Squeezed middle class has a right to ask where government?s priorities lie
Pete McMartin
The Vancouver Sun
In the circular world of the Downtown Eastside’s social welfare industry, where what goes around comes around again and again and again, last month’s little drama felt familiar:
Protesters — in this case organized by VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users — demanded a city-owned lot at 58 West Hastings be converted to social housing. Note, they did not ask for a mix of market and non-market units, such as in the Woodward’s building. Nor did they ask a component of market units be built to help subsidize capitalization costs. They demanded that the development be all social housing.
The math? The city estimates the operating cost of the most modest social housing at about $660 a month, well above the province’s income assistance allocation of $375 per month for rent. To make up the difference, there would need to be — on top of writing off the city’s multi-million dollar property, plus the building costs — a government rent subsidy of at least $285 per month per unit, in perpetuity.
Four or five dozen tent campers had been occupying the lot, and their protest culminated on Aug. 2 when Mayor Gregor Robertson met with them, heard their demands and obligingly signed his name to the following statement scrawled on a leaf of easel board paper:
“We commit to 100% welfare/pension rate community-controlled social housing at 58 West Hastings, working with the community to develop a rezoning application to proceed to council by the end of June 2017.”
It didn’t look so much like the culmination of city policy as a capitulation. The mayor, as he has been known to do when it comes to the homeless, went all in. It was Robertson who in 2008 pledged — prematurely, rashly, stupidly, pick your adverb — to rid the city of street homelessness. Instead, the numbers have grown. So was the mayor’s signing off the result of months of carefully considered staff recommendations, or did he do so to burnish his public image on an issue that has made him look like a chump?
Some context: At the moment, there are 25,629 units of government-subsidized non-market housing in the city of Vancouver proper. That’s nine per cent of the city’s entire housing stock, a not insubstantial percentage.
To break that down, 15,250 0f those units are for people who live independently but have incomes too low to pay market rents. Another 4,599 are supportive housing units for people who need support for a range of conditions like cognitive impairment, addiction or physical disability. The remaining 5,780 units are co-op units with below-market rent.
The province, money-wise, does the heavy lifting. Of those 25,629 units, the city operates only 851 of them, some of which are owned outright by the city, some of which are owned by the province but for which the city acts as agent. The city’s annual budget isn’t onerous: According to Kathleen Llewellyn-Thomas, the city’s new general manager for community services, the operating cost is $1.46 million a year (though that figure is nowhere near representative of land costs and overall cost to all taxpayers). The city’s policies toward the homeless are also, I’d argue, the most compassionate, especially compared to that of most of Metro Vancouver’s suburbs.
Whether it’s the wisest and most sustainable is another question. Projections are the number of social housing units will continue to grow. More than a quarter of them, especially that of the supportive kind, have been centralized in the Downtown Eastside to disastrous effect — ghettoizing the hard-to-house, corroding the livability of adjacent neighbourhoods like Chinatown, anchoring vastly expensive and redundant social welfare groups that serve the resident population. Some 260 organizations in the DTES receive $360 million in tax dollars a year.
But in a city where middle-income earners cannot only not buy a home but can’t even find affordable rentals, how long before the taxpaying public’s patience runs dry and they begin to wonder, not out of greed but need, where their help is, where their government’s priorities lie?
And if the numbers of homeless continue to grow, as they will, does Vancouver have a limit on the amount of social housing it will host within its borders? Will it continue to bear the burden of social housing in Metro Vancouver while its own middle-class citizens can’t find housing, period?
“Well, that’s a question that we’re asking ourselves as we take a look at our housing and homelessness strategy,” Llewellyn-Thomas said. “We’re launching a reset of it all (this fall). These are really important questions, and we’re going to be engaging the public. I know it sounds like I’m not answering your questions, and in a way I’m not. We don’t know the answers to them.”
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