People walk along Hastings Street, in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood on April 5.Kayla Isomura/the Globe and Mail
A proposal to significantly change Vancouver’s strategies for its troubled Downtown Eastside to create more housing, more small businesses that serve residents there, and a more responsive system of medical care was pitched Wednesday by a councillor from the ruling ABC Vancouver party.
The motion from Rebecca Bligh, which some non-profit community groups are calling “potentially transformational,” lays out a comprehensive approach akin to the Vancouver Agreement in place from 2000 to 2010, when all three levels of government worked to improve the area.
This motion goes beyond that in many ways. It proposes re-examining the 10-year-old plan for the area, a controversial one that restricted development in a wide swath of the neighbourhood to buildings with a 60/40 mix of social housing and market rental.
As well, Ms. Bligh’s motion emphasizes the need to make space in any new buildings in the Downtown Eastside for viable small businesses where residents can get jobs or access low-cost food and goods. And it suggests that new types of medical support are needed, which are less bureaucratic and more able to serve people directly in the hotels and social housing where they are living.
Finally, the second-term councillor suggests that Vancouver adopt a “right of first refusal” for building sales anywhere in the city that would be good sites for social and supportive housing – an approach that Montreal instituted in 2020.
“People in the Downtown Eastside are more unwell than ever. This is to enable more social and supportive housing but to do that in a way that is … more holistic,” said Ms. Bligh. “The goal is to create communities where people can live, work and shop.
She emphasized that, although her motion asks for staff to look at coming up with a different mix of allowed housing from the current Downtown Eastside plan, it’s not about allowing in private developers.
Instead, it’s to find the right balance of types of rental housing.
She pointed out that only two buildings that fit the current zoning have been constructed in the last decade, leaving low-income people in the area still heavily dependent on the 4,000 remaining rooms in century-old, barely functional residential hotels.
“It’s not to build a new Yaletown,” Ms. Bligh said, referring to a trendy Vancouver neighbourhood. “It’s to bring out the best of the Downtown Eastside.”
Her initiative is a surprisingly ambitious one for an individual councillor – rather than the mayor or a specialized task force – to bring forward. It will be debated at council next Wednesday.
In an unusual turn for Vancouver’s often polarized politics in the Downtown Eastside, her initiative is getting support from some non-profit groups and it generated a lot of positive response elsewhere after it was made public.
“I kind of feel some hope with this,” said Wendy Pedersen, a long-time Downtown Eastside activist who founded and runs SRO Collaborative, an organization focused on improving conditions for tenants in the residential hotels.
Ms. Pedersen is still adamantly opposed to allowing any market condos to be built in the area but said it might be worth going back to the drawing board to figure out what kind of break-even formula would get more social housing built.
She’s more excited by some other aspects of Ms. Bligh’s efforts: the proposal to get the right to make the first offer on properties that would make good social-housing sites and the efforts to get more money for renovating existing older hotels in the meantime.
Ms. Pedersen said she is seeing a new spirit of collaboration among the political leaders in the three levels of government that are involved in the Downtown Eastside.
And she’s hoping that Ms. Bligh’s motion will be able to leverage that collaboration while it exists, before any elections that bring in big changes.
“The three levels we have now are not going to last long. This is the last opportunity to get a big ambitious plan for the Downtown Eastside.”
The interim CEO of the Atira Women’s Resource Society, Catherine Roome, is equally enthusiastic about the opening Ms. Bligh’s motion creates.
“Putting people in 110-year-old buildings is dangerous and it’s gotten more insecure. Something has to change.”
That’s why she supports changing the current plan, with its 60/40 ratio, to find something that will actually spur development of new social and supportive housing.
And she’s also encouraged by Ms. Bligh’s focus on creating space for small businesses and needed services in the area.
That’s a point that is echoed by the director of an organization that manages commercial spaces in social-housing buildings, with a goal of creating a mix of private businesses that fit in the community and social enterprises that provide local residents with places to get inexpensive clothing or household goods.
Steven Johnston, executive director of the Community Impact Real Estate Society, said that in previous eras, there was a focus exclusively on housing, which didn’t create the healthiest neighbourhood.
“When we only focus on housing affordability, we’re doing a disservice to the community. Housing alone won’t provide everything someone needs for a meaningful life.”
He endorsed the idea that Ms. Bligh’s plan, which he called “potentially transformational,” become essentially a Vancouver Agreement 2.0.
“It’s high time. I just hope ABC is up to the task of making this happen and working with community partners.”