Life might settle down for residents and business owners on lower Marks Street, St. Stephen, these days, but about 30 former neighbours now need new places to live. Police showed up at 18 Marks St. on Friday morning, March 7, with a judge's order under New Brunswick's Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods (SCAN) Act allowing them to evict the people and board up the five apartment building.
      "We had 20 minutes to get everything we had out," Katelynn Johnson said later in the day, sitting in the driver's seat of a car in the driveway. Other former residents picked through things on the ground, looking for belongings. Snickelfritz, an orange male tabby cat, poked around the yard. "That's my boy," Johnson said. Only one of the five apartments had electrical service, and the water was shut off to all of them at the end, Johnson said.
      "That's garbage," Johnson said, looking at the pile of trash at the back of the property. She and Ryan Fader, both in their late 20s, say the dumpster for the building was taken away, forcing residents to pile their garbage by the back fence. Fader, who lives outside of town, dropped by to check on friends at 18 Marks St. and offer what support he could.
      They say the authorities told them they had to leave because of the garbage, but they question whether that was the real reason. The placard attached to the sheet of plywood over the front door says the building was shut down due to complaints related to "illegal drug activity which has adversely affected the safety and security of this neighbourhood."
      Municipal trucks hauled away most of the garbage the following day, but a casual observer could find hypodermic syringes among the odds and ends still lying on the ground and the front veranda. Citizen David Whittingham asked during the public comment period at the February 26 Municipal District Council meeting if something could be done about the 18 Marks St. apartment building. "You know, residents and the business owners around there talk about rats and stuff, the garbage is pulled apart, the building is being trashed," he said. Councillor Earl Eastman asked Fire Chief Sean Morton, deputy chief administrative officer responsible for public safety, if the municipality could intervene.
      "There are other agencies involved in that file. I guess that's what I can say. I'm hoping you will see some progress there soon," Morton responded. He did not disagree when Councillor Brian Cornish suggested that the one "nuisance fire" reported for the previous month was at 18 Marks St. Both Cornish and Mayor Allan MacEachern cautioned against saying anything that could jeopardize a legal process.
      The hearing at which the judge issued the order concerning 18 Marks St. took place in Saint John on Thursday, February 27, the day following the municipal district council meeting. Other news outlets have reported that residents were told on the following Monday to be out by Thursday, March 6. Johnson says the officers showed up the next morning, giving her 20 minutes to gather her things and leave.
      Shutting down this one building might take care of the garbage and alleged drug dealing at 18 Marks St., but it does little to help deal with the continuing crisis of people inadequately housed in St. Stephen.
      "Them pushing us out of an apartment building is going to make us go to another one, and it's going to just keep going on and on and on, because we're not going to live on the street," said a woman, who did not want to give her name, sitting in the front passenger seat of the car with Johnson at the wheel. The woman said she had been staying off and on at 18 Marks St. since November. Johnson says she stayed at 18 Marks St. for about six months.
      "They're closing apartments that a lot of them don't even need to be closed. There are places that could be up for rent, like, that could be, and they're not doing it. They're just saying no," said Johnson.
      The house and land at 18 Marks St. belong to Starshine Properties, owned by Annette Penkala of Calgary, Alberta, who bought about 20 rental properties in St. Stephen in 2020 and 2021. This is the third Starshine Properties building closed under the SCAN legislation since 2022, including ones at 9 and 16 Schoodic Street. At those houses, too, the landlord seemed to exercise little control, it was not clear who were and were not legal tenants, or even to whom tenants should pay their rent. The Starshine Properties building at 80 Union St. burned last year. Local authorities have had trouble contacting Penkala, although another news outlet reports that a document server reached her in Calgary ahead of the hearing dealing with 18 Marks St.
      Johnson and Fader both say they stayed at 9 Schoodic St. Johnson says, "We were all in that one place and, crime, there was no crime. In my family, if I eat then everyone eats. If I drink then someone else drinks. If there isn't enough to go around, you don't bring it out, and that's how it was."
      "It's just that it sucks that they're just going around and shutting these places down and, like, it's cold out; like, someone's going to end up dying," she says.
      Johnson, a single mother of two children who stay with their grandmother, is still suffering from serious injuries from a car accident on the Ledge Road in 2017. She suffered a cracked brain stem and needs brain surgery, she says.
      Fader, who lives with his father outside of town, says that a friend helped him get off methadone, medication normally prescribed to ease symptoms of withdrawing from addiction to narcotics. "I was on methadone there for five years or so," he says, adding, "I've been off about a year now. It wasn't easy, that's for sure. It's one of the best things I ever did, though."
      Tents began popping up in St. Stephen about the same time the authorities boarded up 9 Schoodic in 2022. Neighbourhood Works, a local community nonprofit organization, opened emergency warming shelters in the winters of 2022 23 and 2023 24. Last year the group turned the former Masonic Hall on Main Street into Lighthouse Lodge, a year round shelter and centre for programs dealing with homelessness.
      Lighthouse Lodge has 30 beds, about the same as the number of people needing places to stay with 18 Marks St. closed. "The shelter [Lighthouse Lodge] was full for, like, a week before they shut us down," according to the other woman in the car. Occupancy numbers at Lighthouse Lodge could not be immediately confirmed, but 30 more people looking for places to stay must surely strain community resources.
      Apartments are scarce in St. Stephen, Fader says. Rents are too high, for example, $1,000 a month, unheated, for a one bedroom apartment at one local building, Johnson says.
      "They should take one of these places they just call condemned and, I don't know, gift it to us homeless and whatever they want to call us," Johnson says. "We'd fix the place up, we'd all chip in," Fader says. "Make it a rent for either every month or for a year plan or something, and make it so that we all have to chip in out of our welfare cheques so that we don't get just a free place to live," Johnson says.
      Meanwhile, though, they had to worry about the immediate hours ahead. Johnson's parents came to help gather her belongings but, she said, "I don't know where we're going to put them." Fader said people could stay the night at his residence if they had no other place to go.