This is a sample of the card that people who are living outside will get when they are offered an indoor 24/7 space as a pathway to permanent housing.
Hello Everyone,
Thanks for your emails this past week. As always, to ensure a timely response, I’m writing back to all of you at once. If there is additional information that you’re looking for with respect to sheltering in parks, the move to indoors, or Clover Point, please head directly to my blog here and check back over the past few weeks and months. If you’d like to receive a weekly email you can sign up here, top right hand side.
I’d like to begin by asking everyone to take a moment of silence for the two people who died this week in Beacon Hill Park.
In a country as prosperous as Canada, a province as prosperous as British Columbia, and a city as prosperous as Victoria no one should die alone, outside, in a park.
Many of your emails this week echo concerns we’ve heard from many months now about the situation of people sheltering outside. You want to know what the plan is. Many of you express frustration at the situation, are worried about some of the violence you’re hearing about. Others are worried about those who are living outside who are vulnerable and subject to violence, stigma and discrimination. You want us to do more, and to do better, and to do quickly.
For the past year, we’ve been in our small bubbles, not able to go for dinner with a friend, take a trip, enjoy a symphony concert or a play. Sing in our choirs. Attend church in person. Some have lost jobs. Our kids’ mental health has been stretched, and maybe our own mental health has too. Some of us have been living outside in tents for months. We’re quick to anger, blame. Our frustration is boiling over. One year into a global health pandemic everyone is on edge.
I will out outline the plan for getting people indoors, I’ll respond to your other concerns, and I’ll update and recap the Clover Point decision. In the meantime, what I’d like to ask for, from everyone, over the next weeks and months as we come out the other side of the pandemic and the parks sheltering situation, is for all of us to work together to take the temperature down. I was reminded recently of a really simple piece of wisdom: when in doubt be generous. Generous in spirit. Generous in the face of anger, frustration, confrontation.
Indoor Sheltering Plan
Please share this section of the blog post widely with anyone who has questions about what to expect in the next few weeks. I’ll keep it tight and factual.
In November, Council adopted this motion:
“That the City of Victoria works with the Province and other partners to offer housing or indoor shelter with a path to permanent housing for everyone currently sheltering in City parks by March 31st 2021 and directs staff to bring forward amendments to the Parks Regulation Bylaw so that the temporary measures including 24/7 camping expire on March 31st 2021. Final adoption of these amendments are to be scheduled once it is clear that adequate housing and shelter space will be made available by the March 31st deadline.”
Since November, the Province, the City and many others have worked together to follow through on this direction. Here is what has happened in the past week and what to expect in the next few weeks.
- This week 49 people moved inside, 45 into the arena and four into other locations. Most of the moves happened from Ellis Street, Cecilia Ravine Park, and the Royal Athletic Park parking lot.
- All parks where people are living and most of the people living in them are known to BC Housing. BC Housing, PEERs and others have been working in parks for the past couple of months to ensure that everyone has housing applications filled out.
- Having a housing application filled out is the pathway to permanent housing. People can do so here.
- All move ins are being organized through the Coordinated Assessment and Access (CAA) process.
- Offers are not being made on a park by park basis, but based on the CAA process and individual housing applications. Everyone who has been identified as living in an encampment in a city park will be made an offer in the coming weeks.
- The CAA table meets every Tuesday to evaluate applications.
- The following spaces have been identified / confirmed:
45 Arena (full)
52 Capital City Centre
30 Tiny Homes
5 Mt Edwards
15 Comfort Inn Annex
5 Youth Hostel
Total Confirmed Units: 152
These numbers are subject to change and are the latest available information as of Friday March 5th.
Approximate number of units short: 50-70-ish - We expect more sheltering opportunities to become available in the coming weeks. We don’t know where these will be.
- In addition to these 152 identified units, there are other spaces that are available mostly to people already living in shelters, motels or supportive housing. As these people move into these other spaces, this will create more spaces for people coming directly out of parks. This is a slow process.
- There are 24 units at Hockley House, a new Capital Regional Housing Corporation (CRHC) building in Langford that rent at $375 per month; 13 people have been identified so far to move in there at the end of March, CRHC is evaluating applications. The remaining 11 spaces will be assigned through the CAA process and applications forwarded to the CRHC.
- There are approximately 30 two-bedroom units that rent at $1625 per month in a new CRHC building in View Royal. These would be suitable for roommates with one rent supplement each. There are approximately 70, $825-per-month rent supplements available through BC Housing. These are available to rent market apartments and are for people who can live independently. The two-bedroom, roommate situation is on the CAA’s radar but difficult to coordinate.
- This coming week, offers will be made for Capital City Centre and move ins will begin the week of March 15th.
- In the coming weeks, offers will be made to the other locations noted above, and to other locations as they become available.
