Advocates concerned as Vancouver moves away from temporary housing model

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Lance Weinart moved into a small apartment in downtown Vancouver shortly after a new and unusual kind of housing project opened in November, 2018, giving him a home with his own kitchen and bathroom instead of shelters or streets.

He felt good there.

“You build community, you get to know people,” he said.

Now, Mr. Weinart has to move by the end of July because the building where he has lived for almost five years – a 98-unit temporary modular housing complex – is about to disappear.

Mr. Weinart’s home was in Larwill Place, the name given to the two temporary modular buildings put up at the back end of an EasyPark lot the City of Vancouver owns at Dunsmuir and Cambie – the lot now has to be emptied because construction is about to begin for the new Vancouver Art Gallery there.

Larwill Place is not being moved to another site, as many had expected would happen when Vancouver enthusiastically pushed to create hundreds of apartments using prefabricated units starting back in 2017. That enthusiasm was spurred by the new NDP government’s initiative to create a rapid response to homelessness, with $291-million dedicated to building 2,000 modular supportive-housing apartments.

But now, the city is quietly moving away from that temporary housing, which currently consists of 700 apartments on 12 sites. Those temporary homes created controversies in several communities when they were first introduced, but proved to have little impact on local neighbourhoods, while surveys of the temporary housing residents showed they had positive reactions.

There is no clear answer on where the 98 units from Larwill Place will go. Another 46 prefab units that had been at the Little Mountain social housing site for three years are now in storage. The same uncertainty exists for a temporary 39-studio-apartment project called Aneki Housing for Women on Powell Street, which is being redeveloped for a permanent social housing building.

“We are focused on permanent housing going forward. The long-term plan now is to, over time, replace them with permanent housing,” said Sandra Singh, the city’s manager of community services.

Advocates are outraged that the city is getting rid of any housing, at a time when there are still thousands of homeless people on shelters and streets in Vancouver.

“We have over 3,000 people who are in desperate, desperate need of housing. Until we get enough housing for every single homeless person, we should not be losing anything,” said former councillor and long-time poverty activist Jean Swanson at a recent protest over the closings.

She said that even though current residents of temporary homes are being offered places elsewhere, that doesn’t make up for the fact that housing overall is being lost.

Ms. Swanson was adamant the city has many sites it could use, from the parking lots it owns to land like the current vacant lots near Olympic Village.

But Ms. Singh said the city has contributed more than 30 pieces of land since 2018 to new permanent housing, thanks to a massive influx of money from the province and federal government.

“We have exhausted the sites available for this purpose. We’ve looked at everything. If we were going to relocate, we would have to purchase a site,” she said.

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The last site that was approved for a temporary housing project was at Clark and Vernon in October, 2020 – and is where Mr. Weinart has been offered a place. He’s not enthusiastic about it, saying the operators of that building have much stricter rules, including bans on guests after 10 p.m.

“It’s like they’re setting me up for failure,” he said.

Others have been offered housing at the new work-camp-type buildings currently going up at Main and Terminal, but those have no kitchens and only shared bathrooms, unlike what they had at Larwill Place.

Vancouver architect and developer Michael Geller, who has been a dedicated advocate for years of modular units as one part of a solution for homelessness, said it’s a loss for the city to have the existing buildings taken down and put in storage or shipped away.

He acknowledged that he has heard from city staff that the cost of moving the units has proven to be much more expensive than anyone originally thought.

In the city’s draft budget for 2023, there was $3-million set aside for moving the first of the temporary projects – 40 units at Main and Hastings that went up in 2017 and are expected to have to move by 2025. Another item in the draft budget proposed reserving $4-million for “site preparation costs” for a different temporary modular project.

BC Housing said the only project deconstructed so far, the 46 units at the Little Mountain site, which originally cost $7.4-million to buy and install, required another $2.9-million to deconstruct and remove.

But Mr. Geller believes the costs could be reduced if the temporary units were kept to one floor, as is happening at a project now being installed on Main Street, due to open this summer some time.

And he believes there are a lot of other potential sites besides just city land, like property that is awaiting development where owners could be given an incentive to allow the modular units to be placed there for a short time.

But the city’s reluctance to invest any more in temporary modular housing appears to be one more iteration of a long-term pattern when it comes to housing solutions.

Vancouver and other cities hunt for interim solutions when shelters are packed and permanent-housing supply seems to be arriving only at a slow drip. Cities consider options such as monitored tent encampments, housing built out of shipping containers, or tiny homes.

But bureaucrats and politicians come to see those once-lauded solutions as wasted money that could go to permanent housing.

Mr. Geller said that while there should be a focus on permanent housing, there also needs to be something in between shelters – which offer only the most minimal kind of housing – and new one-bedroom apartments.

But Ms. Singh said it doesn’t make sense to put up three storeys with 40 units on city sites, when they can get permanent projects with double that number of homes.

She said the modular units are likely going to be reused by BC Housing, but in communities that have land available and where it makes sense to have only three stories.

In the meantime, city land is being used to provide 2,500 social housing apartments, 750 supportive housing units, and 443 new shelter spaces.

The temporary units “came in at a time when we needed rapid action,” said Ms. Singh. “But we have so much housing in various stages of development now.”

And the temporary units won’t be disappearing all at once. BC Housing confirmed in an e-mail to the Globe and Mail that it is working with the city to extend leases for nine of the sites – for now.