Opinion: Vancouver needs more supportive housing, not less | Daily Hive

The 2012-built Dunbar Apartments building at the southeast corner of the intersection of Dunbar Street and West 16th Avenue in the Vancouver Westside is considered a model supportive housing project, referenced by Mayor Ken Sim. (Google Maps)

Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Peter Waldkirch, who is a director with Abundant Housing Vancouver.

Mayor Ken Sim and his party, ABC Vancouver, have a new policy for addressing the city’s homelessness crisis: stop investing in new housing for homeless people. This, unfortunately, will only make things worse. The solution to homelessness is housing.

“Supportive housing” describes subsidized housing with on-site support. It helps many of the most vulnerable members of our community, including seniors who need medical support, persons with disabilities, and people with mental health or substance abuse problems.

Supportive housing is the last line of defence in keeping people off the streets, and the first step in helping them them get off them.

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Homelessness is not isolated to one part of the city, like the Downtown Eastside (DTES); Vancouver’s housing system is connected. A major cause of homelessness is Vancouver’s severe shortage of housing. When housing is scarce, rents go up, and when rents go up more people crowd into homes. That means people don’t have any extra space to help keep their friends and family from falling off the edge of our housing crunch.

A major reason homes are scarce in Vancouver is because housing is illegal to build where it’s needed at the scale it’s needed: apartments are illegal to build on about 80 per cent of the city’s residential land. Homelessness in the DTES is connected to the ban on apartments in places like Shaughnessy, West Point Grey, and Dunbar.

The city could be doing a lot more to legalize housing. So it was disappointing to hear Sim say that Vancouver already has too much supportive housing. His argument is that the city of Vancouver has 77 per cent of Metro Vancouver’s supportive housing, but 25 per cent of the region’s population; therefore, he says, we should not build any additional supportive housing. To accomplish that, he’s passed a motion in City Council requiring Vancouver to not make new investments in “homelessness response supportive housing development”.

This sort of thinking is misguided for two big reasons.

First, that’s just not how cities work. Cities are basically networks between people and jobs. Those networks naturally start at a core and then spread out. So, yes, Vancouver has a disproportionate share of the region’s social services — but we also have a disproportionate share of the region’s jobs. Not to mention a disproportionate share of the region’s public transit, higher education, arts, culture, restaurants, and more.

That’s what makes Vancouver great! We’re a city, which creates all sorts of opportunities for not only the residents of the city itself, but for the whole region. This synergy is the magic that cities create, and it’s something we should embrace, not try to stifle.

Should Vancouver turn down new public transit funding, because Vancouver already has a disproportionate amount? If someone wants to open up a business in Vancouver, should City Hall tell them to go away because we already have too many jobs?

Vancouver isn’t just another suburb in a region of suburbs. It’s the urban core of a large city. Metro Vancouver isn’t, and can’t be, a pea soup of evenly distributed jobs, services, and public transit. That’s just not how cities work.

And this leads us to the second reason a freeze on supportive housing is wrong: building less supportive housing in Vancouver does not mean more will be built somewhere else.

It’s true that we need a regional approach to many of the challenges we’re facing, including homelessness. And it’s true that we need more supportive housing across the region, in every municipality. But getting there will take leadership, and announcing that Vancouver wants to do less to solve our regional challenges is counter-productive.

Not only will a supportive housing freeze in Vancouver not get more supportive housing built elsewhere, but it will encourage other municipalities to start playing the same game. Richmond’s Mayor, Malcolm Brodie, recently cancelled a supportive housing proposal at the northeast corner of the intersection of Cambie Road and Sexsmith Road.

If we go down this road, we’ll end up with all the municipalities in Metro Vancouver pointing the finger at each other while nothing gets done.

Vancouver needs a lot more housing, of all sorts, across the city. That includes social and supportive housing. Vancouver should embrace the reality that, as the region’s core city, it’s long past time we end the apartment ban and legalize housing in every neighbourhood. We need to be lowering barriers to housing, not raising them. And we need real solutions, not finger-pointing.

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