Mayor Ken Sim says he’ll make a motion for pausing supportive housing units in Vancouver until there is an increased supply across the region.
Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim wants to stop the construction of new supportive housing units in the city until more is built elsewhere in the region.
Sim said Thursday that Vancouver currently houses 77 per cent of the region’s supportive housing, despite comprising only 25 per cent of the area’s population. He said he will bring a motion to city council to pause the new supportive housing units construction.
Sim also proposed updating Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside area plan to encourage a mix of housing, businesses and services.
“We need to rethink hyper-concentration of services in the Downtown Eastside. For too long, multiple levels of government have enabled and encouraged the concentration of supportive housing, shelter spaces and dozens of social service, non-profit organizations in this small, four-square-kilometre neighbourhood,” he said.
He described the DTES as becoming “the epicentre of intersecting crises: mental health, poverty and homelessness, not just for Vancouver, but the entire region and the province … This poverty industrial complex has not only blocked local businesses from thriving, but has also created conditions that degrade the health and well-being of our most vulnerable community members.”
Supportive housing is affordable housing that provides a range of on-site supports to residents, such as life-skills training and connections to off-site services such as primary health care, mental-health or substance-use services, according to the city. Its website says that since 2019 about 1,500 social and supportive homes have opened and there are about 1,700 units currently under construction.
Sim also said the city will collaborate with the Vancouver police to launch a citywide crackdown on organized crime and gangs operating in the DTES. The initiative will aim to dismantle criminal networks that exploit vulnerable residents and undermine community safety, he said.
Jean Swanson, a longtime anti-poverty activist and former Vancouver councillor, said she believes other parts of Metro Vancouver should build more supportive housing. But she is skeptical that Vancouver halting supportive housing will spur other municipalities to build more.
“The question is, will Burnaby say: ‘Oh, Vancouver, lovely. Give me all your homeless people.’ Will Burnaby say that? Will New West say that?” Swanson said. “People who are homeless in Vancouver need housing.”
Swanson, who wasn’t at the forum, said the timing of Sim’s announcement could be linked to Vancouver’s upcoming byelection, which the city confirmed last week will be held on April 5. Sim’s ABC Vancouver party is expected to run candidates for one or both of the two council seats up for grabs.
“This is a terrible thing for the mayor to announce,” Swanson said. “It’s just cruel. This whole idea that homelessness is an issue of safety, instead of an issue of human rights — and not the safety of the homeless people, but the safety of other people — it just drives me crazy.”
ABC Vancouver Coun. Rebecca Bligh, who has known Sim for decades and ran alongside him with the NPA in 2018 and with ABC in 2022, and introduced a motion last year directing council to explore options to update the zoning in the DTES, said she was “taken aback” and “confused” by the mayor’s announcement.
“I agree with the broader context of a better vision for the Downtown Eastside that was outlined in (Sim’s) speech,” said Bligh, who attended the forum. “But we need to be very clear about what this means, no net new supportive housing units. What this is saying is that we want to reject money from the province to get people in to housing across the city …
“It makes no sense. I don’t want the province to get the impression that the City of Vancouver is not a good partner in solving our homelessness crisis.”
She said that while “other communities need to do more to pull their weight so that anyone struggling in their home communities can access services and housing,” if the provincial government invests money in another community in B.C. or our region, “that’s going to be to house the homeless people that are already in that community. They’re not going to come to Vancouver and pick up homeless people from Vancouver and drive them to that community.
“Our crisis is only going to worsen.”
Sam Sullivan, former B.C. cabinet minister and mayor of Vancouver and founder of the Global Civic Policy Society, said he was supportive of distributing the concentration of supportive housing away from the DTES.
He told a panel he recently spoke to housing and drug addiction experts in Switzerland who pointed to a model of one group spreading 80 housing units for people in addiction recovery throughout 80 buildings.
“In every building, they have one suite and they have people in those buildings who know about them and look out for them,” said Sullivan.