
"It's like a closet for people," says Our Place executive director Don Evans. "This has been a gap in our community for quite a while. We certainly see a lot of shopping carts and people's belongings out on the street, especially in the downtown area."
Evans says such a facility has been talked about for some time, but they've only now found a place for it. The storage facility and shopping cart sorting area will go in the courtyard of their Pandora Avenue drop-in centre. That courtyard used to house an overdose prevention site, which closed when the full supervised consumption site opened earlier this year.
Evans says it should mean that homeless people won't have to pack their belongings around in shopping carts, "this will be a facility for people to keep their stuff overnight. So they have to check-in every day so that we know they're still accessing it and using it."
The storage area will be big enough to serve about 100 people.