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Province funds new winter-shelter beds — but not the ones city asked for

November 30th, 2011 · 63 Comments

Another strange winter of tussling between the city and province over funding winter-shelter beds.

As my story here outlines, the province is going to open some winter-shelter beds, but not in the areas where city staff say they’re needed.

The last two years, the city has asked for — and eventually received, after some struggle — money to operate four temporary winter shelters in areas outside the downtown core: Mount Pleasant, Cardero near Stanley Park, Kitsilano, and Granville Slopes under the Granville bridge.

City and housing staff say those shelters helped encourage people to come into shelters who previously refused to go near the downtown or Downtown Eastside and wouldn’t use the province’s “extreme-weather” shelters because those shelters only open late at night and on nights when the temperature drops to freezing. (Most preferred to find their own nooks to curl up and be asleep long before the extreme-weather shelters opened.)

But Housing Minister Rich Coleman says those aren’t needed any more, since about 400 spaces have been provided in social-housing projects that have opened up in the past few months.

City staff say the problem is

1. Current shelters are still full to the brim and there are people out on the streets.

2. Those housing projects are only taking in small numbers of the people who are the long-term homeless in the city.

3. The shelters outside downtown help staff establish contact with a whole group of people who won’t go out of their existing neighbourhoods, helping break the “culture of homelessness.”

Stay tuned for more on this. There is a major struggle going on, as the city and province struggle over, not just these shelters, but who is getting the precious rooms in the new social-housing projects.

CORRECTION: I’ve had a couple of phone calls this morning about the information that Surrey is asking for the temperature criterion to be changed for opening the extreme-weather shelter beds. To be clear, it’s not BC Housing that decides on that, it’s the council in conjunction with its local housing partners.

The city’s news release was a bit ambiguous on that.

 

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  • Max

    Here is another question:

    What happens when all of those hotels and SRO’s that various non-profits own and operate in the DTES become more valuable if sold off?

    At some point the land in the DTES is going to become highly desirable – a not too long in the future from what we see; so, what is stopping any of these non-profits from selling off a piece or two of their real-estate portfolios.

  • George

    I know this will not be a popular comment. I agree the Povetarians will have a field day, but lets try an exercise in what if…

    1. When did taking illegal drugs become a human right? I believe it is an illegal act.
    2. When did it become a legal right to defaecate, urinate and aggressively come after me for money on the street?

    I have said before that I think we need to bring back a form of the” Vagrancy Act.”

    Someone on drugs is not in his/her right mind and under the Mental Health Act should be forced into a locked treatment center, not a prison, but a locked medical/mental health facility.
    If you look back into our history, since the beginning of the “povetarian industry” the movement started by the grassroots approach to give rights and legalize the rights of addicts and homeless to use the public streets for a toilet bowl we have created the largest entitlement industry in history.

    Millions of dollars spent daily on services, wages with no successful outcome..

    Only the Administrators and Board members of these Societies have benefited. Many of these helpful folks eventually go into politics…ah there we have it, the Politicians are really the Wizard behind the curtain…something to think about. How many Societies to help the marginalized drug addicts have politicians on their staff or on their Board of Directors…?

    Vagrancy Act:
    http://www.realjustice.ca/column/BlackSheepCommentaries050427.htm

    I love this organization…read the history and the program, the man that started this program in my opinion has the right idea..for the willing addict.
    http://www.welcomehomesociety.org/

    Not only is it shocking that there are over 300 police calls to First United Shelter but some employees themselves are with issues. One employee is dealing with sexual assault charges..are the addicts safe from their caregivers?
    I believe if the government paid for registered nurses to work in shelters with staff we would have a more successful outcome..

    I guess this is why I so strongly believe that the povetarians are really “Poverty Pimps”

    I have seen it from both sides….absolutely shameful…

    To David Hadaway and Glissando I know you will read this comment with interest..please know that I have heard you, we took your comments seriously…we have been speaking with a reporter that we feel comfortable with, and the story is being told and will be written about…

  • Derek W

    Long-time lurker jumping in!

    @Max 51 – Your point about the value of DTES land is well-taken.

    One problem that few talk about is where the DTES fits into the Vancouver rental/real estate system. The vast majority of rooming houses (cheap rent) in Vancouver is in the DTES.

    So, if you are fleeing an abusive relationship or family and have a few hundreds bucks in your pocket, or are on welfare, or are a single parent with no education or skills working minimum wage, where can you rent in Vancouver? Where can you find a place to live for $370 per month if you’re on welfare? Heck, even if you can hold down a job for 25 hours a week working minimum wage, where do you live for $500 per month? If you’re responsible and resourceful, you can probably pull it off. If you were beaten every week for the first twelve years of your life (a story I hear often on the DTES), your chances aren’t so good. God forbid you need to do this as a single parent with a child or two.

    The fact that we live in the least affordable city in Canada (measured by median income into median price of a detached home) hits most of us in the pocketbook, but sucker-punches the truly poor in the gut.

    What does this mean for the system? Lots of young professionals in the $50k-80k/yr group rent places in Vancouver that their peers in Calgary or Toronto wouldn’t even look at. That means less housing for the students and $30k-50k crowd. What does that leave for the welfare-to-minimum wage crowd? The cruddy rooming houses of the DTES. Put all those emotionally vulnerable folks together, throw in some predators and a highly developed drug culture, and viola.

