Housing Minister Selina Robinson listens during a housing announcement in Coquitlam, B.C., on April 13, 2018.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
After months of talks with the province that went nowhere, the City of Maple Ridge must this week reveal a plan clearing the way for supportive housing units to be built in the municipality.
Housing Minister Selina Robinson said she set a deadline of March 8 for a social housing proposal from the city, but agreed to wait until Tuesday’s council meeting for a plan.
“We were hitting roadblocks and I got really clear with the mayor … that we need to see a plan,” Ms. Robinson said Friday in an interview. The province has said it would move forward on its own if it doesn’t get an acceptable plan from the city.
Ms. Robinson said the city expressed concerns about the lack of services available for people who are living with drug addiction and mental illness and that supportive housing alone isn’t enough to address those problems.
“There were several offers over many, months to [build supportive housing] and they weren’t interested … they were not keen to work with us,” Ms. Robinson said.
Maple Ridge Mayor Mike Morden declined an interview request, but in a statement on March 5 – the day after Ms. Robinson imposed a deadline – said he was committed to work in a “collaborative fashion” to find solutions to housing and social service needs in the city.
Authorities in Maple Ridge, a city of about 82,000 east of Vancouver, on March 2 began clearing some material from Anita Place, a tent encampment on city property started in 2017 as a housing protest. The city obtained an evacuation order for the camp from the provincial fire commissioner the day before following several recent fires at the site. That order ended Monday. Some people will be allowed back onto the site under conditions, the city said.
The tension between the city and the province comes as the provincial government is attempting to tackle homelessness and housing affordability on several fronts, including a temporary modular housing program announced in the 2017 budget.
That $291-million program – envisioned as part of a rapid response to end homelessness – involves the province working with cities to build 2,000 modular units over two years. Built off-site in a factory and then taken to the building site, the units can be built more quickly than conventional developments, especially if cities streamline their zoning processes.
In Vancouver, for example, expedited zoning procedures meant 606 units in 10 buildings went up in about 18 months, the provincial housing agency BC Housing said.
The buildings have a lifespan of about 40 years but are designed so that they can be moved if, for example, a city decides not to renew a lease.
A handful of cities have balked or backtracked on projects after community concerns. In Penticton, council voted down a rezoning application for a temporary modular housing project in May, 2018. BC Housing subsequently found another site.
In Nanaimo, city council last February voted against a proposed supportive housing project that would have been built on city-owned land with provincial funds. That decision spurred a protest that began with tents in front of City Hall and then shifted to a waterfront site where an encampment dubbed “Discontent City” lasted until December, when it was cleared after a B.C. Supreme Court order.
The September court order called for the site to be cleared by October, but that deadline was extended so that the province could try to find homes for people who had been staying at the site. The province stepped in to open 170 units of supportive housing on two sites.
While the projects have helped address homelessness, the rushed implementation holds lessons for how to proceed with future projects, Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog said.
“Things were put together very quickly and there were significant issues with that – security, criminal behaviour, all sorts of problems. I’m not going to pretend that it was a pleasant experience for the neighbourhoods,” Mr. Krog said on Monday.
As residents settled in, some of those problems lessened or were resolved, he said. But the continuing challenges mean Nanaimo is aiming to do things differently next time around.
“The cities have neither the financial means, nor the jurisdiction, nor the responsibility to do this [housing],” Mr. Krog said. “It is essentially a provincial responsibility and the city’s job is to co-operate the best it can to make sure these things succeed.”