- The criteria being used to prioritize people – with the most vulnerable being offered spaces first – is over 55, risk of COVID-19, long-time homeless, Indigenous.
- Island Health has been part of the planning for the move-ins over the past few months and will work to ensure that people have the physical health, mental health and other supports they may need as they move inside.
- When people receive an offer they will get a card as pictured above and will be assisted to move into the identified location.
- Not everyone will be offered a motel room; those who move into the non-motel room spaces like the arena and others that may become available, will move into permanent housing first.
- If you turn down an invitation to go indoors, you may still be considered for future shelter or housing opportunities. There is no guarantee of another opportunity, but applications will remain valid and will be considered as vacancies are available in the BC Housing system.
- 24/7 sheltering ending is contingent on people already identified in encampments being offered a 24/7 indoor sheltering space as a pathway to permanent housing. A motion of Council is required to re-instate the 7pm-7am only sheltering bylaw.
Other Sheltering Related Questions and Concerns
Some of you have raised other questions and concerns that aren’t covered above. I’ll do my best to address them here, again with a numbered list for ease and readability! I do like to write in paragraphs rather than lists but also want to make sure that I share as much information as possible in as concise a way as possible. I’ll go back to paragraphs once we get to the other side.
- Some people will need more help and support than supportive housing can offer. This is why myself and the 12 other mayors in the province that make up the BC Urban Mayors’ Caucus – which are all facing the same homelessness, mental health and substance use crises – are working with Ministers Eby and Malcolmson on Complex Care Housing. Please read our recent op-ed to learn more.
- Our police officers, bylaw officers, parks and public works staff are all doing incredibly difficult work in very challenging circumstances. I, like many of you, am grateful to them for their work. I will continue to support funding and resource requests to ensure they have they have what they need to do their work.
- Some of you have asked, “What has happened to our once beautiful city?” Part of my PhD research focused on Victoria in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. I read hundreds of reels of microfilm of Victoria’s daily newspapers, and people then were asking the exact same question. What is happening to our city and other cities across the province and country, is that we are in the middle of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, like then, those who are suffering the most are the most visible. In the 1930s, people were upset to see jobless men in bread lines, the long line ups at the City’s relief office, and a feeling of general disorder and upheaval. In 2020-2021, it is people without homes living in parks that are the most visible. What we’re seeing now is the manifestation of the pandemic, just as in the 1930s what Victorians witnessed was the manifestation of the Great Depression.
- This is not to dismiss the challenges facing us. I have read all your emails. I share your concerns. The situation we are in with people living in parks in the middle of a global health pandemic isn’t good for anyone. Hence the plan above. Council and city staff are working hard every day with our dedicated and committed partners to address the issues that many of you have raised. This is a tough problem and it takes a lot of people working collaboratively and a lot of time to resolve.
- Some of you have asked myself and Council to support no sheltering in Central Park. I do support this, as well no sheltering in Centennial Square and Cecelia Ravine Park. Downtown, North Park and Burnside Gorge already host most of the shelters and supportive housing units in the city.
- Thank you to those of you who have sent suggestions, from buying old ferries to temporarily house people to sharing what Finland has done to end homelessness. All these creative ideas are welcome.
Clover Point
I understand that we touched a nerve with Clover Point. I think this is probably because the idea was sprung on you with no warning. I get how this is unsettling and disruptive, especially in the middle of a pandemic with so much uncertainty already. Those creature comforts and familiar experiences like sitting in a car watching that waves at Clover Point are really important.
I won’t recap everything I shared in my email / blog post last week about why now and the interim nature of the changes. For those of you who haven’t yet read that post, with all the details, I would really appreciate it if you take the time to do so. You can find the information here; skip down to the Clover Point heading.
And thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. Some of you who want Clover Point to remain exactly as it was say that you sharing your perspectives with me is not going to change my mind. But hearing your thoughts and perspectives over the past few weeks did change my mind from making Clover Point pedestrian only to moving towards a middle ground. This new compromise option is temporary – let’s see how it goes and how the space is used over the next couple of years.
Turning the Problem Around
Many of you have written with points of view that are very different from mine, whether it’s about Clover Point, parks sheltering, downtown, the role of cities, the Vancouver Street bike lanes and more. The gift of being mayor is that I get to read all these different points of view. And I consider them all; that’s my job.
In a book I finished recently, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening and Creating New Realities, Adam Kahane writes about a team that he worked with to develop democracy in post-apartheid South Africa: “When they listened, they were not just reloading their old tapes. They were receptive to new ideas. More than that, they were willing to be influenced and changed. They held their ideas lightly; they noticed and questioned their own thinking; they separated themselves from their ideas (‘I am not my ideas, and so you and I can reject them without rejecting me’). They ‘suspended’ their ideas, as if on strings from the ceiling, and walked around and looked at these ideas from different perspectives.”
With gratitude,
Lisa / Mayor Helps