What will happen to Vancouver's unhoused population during FIFA?
Vancouver has finally answered the question of how it plans to support the unhoused population during the FIFA World Cup, and the answer is that it won’t change much.
With the FIFA World Cup now just weeks away, the City of Vancouver has officially published its Human Rights Action Plan, outlining some of its intended actions to support the unhoused population during the event period from June 11 to July 19.
FIFA required all World Cup host cities to create and implement a Human Rights Action Plan. Vancouver first released its draft version on Feb. 19, 2026, and published the final version today.
“While Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and the Downtown South are outside of the FWC26 [FIFA World Cup 2026] venue areas, we recognize that there is significant concern across the neighbourhoods about the impacts of activations on people in these neighbourhoods without housing or who are precariously housed due to the stadium’s downtown proximity,” reads the report.
Pete Fry, a Green Party councillor, had previously introduced a motion to City Council that called for stronger protections for unhoused and precariously housed people.
On each match day, there will be a two-kilometre controlled area (also known as “the bubble zone”) around BC Place for security and crowd control.
“We want to ensure that we are appropriately resourcing alternative spaces for folks to go, so we’re not just seeing them pushed out of the bubble zone and into another zone or into an unsafe situation,” Fry said in an interview with Daily Hive Urbanized at the time.
While Fry’s motion was ultimately defeated in April, he told Daily Hive Urbanized that “a lot of the concepts have been sort of captured and inserted into this final plan.”
He is reassured to see that this plan has improved monitoring and reporting, added sex worker safety as an area to track, and includes the addition of daytime shelters for folks to watch the game.
Is there a plan for unhoused people?
But Fry said the plan is more of “an overarching values plan, as opposed to a real action plan.”
“There’s probably a lot more decisive actions that could have been incorporated in this,” he said. “It doesn’t really articulate what we are actually expecting to happen with folks who are unhoused and on the street? And how are we going to, in the event that there is an impact on them, where did they go? What does that look like?”
The plan does include the daytime shelter spaces, with funding provided to five City-run locations in the Downtown Eastside and Downtown South on match days, intended to “provide respite space for people experiencing homelessness and housing precarity to watch the matches.”
These locations are the Carnegie Community Centre, Balmoral Hotel site outdoor activation, Oppenheimer Park Fieldhouse, The Gathering Place Community Centre, and the Evelyne Saller Centre.
Further, the plan states that people experiencing unsheltered homelessness will continue to be allowed to erect temporary shelter overnight in parks, and that the City will maintain its services to people experiencing homelessness and housing precarity.
However, it makes one interesting note.
“It is important to be transparent that the City’s daily public realm management and by-law compliance work will continue across the city to ensure that parks remain usable by the whole community during the daytime and sidewalks and streets remain safe, clean, and accessible.”
The action plan also states that the City’s role is to support B.C. in providing support for people who are unhoused or experiencing housing precarity.
“It’s not a surprise that the City has voided any kind of commitments to housing unhoused people, because that is ultimately the purview of the provincial government, and so there’s even generally a reluctance to open daytime shelters on the City’s dime, because notionally that is the responsibility of BC Housing,” said Fry.
However, he said he thinks that this is an area “that we have to deal with as a city,” and that he had hoped for a more robust plan. Fry had put forward a motion to City Council, calling for rapid shelters to address homelessness in advance of the World Cup.
“There was no interest at all from this council to support a plan like that,” he said. “So, I’m not surprised to see that that didn’t make the cut, as far as this revised rights action plan.”