With Vancouvers mayoral candidates sparring over dozens of protestors voluntarily occupying a downtown tent city, housing advocates are hoping some of the election spotlight may still shine on the thousands living on streets and in shelters out of necessity.
An eight-person panel consisting of housing advocates, writers and academics gathered at SFUs Goldcorp Centre for the Arts last week to call attention to the work facing the next city council in alleviating the citys homelessness and housing crisis.
Despite a dramatic reduction in street homelessness in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»in the last three years, serious and systemic issues still prevent people from accessing affordable and secure housing in Vancouver, said Doug King, a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, which co-sponsored the event. Meanwhile rising market rents and cost of living in the city are putting more and more people at risk of homelessness.
With the civic election looming and winter around the corner, King said the time is right for a renewed discussion on the topic. Housing should be front of our minds this time of year because life is about to get a lot more difficult for people sleeping on the streets.
Both Vision Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»and the NPA have taken credit for an 82-per-cent decline in street homelessness revealed in preliminary results from the Metro Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»homelessness count held in March. But that number paints a skewed picture of the overall situation when considered in isolation, cautioned Kingsley Okyere, homelessness secretariat with Metro Vancouver.
Overall homelessness in Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»has declined by only 1.3 per cent since 2008, he said, noting the decline in street homelessness is offset by a 91-per-cent increase in sheltered homeless.
Additionally, rates of homelessness among aboriginals remain disproportionately high, accounting for 27 per cent of the homeless population while comprising a mere three per cent of the general public. Homeless youth also increased by 29 per cent between 2008 and 2011. And food security remains an issue. Preliminary estimates from the count showed 35 per cent of those surveyed hadnt had a meal in at least two days.
Though not included in the count, Okyere noted Metro Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»discovered a growing number of people at risk of homelessness, with the working poor increasingly accessing services such as food banks.
A lot of people are living paycheque to paycheque and [accessing] the food bank becomes a way to make ends meet, he said in an interview after the meeting. Its an indication of very great risk; how else can you interpret that?
Michael Shapcott, director of housing and innovation with the Wellesley Institute, a Toronto-based urban health think tank, said homelessness has been on the rise in Canadian cities for the past 20 years due in large part to cuts to federal housing programs. But that doesnt let cities off the hook. With municipalities increasingly shouldering the rising cost social and economic cost of homelessness, local governments need to take a hard look at conditions that create homelessness in the first place.
We have a tendency to want to pick apart the lives of the homeless to pathologize it. But rather, we need to look at our cities, what is it about them that makes it so prohibitively expensive? said Shapcott, speaking via Skype.
Cities do have some tools at their disposal, he argued. Inclusionary zoning which requires new developments to include a certain amount of affordable housing are standard practice in the United States. And rigorous enforcement of standards of maintenance bylaws requiring landlords to maintain rental housing can help safeguard rental stock as well as prevent tragedies like the fire that killed three men in a Pandora Street rooming house last December.
Finally, cities need to band together to pressure the federal government to invest in a national housing strategy, Shapcott concluded, noting homelessness is a much simpler problem than the government makes it out to be.
Theres this notion that homelessness is a mysterious plague thats washed over us, but it could be solved with one simple thing: a home.
So, how do Gregor Robertson and Suzanne Anton plan to address homelessness and housing? Find out as the two face off in a mayoral candidate debate hosted by End Homelessness Now Nov. 7, 7pm at St. Andrews-Wesley United Church (1012 Nelson).
