Melissa Reid

Building a City That Leaves No One Behind: Rooted in Kingston, Driven by Action

Homelessness, addiction, and mental health are not three separate problems. They are one problem with three faces, and it does not stay where people would prefer it stayed. It arrives as an ambulance call, a police response, an emergency room bed, a storefront that stays boarded, a park families stop bringing their kids to. Housing, health care, social services, and city infrastructure are tangled together on the ground. The only place they are still filed separately is on paper.

Kingston has been answering each symptom as it appears, and every year the answer costs more and the problem is bigger. I am not running to point that out. I am running because I have done this work up close, I know where the money goes, and I have a plan that starts from what is already happening on our streets.

I am on the front lines of this crisis in Kingston every day, as the founder of The Peer Outreach Empowerment Team Alliance. That work is backed by formal credentials in data collection for homeless services, program evaluation for the homelessness sector, and low-barrier, gender-focused housing approaches, alongside certifications in mental health, addiction, and harm reduction.

As a fifth-generation Kingstonian, my family's history is tied to building this city's cultural and community infrastructure — from the early groundwork of spaces like the Centre culturel Marie-Garin and ACFOMI to generations of civic dedication. That legacy taught me that when institutional systems fail a community, grassroots solidarity and unyielding resolve are what carve out a place to exist with dignity.

The infrastructure to steady this already exists, and the city already owns it. We need to use the municipal footprints we have — fenced service yards, structured interim zones already mapped in existing master plans — to provide safe, recognized spaces where people can exist securely, and to take disorder out of public parks and storefronts. We have to prioritize peer-driven outreach models that meet people where they are, bridging the critical gaps left when emergency infrastructure shuts down.

Everyone who actually responds to this crisis is working the same problem: finding people. A known, recognized location solves it. Emergency services reach someone in minutes instead of searching a park in the dark. Outreach and health workers deliver at one site instead of chasing a moving population across the city. It is faster, it is cheaper, and it works better than the alternative — which is the cycle we are running right now. Residents get their parks and their storefronts back, not because anyone was chased off, but because there is finally somewhere to go.

And we must stop paying, over and over, for the thing that does not work. Displacement is the most expensive option Kingston has. Enforcement moves people from one place to another; the people do not disappear, they arrive somewhere else, and the same costs come back with them — a second response, a third cleanup, another round of the same enforcement, at a higher price, with nothing improved. That is not compassion versus cost. That is spending twice to end up further behind. I would rather spend once on what works, and move those dollars toward transparent, accountable logistics that protect public health and public safety for every resident in this district.

Kingston has stood together before. With deep roots in this city, frontline experience, and a clear focus on the crisis in front of us, I am ready to do the work. Let's build a Kingston that leaves no one behind.

Melissa Reid