More than a year after Vancouver city councillors voted for a plan to “uplift” the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside, city staff delivered an update on the work.
The 42-page report outlined a long-term plan to replace the neighbourhood’s aging and in many cases dilapidated single-room accommodation units with self-contained units.
In the short term, it calls on neighbouring municipalities to do more to house the homeless and provide mental health supports, citing modelling that suggests three-quarters of new supportive housing should be built outside the city to balance regional responsibility.
“It’s really hard to actually improve your health outcomes and your journey when the housing around you is crumbling, so we are committed to improving that housing stock,” Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim told Global News.
Sim’s ABC Vancouver, however, faced controversy this week when a confidential memo from October revealing more of the proposed blueprint for the neighbourhood was leaked.
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That document included the idea of relocating some Indigenous residents to their home nations.
“These are draft documents, they are working copies,” Sim said in response. “Sometimes the language isn’t super clear so we just make it more clear.”
Coun. Rebecca Bligh, who now sits as an independent after being ejected from ABC over policy disagreements, said the idea of a “secret plan behind closed doors” was problematic.
“Any notion of moving people out, particularly Indigenous residents, who have been living in the Downtown Eastside maybe all of their lives, to suggest that they need to be relocated to reserves or origin homes really is out of touch,” she said.
“It’s offensive to many people.”
Harm reduction expert Guy Felicella, who spent years in the Downtown Eastside before his recovery, said many people overlook the tight community in the neighbourhood because of its bad reputation.
“We can’t just uproot them from that community and put them in another community, it will cause more trauma,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people that are in the Downtown Eastside that cannot go back to what they’ve endured, whether that was trauma, abuse, you know, they have those significant challenges,” he added.
Felicella said that while there are some supportive housing facilities in the area with “management issues,” the vast majority in the Downtown Eastside are doing a “great job.”
According to B.C. Housing, 80 per cent of the region’s supportive housing are currently in the City of Vancouver.
Sim has now proposed freezing net new supportive housing in the city as it works to refurbish the existing stock.
He denied the plan is to gentrify the neighbourhood.
“Our move is to make sure we have vibrant neighbourhoods across Vancouver,” Sim said.
“And to have a vibrant neighbourhood you need a collection of different groups and healthy businesses and diversity actually makes it stronger.”
