Most people have heard about Pivot Legal Society's excellent new report Cracks in the Foundation, warning of dire consequences if Vancouver City Council continues to allow the rapid decline of single room occupancy (SRO) rooms in downtown hotels.
Comparing rates of rising homelessness over the past few years and extrapolating them over the next few years as 2010 approaches, Pivot warns that if no new low cost housing is built, Vancouver's homeless population will rise about two-and-a-half times by 2010, to about 3,200 people. Pivot's figures are conservative because this figure does not take into account the continued closing of SRO hotels and the predicted large influx of immigrants to Vancouver.
Pivot's urgent appeal for action adopts the rhetoric of self-interest, which indeed might best motivate the politicians. Mayor Sam Sullivan’s rhetorical question, "When the world arrives in Vancouver in 2010, what kind of city will they find?" appears a number of times throughout the report. The report adopts the favoured corporate language of “disorder” in the streets, in its appeal. The report hammers home figures that claim that not dealing with homelessness costs the public more than dealing with homelessness. Citing government figures, the report claims that it costs the public "up to $40,000 per year to provide services to a homeless person," but about $22,000 to $28,000 to provide supportive housing to the homeless.
What I find most valuable about the report is its documentation of the role of various government agencies in the housing crisis downtown. From the City not enforcing by-laws, to tenants not getting police protection from landlords, to the provincial government gutting our Residential Tenancy Offices (which enforce the act protecting tenants—the report includes a Kafkaesque "flow chart" of the absurdly complicated RTO arbitration process), and especially the active involvement of various government departments in the closure of five different SROs, our governments are not simply silent or quietly complicit in this assault on the city's poorest tenants, they are the instigators of the assault (except in one case).
To quickly review only the most dramatic problem—the permanent, pending or temporary closure of five SROs—the reports findings are these: First, on September 15, 2005, the Vancouver police and fire departments, acting on misinformation, raided the Pender Hotel, and 36 rooms were closed. In May 2006, a police sting operation resulted in the Lucky Lodge (63 rooms) having to go back to the city's Business License Panel to seek their license renewal. In the meantime, the provincial income assistance branch refused to forward any welfare cheques to the hotel to pay for the tenants' rent.
Third, on July 19, 2006, Vancouver Coastal Health effectively closed Powell Rooms. Subsequently, a number of organizations, including DERA, Pivot and others, worked to address some of the concerns and Powell Rooms was not closed. Fourth, on March 30, 2006, the Vancouver Fire Department forced the closure of Burns Block. The owner has subsequently put the building on the market for $2.5 million. Finally, in August 2006, the American Hotel illegally served eviction notices to their tenants citing renovations, yet as the report says, "neither level of government has intervened to protect the residents." According to the report, a representative of the hotel later told both the CBC and the Globe and Mail "that the owner's true intent was to bulldoze the building and build market housing."
As a first step, the report's authors recommend "the City and Vancouver Coastal Health should use their by-law enforcement power to improve and retain housing, rather than damage and remove [low cost] housing."
Homelessness is one of multiple housing crises
Homelessness is a motherhood issue. All politicians, regardless of their political stripe, shed crocodile tears over the subject. See, for example, Mayor Sam's comments on the Pivot report: "We need to do better. We need to do more for our most vulnerable people." This from the Mayor whose council, police force, fire department, building codes inspectors, and development permit branches, are all part of the problem.
There are multiple housing crises in Vancouver. Homelessness is only the most visible and dramatic of many interrelated housing problems. In addition to homelessness, there are evictions, a housing scarcity (especially at the middle and lower end of the market), overpriced rents, astronomical land values, and a new form of peonage caused by mortgage debt (which has only begun to rise), and these all hold Vancouverites in insecurity and economic bondage.
Homelessness is not a discrete problem. People don't wake up one day and become homeless, they go in stages towards homelessness: property redevelopment, rent hikes, housing scarcity, unemployment, inability to get basic income supports, a personal crisis: each is a signpost on the way to homelessness. It's more useful to see the large group of social problems caused by our irrational housing market as a continuum, with extortionate property values and rents at one end and homelessness at the other.
Rather than seeking to protect its citizens from this exploitation by the players in the housing market, each level of government—the municipal, the provincial and the federal—continue to work with the real-estate, development, and banking industries to deepen the problem.
The crude fact that stares at us all, but gets very little attention, is that the private developers are unable, for a wide variety of reasons—you can start with the astronomical cost of land—to provide housing at a reasonable cost relative to the stagnant and falling incomes of average Canadians.
Housing needs to be seen as part of the social welfare state, every bit as important as education and medical care, as a key to a full, healthy and secure life. Take housing out of private hands, it is too much a social necessity.
Infomercial disguised as journalism.
The Vancouver Sun obliged its corporate colleagues by recently publishing a front page '”exclusive” article that parroted the downtown business community's line on street poverty in Vancouver. Under the provocative title of "Beggars, drug dealers kill convention business," the reporter allowed business leaders to propagandize through the organ that "Aggressive panhandlers and drug dealers are damaging Vancouver's international reputation as a safe tourist destination." This infomercial masquerading as journalism cited nine sources, including Philip Barnes, general manager of the Hotel Vancouver, Rick Antonson, who runs Tourism Vancouver, Rae Ackerman, director of Vancouver Civic Theatres, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, and Mayor Sam Sullivan. It did not quote a single source that questioned the business community's line.
Furthermore, the issue was explicitly detached from the social context that gave rise to the jump in homelessness in Vancouver—huge rises in housing costs and inequality at the same time as government cutbacks in income assistance. "This is not about the poor, about people on the street because of mental illness or other legitimate reasons," the reporter quotes Barnes as saying. What else is homelessness and panhandling about? A career choice?
Absurdly, the reporter leaves unquestioned Barnes's assertion that “people have been reluctant to talk about panhandling.” He must have arrived in Vancouver very recently. Panhandling has been on the front page of The Sun for years. It has also made the annual report of Tourism Vancouver, the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, and the Vancouver Board of Trade since the late 1990s. This is what makes the whole thing so ridiculous, these are the same “usual suspects” that have been telling us panhandling is the scourge of our city for years (that and petty crime).
The piece lets Mayor Sullivan go on about "disorder" in our streets, and to promise a new approach to street crime, coming to a city street near you in the fall of 2006. I can hardly wait.
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