Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim speaks during a news conference in Vancouver on Sept. 16, 2024.ETHAN CAIRNS/The Canadian Press
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s abrupt declaration that his city would put a pause on adding more supportive housing units unless other municipalities step up could backfire, say housing providers.
Advocates for this type of housing that offers shelter and services to those dealing with poverty, homelessness, mental health disorders and addictions have been struggling to maintain support for the model amid a rising tide of voter fatigue over the crises.
Next week at council, the mayor is expected to move his motion to halt the creation of more supportive housing units. Two members of his own party – councillors Rebecca Bligh and Lisa Dominato – have objected and are bringing forward a motion to have a representative of the provincial government come to council to answer questions about the potential negative consequences of that move.
In their motion, which will be discussed Feb. 26, the councillors noted that the mayor’s move goes against the city’s own recently approved strategy to improve the Downtown Eastside, which included a push for more supportive housing. The proposed freeze, they wrote, “appears to contradict those goals and suspend net new supportive housing construction” indefinitely.
Councillor Bligh was expelled from the mayor’s ABC party caucus on Friday.
Housing experts say the long-term consequences of the mayor’s proposed moratorium could mean that, as the province builds new supportive housing units in other municipalities, increasingly militant local opposition will push B.C.’s housing agency into selecting tenants with the least amount of need.
“They will cherry-pick the tenants who pay on time, who have the fewest number of guests. They know they can’t risk it being problematic,” said Janice Abbott, the former CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society, an organization that takes on some of the groups experiencing the worst hardships, like people coming straight from homeless encampments.
“So that means the folks who have the most problems end up in the Downtown Eastside,” said Ms. Abbott, who now works as a housing consultant for several Indigenous groups.
Supportive housing is a kind of subsidized housing intended for people who typically end up homeless and have become increasingly visible in places from Vancouver to Kelowna to Fort St. John in the past 20 years. In addition to staff working on site, supportive-housing complexes receive visits from health specialists and employment support workers.
Last month, Mr. Sim received applause at a Save Our Streets conference of residents, businesses and organizations concerned about deteriorating public disorder when he announced his proposed moratorium, apparently without consulting the rest of his caucus.
“This poverty-industrial complex has not only blocked local businesses from thriving but has also created conditions that degrade the health and well-being of our most vulnerable community members. Meanwhile, it has attracted predatory criminals, further compounding this neighbourhood’s challenges,” he told the crowd.
Mr. Sim’s pledge to ensure there is no “net new” supportive housing units planned for Vancouver excludes projects already in the works. There are at least six projects with supportive-housing units under construction currently in the Downtown Eastside, along with two others elsewhere downtown.
There are also 330 units in five projects awaiting development or building permits and the city has indicated they will go ahead. According to what the mayor has said, under his proposal, projects that are replacing current temporary housing – and therefore aren’t “net new” – wouldn’t be affected.
Even before Mr. Sim’s declaration, the province had moved to fund or acquire many projects outside the Downtown Eastside or outside of Vancouver altogether.
A recent news release said the NDP government has completed or started construction on more than 9,700 supportive homes throughout B.C.
Ravi Kahlon, B.C.’s minister of housing, announced last week that his government will pursue a 90-unit project for Richmond, where there had been such a flare-up of community opposition before the provincial election last October that it was put on pause.
The project is still generating opposition, with some protestors calling it a future “drug den” and a magnet for increased crime. As well, Richmond council withdrew its approval for the site this week, saying the ministry hadn’t been open enough about other sites it had considered and rejected. This, says councillor Dominato, is an example of why she doesn’t believe the mayor’s motion “is going to compel other municipalities to do more.”
Ms. Abbott and others say the units, if they are eventually built, will likely house the most compliant and rule-abiding tenants that BC Housing can find. As well, it is likely to have more sufficient staffing than many supportive-housing projects have had in the past.
Ms. Abbott noted that a new supportive-housing building that BC Housing is currently putting into operation – Chalmers Lodge, well outside downtown and in a comfortable neighbourhood near Vancouver General Hospital – has one of the highest levels of staffing she has seen in her decades-long time in non-profit housing.
Until the early 1990s, the term “supportive housing” was little used in B.C. and the concept was unknown to most of the public. The provincial Liberal government latched onto the idea in the 2000s, funding towers of supportive housing that often had more than 100 units in a building.
Even more units were added in the past several years, as the NDP government tried to deal with growing homeless encampments in Vancouver and Victoria. The province bought entire hotels and moved hundreds of people from camps into them.
But insufficient staffing and a tendency to fill entire buildings with tenants suffering from extreme crises led to problems in some projects and community backlash. Although operators of newer projects have learned from those mistakes and the buildings function with minimal impact on surrounding neighbourhoods, the negative experiences have stuck with opponents.
Months after his party barely won an election that was in part fought on public disorder, Mr. Kahlon acknowledges some mistakes were made. He said it clearly didn’t work well to take everyone from one homeless encampment and put them into the same hotel.
“The lesson learned is that it’s not that simple. You need to assess people so you find the right mix in those buildings.”
He said the other lesson learned was that a good, workable mix is also difficult to achieve because “some of our providers take the easier people and some take the challenging people.”
Micheal Vonn, the CEO of PHS Community Services Society and spokesperson for a coalition of housing providers, said the mayor and the minister are understating the challenges involved in successful supportive housing.
“The non-profits that run supportive housing are critically underfunded to appropriately manage the responsibilities placed upon them,” she said.
“The work of keeping these individuals housed is harder than most people can imagine. In their day-to-day work, staff within supportive housing must de-escalate conflict, calmly and effectively respond to crises, manage life-threatening emergencies, and endure language and behaviours that almost no one else has to encounter in their workplace.”
She said when the mayor pushes for scattering more supportive housing around the region, a strategy needs to be in place to ensure people aren’t cut off from essential medical, drug-rehab, employment, or counselling services they need that aren’t always present in more suburb-like settings.
No supportive-housing building, even the largest ones, can afford to have full-time staff providing all the needed supports, she says, and so it’s critical that residents have access to those services off-site.
“You concentrate or you disperse but both have implications. You have to understand the entire ecosystem. You are going to have to provide a means of getting people help.”