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Province goes after DERA with lawsuit

March 25th, 2010 · 8 Comments

I heard earlier this week that there was a housing bomb coming down the pipe from province. Here it is, the province taking over the once-venerable Downtown Eastside Residents Association after an audit that they say shows provincial money was being used improperly.

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  • Frank Murphy

    Intervention to help damaged people in need of psychiatric, addiction, emotional assistance isn’t a housing issue, it’s a health issue. Helping people who can’t currently afford basic housing, is a housing issue and should be structured around subsidy to the individual not to the building or to the complex, inevitably self-serving empires that grow up around large amounts of public funding.

  • Stephanie

    Unfortunately, Frank, portable subsidies are not a workable approach to housing affordability in markets with a tight supply of rental housing. While there’s certainly a place for them in a well-developed housing strategy, we need multiple interventions in the market – co-ops, purpose-built rental housing, programs for affordable ownership, etc. – if we are going to have a city that is affordable to the people who actually work in it.

    As for DERA: it hurts to watch that organization go down. What a waste.

  • Frank Murphy

    Understood, Stephanie, and well sketched. And I agree. I take no pleasure in DERA’s current crisis. I do tho find myself wondering if the pendulum has swung too far away from the effective role the “market” should play.

  • michael geller

    This is a very sad story for all involved. I agree with Stephanie’s assessment, with some added provisos…

    In addition to increasing the supply of purpose built rental housing, social housing, and affordable ownership housing, we need to initiate other actions to reduce the demand for such housing.

    These could include
    1. an increase in the shelter component of welfare;
    2. more job opportunities for the homeless, including support services providing free haircuts, dental work, suitable clothing and assistance in finding work;
    3. programs to support re-unification with family and friends;
    4. other forms of rental assistance allowing people to rent in existing housing. I’m told the new initiative to help those with mental illness find housing is working quite well.

    We must stop focusing on very large and often expensive social housing projects such as those built by DERA and now proposed on the ’12 sites’ around the city.

    We must also reconsider what to do with the very expensive social housing units at the Olympic Village. Allen Garr had a very good story in Friday’s Courier which you can find at http://www.gellersworldtravel.blogspot.com along with some of my comments that didn’t make it into the story.

  • Wondering….

    Hmmmmmm….let’s have a look at the Portland Hotel Society while we’re at it,

    hmmmmmm?

  • Stephanie

    Michael – I’ll address your points one by one.

    1. Shelter component increase, yes. But it needs to be substantial, and there also needs to be an increase in the support allowance. Long experience shows that increased shelter allowances are immediately absorbed by SRO landlords via rent increases, legal or otherwise, but are not substantial enough to allow tenants on income assistance to enter the the non-slumlord part of the rental market.

    2. Trying to provide job opportunities for the homeless doesn’t work very well, because they’re homeless. They don’t have phones, or they have a phone number at a shelter (which doesn’t impress employers much). They don’t have adequate funds for transportation. Interview clothing won’t last on the street, and it’s likely to be stolen in the shelter system.

    However, getting people into housing first and then providing job opportunities and supports works quite well. I agree with you about a need for expanded support services. I also think some of the employment programs offered by agencies contracted by MHSD are poorly run and offer very little in the way of actual assistance. (Some of them are great, though.)

    3. Programs to support re-unification with family and friends: i.e.; one-way bus tickets out of town. Doesn’t sound as nice that way, eh?
    I don’t think additional programs are necessary. MHSD already offers moving costs as a supplement to income assistance – we just need them to loosen the criteria for this particular moving supplement. And it needs to be made available without coercion.

    4. There’s actually been a Supported Independent Living (SIL) program available for many years. It provides a portable subsidy and mental health supports, and it can work well. There are a couple of problems, though: the program doesn’t work if there isn’t sufficient capacity in the entire system (more supportive housing, better mental health care) to address problems that happen if clients decompensate. Often clients who are too difficult to “manage” end up being bounced from SIL programs to the street.

    The other problem is the lack of available rental housing that is affordable to people receiving disability benefits and the subsidy. As with any portable subsidy program, available rental housing is key, and that’s a problem in Vancouver. (There’s a similar program available for persons living with HIV/AIDS, but it’s so under-funded that people can wait 5-10 years for an available subsidy.)

    Presumably the program you’re discussing is part of the federal initiative? I’m not up-to-date on what they’re doing.

    5. I disagree that we need to stop building large non-market housing projects. These buildings don’t work optimally when the tenant population is “hard-to-house”, but they work just fine if for other tenant groups if government commits to adequate funding for staffing and maintenance of the buildings. While I have seen credible research that supports small buildings for vulnerable tenant populations, the idea that a lower-income tenant population is inherently unstable isn’t borne out by anything I’ve read to date.

    Of course, I’m biased: I live in a housing co-op with over 200 units, 80% of which are subsidized. Our co-op works just fine. If people are concerned about “ghettoization” of the poor, this is the kind of mixed-income development they should look to (IMO).

    6. As for the Village, I say: rent it, rent it, rent it. Heaven knows we need reasonably priced market rentals in this city. If the rentals end up housing working singles and families who can’t afford to buy, then it’s still a plus for the city. When financial conditions improve we can talk about applying subsidy to those units and making them into more affordable housing.

  • michael geller

    Stephanie, thanks for your thoughtful, and obviously well informed response. It is most helpful.

  • MB

    It seems reasonable that fairly large social housing facilities on the 12 sites will also provide a centre of gravity for communal meals served in on-site kitchens, a nurses station operating several hours a day to coordinate treatment options for addictions among other things, a night watch, and so on.

    I wouldn’t want to see them too large and out-of-scale for the DTES neighbourhoods, though. I feel they need at least another half dozen in the suburbs too.