By Sean Condon
Photo courtesy of Ministry of Housing and Social Development
When Vancouver won the right to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, it included an unprecedented package of commitments which promised that inner-city communities like the Downtown Eastside would be protected from any adverse impact of the Games.
The Vancouver Organizing Committee's (Vanoc) Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement made 37 “goals and objectives”—the most significant being to “ensure people are not made homeless as a result of the Winter Games.” For a city that had seen 1,000 low-income tenants evicted from Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels during Expo 86, it was a substantial promise meant to alleviate people’s fear that the same tragedy would be repeated during the Olympics.
But in the six years since Vancouver beat out Pyeongchang and Salzburg for the Games, Metro Vancouver’s homeless population has increased from 1,121 to 2,660 (most advocates believe the number is much higher). Hundreds more across the city were evicted from their low-income housing when landlords took advantage of a real estate boom, along with a legal loophole to renovate and charge higher rents.
After initially freezing new social housing spending, the BC Liberal Party began to reinvest in housing five years ago with a new sense of purpose. The province purchased 24 rundown SRO buildings in Vancouver, funded low-barrier shelters and created hundreds of new social housing units.
While the province insists that it is making progress, housing advocates still claim the Downtown Eastside has lost more than it has gained because of the Olympics. In a recent interview with Megaphone, Minister of Housing and Social Development Rich Coleman disputed some of the homeless numbers and talked about the province’s plans for the Downtown Eastside and the city’s homeless.
The government promised the Olympics would revitalize the Downtown Eastside, while critics claimed it would gentrify the neighbourhood. What impact have the Games had on the area?
I don’t take [the Downtown Eastside’s changes] from the Games, I take it more from what’s been done under the [province’s] housing strategy. And I look at the differences we’ve made.
The first thing we did was to stabilize the shelters so people weren’t being put out on the streets every morning. We then went into the market and started buying SROs. Some of that housing was awful, but we transformed it into supportive housing and the renovations, supports and 24-hour management [that were added] made a big difference. We [built] about 1,000 units [of social housing]. We have another 1,200 under construction and 1,200 are in process. We will have done well over 3,000 units in Vancouver, not counting the SROs, [by next year].
When I took the [housing] file, I thought, “I can’t evaluate this from anecdotal comments and I can’t evaluate it by numbers because the statistics were weak.” My anecdotal evidence is my own. I go down to the Downtown Eastside about once every two weeks and walk the area. There’s a lot less people I see on the street and I talk to a number of business owners who tell me that it’s 10 times better than it’s ever been.
Since 2002 the number of homeless in Vancouver has more than doubled. What role have the Olympics had on this increase?
I don’t think it has. Counts are always a mug's game as far as I’m concerned. I think you have to recognize when we put our housing strategy in place in 2005 I said, “We’re not building a housing strategy around bricks and mortar, we’re building it around people and we’ll put the services around the people to be successful.”
It’s fine to say that you created 2,000-3,000 units and found a couple thousand units for people to live in, but if you’re not helping them stay in that housing and live a life of value, then you’re just running this revolving door and you’ll never be successful.
We recognized we needed something for the more severely sick people who couldn’t function in supportive housing like an SRO, so we built the Burnaby Centre for people with mental health and addictions. Shortly, you’ll see an announcement on the opening of another building in Riverview [Hospital], which will be longer term housing for people coming from Burnaby.
The next two things will be an urgent care centre in Vancouver and a sobering centre in Surrey. So people, rather than go to the emergency room or jail, can be taken to an urgent care centre and be helped with their issues.
The low-barrier HEAT and Emergency Weather shelters have widely been seen as a success. But there are still more homeless on the streets than in shelter beds.
That’s another statement I don’t agree with. I monitor through my folks the beds that we have available, and at no time this winter have we been short beds that would turn somebody away. Now, the type of shelter someone might want to go in might have been a barrier. But the fact that there’s a bed or not isn’t the barrier.
But what will happen when the city’s seven low-barrier shelters run out of funding in April?
We found that those locations didn’t work well during the warmer weather and that kind of thing can really have a negative impact on your ability to reach your final goal. So what we’re trying to do between now and then is to find additional beds in the marketplace. It’s actually a good time: we’ll have the Olympics over with and we’ll have some vacancies.
Activists claim the Assistance to Shelter Act [which allows the police to take a homeless person to a shelter] will be used to sweep the homeless up during the Games. What is your response to this criticism?
All we’re trying to do is give [the police] a tool and those that make the criticisms haven’t read [the law], don’t want to read it, don’t want to discuss it and frankly are full of it.
When the person died on the streets of Vancouver [last winter], the media stuck microphones and cameras in my face and said, “You got to do something about this.” And now that I’m trying to do something about it, the same people don’t think I should.
I’m in a no-win situation, so at least a police officer should have a tool. So if someone is going to freeze to death they can take them to the door of a shelter. If they make the choice to stay outside there’s nothing we can do about that.
There will be intense interest and coverage of the Downtown Eastside during the Games. What impression do you think people will take home with them of the neighbourhood?
If they take the time to walk the neighbourhood and talk to people, I think they’ll walk away [with the impression that] this is a jurisdiction that has done something remarkable in the last number of years to deal with homelessness, mental health and addictions, and there’s some ideas we can take back to our communities that would work.
The challenge is that you’ll get someone who comes to town and they’ll find somebody in a doorway or taking drugs, take a picture and say this is the squalor, this is the open drug scene in Vancouver. They’ll go back home with blinders on and not recognize what we have.
We have 7,000 people [across the province] that have been connected with homes and supports. Of course we’ll never be happy until it’s all done, but we shouldn’t be ashamed. I’m pretty proud of what we’re accomplishing.