    I also have to add that it makes for some AWESOME community in the DTES sometimes too…it isn’t all bad. Just mostly.

    Anyway, by this thinking, if UBC increased their on-campus housing capacity or if we found some way to get more density for students, we’d see relief of pressure on folks who are competing with students for low-cost housing.

    Thoughts?

  • George

    Derek
    Not sure how we went from homeless shelters to student housing..are you saying that we should build student housing to help solve the shelter problem??

    Oh my…

  • Derek W

    @George – I’ll clarify. I was trying to show how the concentration of poor on the DTES is part of an integrated system, to expand how we think about the problem. It was an illustration, not a recommendation. But yes, I believe that if enough student housing was built at UBC, that would help the shelter problem. It’s not the best way to solve that problem, but it is an illustration of how we could think about the problem of affordability, which is a critical component for working on the homeless issue (along with other important elements you bring up, like more access to treatment).

    Here’s an example to illustrate my logic. Sally the Student arrives in town to go to UBC. But there is a wait list for housing on campus, so she hits craigslist, looking for a place to rent for her 600/month budget. The same day, Mary the single mother leaves her abusive husband with her one year old daughter. With help from friends and her part time job, she’s pulled together $600 per month too. Now they’re both competing for the same space, and Mary the single mother with the black eye is going to lose to Sally the chipper young student. Mary will have to go to the only place where she can get a cheap place to live: the DTES. There she makes some good real friends, but also meets her new “boyfriend,” who ends up her pimp, and we know how that story ends for her, let alone her daughter.

    If Sally the Student had found a place on campus, this wouldn’t be a problem.

    Make sense? I don’t have solutions following from this logic yet, but I’m trying to think about the problem in a new way using systems theory.

  • George

    I understood you the first time….oh my goodness…even the way you describe each woman, oh my goodness.. sadly shaking head…

  • Derek W

    George, it sounds like you’re so taken aback by my suggestion that you can’t even describe what you agree with. Could you at least point me toward a resource that would get me thinking about your point of view?

  • George

    I don’t agree with anything you’ve said….if you can’t see your lack of sensitivity… sorry can’t help you… wow..

  • Michael Geller

    MB $41. It isn’t $2800 a year for a shelter, it’s $2800 a MONTH…. in other words, $57,120,000 a year to house 1700 homeless people in shelters.

    Now do you want to reconsider your comments 🙂

  • MB

    @ Michael 59

    Sorry to disappoint you. I don’t care to reconsider my comments excoriating a government that willingly spends about $6,500 million on a stadium roof and freeway – to cite only two capital projects (excluding debt servicing costs) – while concurrently bickering with the locals over the costs of sheltering human beings experiencing unfortunate circumstances.

  • Max

    @MB #60:

    Where do you think the tax monies that pay for the shelters, medical care, welfare, free needles etc comes from?

    It comes from people spending money, property taxes, business taxes income taxes, goods taxes etc. Taxes period.

    It was estimated that Grey Cup brought in $100 million to the city that weekend.

    I support social housing, but Vancouver is not the only municipality in this province that has homeless issues – we just get the privilege of carrying the bulk of it – from all across Canada.

    And in the meantime, there are how many 100’s of thousands of other people that lead their day to day lives – pay their fare share of taxes, and expect a little something back from it – like roads and other amenities.

    And ‘taxes’ from those that work & participate in life covers it all.

  • MB

    @ Max, I thank the lord everyday for her forbearance for not allowing the Taxpayers Coalition to govern us.

    Yes, there are taxes, taxes and more taxes, but I’d like to draw your attention to the presence of subsidies, subsidies and more subsidies. Not to mentioned tax breaks and more tax breaks.

    Subsidies and tax breaks often purposely benefit already hugely successful private corporations (e.g. petroleum companies) and weathly individuals, not the unwashed masses.

    There are just as many arguments out there drawing attention to what they can define as an “unbalanced” tax system, as there are to those whose reason to live is to diminish government out of existance by making all taxes evil. Our system of government allows the decision makers extraordinary flexibility in managing tax rates and benefits, and it hasn’t been entirely fair.

    But when people place the bottom line ahead of lives, that’s when it gets very dicey to me. Sure, the Grey Cup may have brought in millions, but the debt servicing on the new stadium roof still exists and will continue for many years, and the capital costs were financed at a time when funding for the homeless shelters was in contention.

    And, BTW, what is the expected return on the Port Mann / Gateway investment of over $6,000 million? I’ll make that one easy: it will never recover its capital, debt servicing and operating costs even with tolls and a very temporrary relief from congestion. The fact is that in every jurisdictionthat tried to build freeways to relieve congestion ended up with far worse congestion and an even heavier economic cost in the long run.

    Moreover, the calculations and project rationale ignored the hidden costs of health care, emergency services, litigation and environmental remediation of the increase in car dependency this project will stimulate.

    The liabilities and benefits of taxes depends on how you define your priorites.

  • MB

    Correction:

    Moreover, the calculations and project rationale ignored the hidden TAX-SUPPORTED costs of health care, emergency services, litigation and environmental remediation of the increase in car dependency this project will stimulate.

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