MAKE STORYEUM A SHELTER Draft 24 August 2007
Why are people sleeping on the streets?
I am interested in seeing that more shelters are created in
The Downtown Eastside contains 2% of the land located in the City and 1% of the population. The City of
The 10-hotels the Province recently purchased are not additional housing. These hotels only guarantee that the rooms (SROs) presently occupied will not be lost to new development. In the DTES we can only hope to maintain housing as it is and ask for crumbs: shelters. Shelters are necessary as we have a zero vacancy rate and there is no place to put anyone. Shelters also prevent illnesses and deaths from happening by people living on the streets. It is disgraceful for a City as rich as
Y2007 stats for the street homeless range from 2,000 to 4,000. There are only 515 all-weather shelters in
To the crumbs end, I would like each of you to e-mail the mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca and ask that City owned STORYEUM, a 105,000 square foot vacant space located in Gastown, be used as a basic sleep-on-the-floor shelter for the street homeless. STORYEUM has been vacant since November 2006. A few years ago it was upgraded and it is now up to City standard for building and fire codes. STORYEUM could be used as a spacious 24-hour shelter/community center without costly supports. No one should be thrown out of a shelter at
There is great resistance to creating more shelters in the DTES. This resistance has existed for years. It is as if the City and the social providers are stuck in time: the status quo must change. Things are not like they were ten or twenty years ago. People were not sleeping on the streets in the numbers they are doing now. Point-in-fact; no agency is lobbying for additional shelters. And, to make it worse, the policy of the City is no more shelters. This reflects what is wanted by the service providers “experts” and advocates for housing in the DTES and not the “homeless.” The service providers want to forego shelters and wait until low income consumers can be placed directly into real affordable housing. Dream on…. The City is also dreaming as it wants to wait until the underlying problems of homelessness are solved (income and health, see City’s 2005 Homeless Action Plan). Although, the federal government has been downloading housing to municipalities for the past fifteen years, the City refuses to seriously acknowledge this and continues to say housing is a federal (and provincial) responsibility. The City will have to eventually accept responsibility for housing: this is where the homeless are.
The various reasons given for denying shelters to those on the streets are blatantly stupid. Each year the homeless population increases and the number of available low rental units decreases while emergency shelter units remain the same. We cannot wait until new self-contained rental housing is built or housing is found in existing buildings (BC Housing’s current take on this is to displace the working poor from their existing affordable rental units and force them to find alternate housing and replace them with renters who are in more dire need) and/or wait until the reasons for solving homelessness are fully implemented. In other words, unless you are a recovery alcoholic or drug addicted, physically of mentally disabled, or a fail senior citizen, you cannot get subsidized housing.
The City knows that one chronic street homeless person can easily cost the three levels of government $100,000 a year with policing, courts, prisons, legal aid, doctors, prescriptions, counseling, countless detox treatments, ambulance attendances, hospitalization visits, harm to family, mental health services, social welfare benefits, and loss of a human resource “the individual.”. This accounting model “cost benefit analysis” has been available for as long as I can remember (30 years). If a homeless person is housed, it saves money by lessening the drain on government services as the need to access these services are greatly reduced: a homeless person is not outside with pneumonia or having the police in his face. Therefore it would follow that shelters would also help lessen the drain on services. Not as much as a self-contained home; but enough to make shelters economically viable.
Money is not the issue for the lack of affordable housing. Lack of action by our politicians is. In Y2008 the Provincial government will be cutting income tax by $105 million per year even though no one or group had asked for it. This $105 million could have been budgeted for social housing. Write your MLA and tell him to reverse this tax cut. The Province could also increase the B.C. Property Acquisition Tax by 1% which would bring in revenues of $500 million a year which could be dedicated to housing. $$$ poblem solved. The current federal government’s plan is to “talk” and maybe provide tax incentives which historically lowers taxes for the rich and proportionately increases the share of taxes paid by the working middle class which is nothing more than doublespeak.
It has been documented (Death of Social Housing by Connie Fogal) that no serious public housing will happen because of NAFTA restrictions. Since 1973 the federal government has been getting out of public housing. This coincides with its signing of NAFTA. The end result of NAFTA is that everything is to be privately owned and that means the end of social housing. Unless, the invisible hand of commerce lowers property values, I see no affordable housing that will be built in the future. Shelters are going to become a part of our lives and insist that all new shelters be well designed as more and more people will have need to use them..
I sometimes think that society wants to punish the homeless for being destitute. It is as if to say that unless the homeless behave according to certain standards, they will be ostracized from the mainstream of society and they will remain homeless: the affluent members of our society seem to enjoy the suffering of others. Are we going to continue to punish the homeless no matter what the cost.
If we flood City Hall with e-mails, letters and phone calls, the mayor and council will have no choice but to change its policy and create more shelters. I was told that 100,000 contacts (e-mails/telephones/letters) would guarantee a shift in policy. So, please be part of the solution and participate.
Yes, City Hall listens to the input of angry citizens.
Remember to e-mail, mail or phone City Hall to MAKE STORYEUM A SHELTER.
Thank you.
604-873-7621 (direct line to Sam)
604-873-7191 (main line)
City Hall,
Vancouver, B.C.
V5Y 1V4
The residents of
I invite your comments….
Audrey Laferriere
MAKE STORYEUM A SHELTER
V6A 1N1
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