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Oliver Collerette will be sleeping under a bridge somewhere in Kelowna tonight and the saddest thing is there is likely little you can do about it.
Collerette said he can't bring himself to spend the night in a shelter. He said there's too much drug use, the people tend to be sick and noisy, it smells bad and people steal from him. 'When I get there I get sick right away," said Collerette. "I always got some of my items stolen," he added. So he chooses to sleep-out instead.
He said most nights he can stay warm enough. "If I don't, I just keep going," he told NowMedia. "Like last night I moved all around. I did my picking and the next thing I know it's 4:30 and that gives me time to make it to the closest Starbucks."
There he buys a coffee and buys himself some time to get warm inside. "Sometimes they let me sleep," he said. "Other times they don't."
Collerette said it's hard to be ready for a job in the morning when you have no place to stay and it's nearly impossible to find a place to stay when you have no job.
The last official count in Kelowna found 286 homeless people. The Point In Time Survey showed a 23 percent increase in homelessness since 2016.
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