Thanks, as always, to everyone who took the time to write to me this week. I appreciate hearing your ideas, insights, complaints and frustrations. As usual, I’m responding to everyone together – on the one hand, for efficiency, but on the other, to ensure that as many people as possible have answers to the questions and concerns that people are raising.

If you’d like to stay in touch on a weekly basis, you can sign up to receive the weekly email here. If you’d like to look back over the past few months on information I’ve shared with respect to parks sheltering, housing and related matters, you can do so here. The posts are categorized by topic.

Housing Update
As noted in today’s Times Colonist article, Hotel Fire Delays Efforts to House People Without Homes in Victoria, we are not going to meet our original goal of helping 200 people move inside by the end of the year. Since August, the Community Wellness Alliance Decampment Working Group, comprised of BC Housing, Island Health, the City, the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness, the Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness and Our Place, has been working hard to identify transitional and supportive housing units and to move people in. The Times Colonist article lays out the challenges really well and I’d love if you take the time to read it.

The good news is, that this week I spoke to both the new Housing Minister as well as to Victoria’s new MLA Grace Lore and both expressed a commitment to help meet Victoria’s goal of moving people inside by the end of March 2021. This is going to be an enormous challenge and it’s going to take all of us, working together to make it happen. And we will!

Impacts of Sheltering in Parks
A few of you have written to me this week concerned about the impacts of people sheltering in parks. One extremely thoughtful email from a North Park resident outlined challenges facing both housed and unhoused neighbourhood residents in North Park. I want to share some of the thoughtful and detailed analysis from that email here:

“According to 2016 Census statistics for North Park:

• 57% of residents live in 5+ storey apartment buildings, 
• 28% are considered low income, 
• 21% are racialized, 
• 4% are recent immigrants, 
• 28% of children (0-17) live in poverty, and
• 36% of seniors (65+) live in poverty.
• North Park is ranked the most financially vulnerable of 78 neighbourhoods in the CRD

“Since May, when the City of Victoria relaxed bylaws to allow continuous sheltering in light of public health recommendations, Central Park, located in the heart of North Park, has experienced the highest concentration of outdoor sheltering in the city. North Park has been working collaboratively and compassionately for months to advocate for the needs of those sheltering while also balancing the needs of housed community members: primarily, access to Central Park – a well loved, and much needed community amenity. 

“North Park is considered a ‘park deficient’ neighbourhood with only 1.23 hectares/1000 residents compared to the City average of 3.16 hectares/1000 residents. However, the actual amount of green space is much, much lower when taking into account sheltering taking place in Central Park, as well as the fact that Royal Athletic Park – which makes up about half of North Park’s greenspace – is a fenced, regional facility.”

The writer had also copied many provincial officials and requested that the Province work with the City to house people by March 31st with the supports they need so that they are taken care of and so that the neighbourhood can have its much-needed and much loved park back.

Another North Park resident wrote thanking me for these weekly emails (you’re welcome) but frustrated by the fencing that had gone up in the park without notice, that created confusion and had the effect of moving people sheltering closer to the playground. We hear you. Bylaw staff were in the Central Park all week working with people there to relocate to other parks in the short term until we can find places for them inside. There are so many needs to balance and nothing about the situation is straightforward.

I’ve also received emails from Fairfield residents this week who live near parks where a small number of people are sheltering, likely having moved recently from Central Park. They have written noting the impact that one or two tents are having in their neighbourhood with respect to feelings of safety, not feeling like they can open the blinds etc. We hear you too.

All of these emails reveal how challenging homelessness is for everyone. A writer asked why Council cares more about people who are living without homes than tax paying residents. What I know from the volume of emails received each week concerning parks sheltering, is that if people who are currently sheltering outside move inside and out of parks, everyone benefits. That’s why we’re working so hard on the issue.

