Hello everyone,
Thanks for taking the time to write to me this past week about sheltering in parks and related concerns. To ensure everyone gets a timely answer, I’m responding to you all at once as well as creating a blog post so others have this information as well. If you’d like to stay up to date on sheltering, housing and more, you’re welcome to sign up here.
As always, your emails cover a range of topics. I do my best to address them here in a clear and direct way. I use sub-headings, so you can skip to the section that is of interest to you.
Showers and Community Care Tent
There are those of you who wrote to me this week who think that the City should have left the care tent and the showers in Meegan/Beacon Hill Park intact. And there are others who think we waited too long to remove them. Last weekend, I wrote about this difficult situation. So as not to repeat myself, please take the time to read last week’s post here. I also shared last week that Council recognizes that people need access to showers, hygiene and other social services. That’s why we created an emergency $100,000 grant program to ensure that people’s basic needs are met until everyone moves inside by the end of March. On Thursday Council extended the grant deadline to Tuesday December 1st at 4:30pm. You can find out more here.
Access to Housing
A mother wrote this week letting me know that her son is currently living in Meegan/Beacon Hill Park and asked how he can get housing. Anyone who knows someone living in Meegan/Beacon Hill Park or any other park in the city, please let them know the way to get housing is to fill out a BC Housing application. There are outreach workers in the parks every day connecting people with services but most importantly, making sure that everyone living outside has filled out a housing application so that no one is left behind. Flag down a worker. Or go to one of the weekly circles that are held at Meegan/Beacon Hill Park and Central Park.
Access to housing is facilitated by the Coordinated Assessment and Access (CAA) process run by BC Housing, Island Health and the CRD. As vacancies become available, the CAA meets and decides who is the best fit for which housing opportunity based on the needs people living outdoors or in shelters have identified in their applications. There are many people who have been living in 24/7 shelters like My Place or Rock Bay Landing for years. As part of the “positive flow” process from parks to shelter to supportive housing to market housing, some of the people living in My Place, Rock Bay and other shelters will be moving into permanent housing, freeing up these transitional housing spaces for people who are living outside.
Some of you have asked about people coming from outside of our region to get housing, as, for example, the temperatures in Winnipeg begin to drop. While we can’t – and wouldn’t want to – limit people’s constitutional rights of freedom of movement, we have made very clear that our intentional focus between now and the end of March is to take care of people who are currently here. The CAA process is prioritizing people who have been homeless for a long period of time and/or who are vulnerable, and/or who have been living long-term in local shelters. We are also prioritizing Indigenous people who make up 35% of the population of people who are homeless in our region, even though they only make up 3-4% of the general population.
I also received a few angry emails this week from people who are simply tired of having people living in parks. Someone wrote that we should buy one way bus tickets and send people home. This is precisely the issue: in every major city across this country there are people living outside in parks who have no home. I understand everyone’s frustration and anger. I’m frustrated too. We should all be frustrated that in a country as prosperous as Canada, some people are left to live outside in the middle of a global health pandemic when we’re told over and over that the best prevention is to stay at home.
Central Park
Some of you have written this past week about the new fencing in Central Park: Why is it there? How long will the fences be up? What does this mean for people who are sheltering in the park and for others in the neighbourhood?
Staff closed the sports fields in Central Park for maintenance to get them ready for community recreation and play as part of the scheduled re-opening of the Crystal Pool and Fitness Centre in 2021. Sports fields are bookable by the community and we need time to get them ready for community use. As we have all along during the pandemic, we’re working to balance the needs of those sheltering with the needs of others for outdoor recreation.
It will take several months to remediate the sports fields so they can be used for community recreation and play next spring; the fences will remain in place for that time. Sports fields are already designated as no-shelter areas by the Parks Regulation Bylaw. While 24/7 camping is in place until the end of March, Council created a new four-metre setback around playing fields to keep them clear for recreational activities and maintenance.
New signage has recently been added to parks where sheltering is permitted, including Central Park, to remind everyone of the rules and where sheltering is allowed. Bylaw officers continue to work closely with people sheltering in parks to remind them of the areas they are allowed to shelter in, and make them aware of services available in the community.
Your Ideas
Some of you have written this week to share your ideas; thanks for doing that. One of you suggested that the Province call in the military to set up barracks in Beacon Hill Park as they did during World War One. Someone else suggested that there are probably hundreds of thousands of travel trailers and older motor homes not in use and of little value and that “this form of housing would be a huge improvement to people with just a tarp over them…imagine heated space with no wind and rain!” Someone else suggested setting up a tiny home village.
My hope is, that the City working together with the Capital Regional District (they hold the purse strings for the federal Reaching Home funding), the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, and shelter organizers we’ll be able to create temporary solutions for people over the winter that are better than living in tents. If this sounds vague, it’s because all the details are still being worked out. I’ll share more when I can. In the meantime, keep your good suggestions coming our way; mayor@victoria.ca is my direct line.
About Everything Else and Gratitude
Last week near the end of the email, I talked about the “everything else” we are working on in addition to ending 24/7 sheltering in parks and getting people inside by the end of March 2021. I thought that each week I’d feature a sample of that work. And, since we’re in the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, I thought I’d start with the work we’re doing on economic recovery and creating an economy for the future.
Victoria 3.0 – Recovery Reinvention Resilience – 2020-2041 is a long-term plan and vision for a sustainable, influential city that will build a strong innovation ecosystem and create a strong and resilient economy now and for the future. The priorities are to support our small businesses through recovery and also to build a more diverse and inclusive economy so that we will be able to withstand future economic shocks better than we have this one. It’s a really exciting plan and if you’d like some holiday reading to learn more about our wonderful city and its future, you can download the PDF here.
In addition to the City’s recovery plan, I’ve been working to help with regional economic recovery as part of the South Island Prosperity Partnership’s Rising Economy Task Force. We recently released Reboot: Greater Victoria’s Economic Recovery Plan 2020-2022. It’s also an exciting plan that will help people who have lost their jobs to ‘upskill” and get ready for the next economy which we’re seeing emerging through the pandemic – more digital and more knowledge based. The plan was created by over 120 people working hard together since April to help and support all those who make southern Vancouver Island such an amazing place – from farmers, to retailers, to tech workers, to Indigenous communities and more.
I’d also like to tell you about the Ocean Futures Innovation Hub. Creating this Hub is a recommendation coming out of both Victoria 3.0 and the Reboot strategy. I’ve been leading a small group working to develop a business case for the Hub so we can get federal and provincial recovery funding to get it off the ground in early 2021. The Ocean Futures Innovation Hub is a response to input from our region’s marine sector. The Hub, will be a centre for solving tough challenges and innovation needs faced by our marine industry and will allow companies in Greater Victoria and Pacific Canada to pursue major opportunities in the global ocean and marine space. The vision for the Ocean Futures Innovation Hub is ocean industry transformation for the 22nd century – low-carbon and good jobs.
Finally, the gratitude. Some of you have been receiving and reading my Sunday emails for months now. Some of you have started more recently. I wanted to say thank you. Thanks for reading. Thanks for sharing. And thank you also for taking the time to say thank you. I’ve received a few cards in the mail this past week – yes real cards in the real mail! – thanking me for my work and especially for these emails. One card – signed by a whole family – said they enjoyed reading the Sunday emails each week and that they want to invite me and my family over after I’m finished being mayor to say thank you. These acts of generosity and thoughtfulness touch me deeply and keep me going, especially on the most difficult and stressful days.
With gratitude,
Lisa/Mayor Helps