Western Canada: In B.C., not all supportive housing is created equal

When police and civic workers moved to clear out the tents occupying the sidewalk along East Hastings Street in Vancouver last month, some of the people who were displaced were forced to consider their options.

Wade Woodward, who has been homeless for 30 years, packed up his belongings. He said he would probably decamp to a back alley. The offer of a unit in a single-room occupancy (SRO) building held no appeal. The bedbugs and cockroaches, he said, “eat you alive.”

As Frances Bula reports this weekend, not all supportive housing is created equal.

The three-pronged housing, overdose and COVID-19 crises have pushed the NDP government – and the Liberals before them – to build, renovate or acquire as much housing as possible to ensure British Columbia’s most vulnerable citizens are not sleeping on the streets. There is never enough of it.

A scan of the supportive housing inventory in Vancouver, according to an official list published by BC Housing in June, 2022, shows there were 2,570 supportive apartments available in newer buildings and new temporary modular housing, with only 1,610 in older buildings.

The list does not include purchases of various hotels in the past two years on Kingsway, Granville and East Hastings during the pandemic, nor does it count the purchase earlier this month of the Chalmers Lodge apartment building on West 12th.

It also doesn’t include privately run SROs. The Globe and Mail highlighted the deplorable conditions in some of those buildings in an investigation into the properties owned by the Sahota family. The facilities were so structurally unsound the City of Vancouver was forced to close two of them: first the Balmoral and then the Regent. The city announced plans to expropriate the buildings.

The housing stock funded by BC Housing includes shabby, unrenovated hotels and motels. Non-profit housing operators have been given only minimal staffing to keep the buildings secure and help existing tenants get the assistance they need to stabilize.

There are also new buildings suffering from the same lack of support, set up at a time when the province was focused on getting the unit count up to prove it was doing something about homelessness.

Then there are new buildings where BC Housing has agreed to provide ample staff members to help residents, who may have been homeless for 20 years or more, adjust to being sheltered. Employees also mediate conflicts between residents, monitor rooms for bugs, fires and weapons, and make tough choices when someone must be evicted.

Frances interviewed Steve Davidson, who was living on the streets in Nanaimo five years ago when the encampment he called home was cleared. Mr. Davidson was deemed too functional to qualify for supportive housing. So he spent the next five years in decline, until he did qualify. He wound up in a facility called Nikao.

Nikao is a cluster of construction trailers in an industrial-area parking lot surrounded by a chain link fence. Residents can’t have guests, and can have only one duffel bag each of belongings. There are weekly room checks.

But Mr. Davidson stays, because he appreciates the weekly doctor visits, the on-site meals and the space for his few things.

Mr. Davidson also knows that staying in the facility – which to some may appear more like a minimum-security jail – could help him climb the housing ladder. His hope is that he will qualify for permanent housing in another facility. Uplands Walk is run by the same non-profit as Nikao. It has large studio apartments with kitchens, common rooms, community meals and attractive landscaping.

“This isn’t the end of my story,” Mr. Davidson said.

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.