Downtown
From some of the emails I’ve received over the past few months, from a daily morning show diatribe against pretty much everything the City does, and from reports I’ve been given about some local social media echo chambers, I have to admit, I was getting pretty worried about downtown. I’ve been spending most of my time at City Hall buried in Zoom and Teams meetings, working on the future of the city and recovery from the pandemic and haven’t looked up in awhile.

But Saturday, I went downtown for pleasure. And it was a pleasure! There were people everywhere – most masked and physically distant. Our amazing local businesses were bustling. A couple of retail vacancies I’d noticed a few months ago were now full with new businesses. We’re not through this pandemic yet, and our local businesses need us more than ever. One of the best ways we can help them is to, collectively, tell a more positive, more realistic story about downtown Victoria.

This letter that was printed in the Times Colonist yesterday that I will quote in its entirety puts it better than I can:

“What Victoria are you living in?

“I read two letters in the Times Colonist. The first was an uplifting account of walking through Beacon Hill Park. As a neighbour to the park myself, I agree with the writer completely!

“My life has ‘not been ruined’ with proximity to the park. It is a fantastic space, for walking, admiring the trees and nature. The tents that we all see do not frighten me. I feel only sadness for those forced to live this way.

“The other letter was about a Victoria I don’t know. The writer claimed that ‘our parks system has been largely ruined, the downtown is dying and the whole city is a more unsafe and sinister place.’

“Wow. This is a description I don’t recognize. I work downtown and am there at 6:30 or 7 in the morning. The City is hosing down and washing the streets. It is not dirty. I walk past all the amazing and vibrant restaurants and businesses. I talk to the street people and they talk to me. It is not sinister or unsafe.

“These are our fellow human beings. That person was a little boy or girl once too. Listen to their stories and what they will tell you. When you really look and listen I believe your thoughts might change.

Anne Grimes”

Your Suggestions
Each week I get emails with creative suggestions for addressing homelessness. This week someone wrote and suggested using empty schools for this purpose. Victoria’s population of young families is growing, and any schools that are currently vacant are under redevelopment or refurbishment to get them ready to receive students. Someone else suggested building a tiny home village like this one in Seattle for women. Stay tuned; there will be more coming on this idea soon!

About Everything Else
A few weeks ago I started to share some of the projects the City is working on in addition to sheltering and housing, so that you’d know we’re working hard on lots of fronts. I’ll be brief here this week because I feel like I’ve already written a lot – which means you’ve read a lot!

In a paper called, “Will COVID-19 fiscal recovery packages accelerate or retard progress on climate change?” the authors point out that:

“The climate emergency is like the COVID-19 emergency, just in slow motion and much graver. Both involve market failures, externalities, international cooperation, complex science, questions of system
resilience, political leadership, and action that hinges on public support. Decisive state interventions
are also required to stabilise the climate, by tipping energy and industrial systems towards newer,
cleaner, and ultimately cheaper modes of production that become impossible to outcompete.”

In the long-term, the impacts of climate on our economy and community well-being may dwarf those currently being felt as a result of COVID-19.

In 2018 the City adopted a Climate Leadership Plan to take action on climate change mitigation (actions to stop climate change) and adaptation (actions to adapt to a changing climate). We did this because we know that climate change will negatively impact our community’s well-being and our local economy. I know between my post last week and this week, I’m loading you up with lots of holiday reading. In addition to Victoria 3.0, I’d love if you’d take the holidays to read the Climate Leadership Plan.

The reason for my reading request, is that we just got our first Climate Progress Report. And while we’re doing well corporately and are on track with city operations to meet our 2025, 2030 and 2050 goals, as a community we’re falling behind. The City’s corporate greenhouse gas emissions are only 1% of the total. The other 99% are generated in the community through buildings, transportation and waste.

Just as Minister Dix and Dr. Henry remind us on a regular basis that beating COVID-19 takes every single one of us, so too with climate change. It would be great if you could have a read through the Climate Leadership Plan and the Progress Report and find just one action in there – large or small that you can take at home, in your workplace, school, community group etc.

With gratitude,

Lisa / Mayor Helps