Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Coming up in this episode, Devin O 'Leary co -authored the Carnegie Housing Project's 2024 report on the urgent need for governments to build housing that low -income people can afford.
Speaker: Unless governments act to build and save housing that low -income people can afford, the number of houseless people in Vancouver is on track to increase by 50 % by 2030. This is the stark prediction in the Carnegie Housing Project's 2024 report released last month. Devin O 'Leary is one of the authors and he joins me today to talk about the report. Hello, Devin. Hi.
Speaker: The report is dedicated to Dino Bundy, who's known to his friends as Boomer. So I wanted to just start by asking you to tell me a bit about him. Boomer was a really loved person in this community. And Jean Swanson, who co -wrote this report, she knew him. He found a electrical closet and a building that, compared to the other options, was actually quite safe.
Speaker: and secure. He had his own lock on it and everything. But of course, like, I mean, electrical cause, it's a very dangerous place to be. And he tragically passed in a fire that happened in there. And yeah, that's just highlights of the risks that people have to take whenever
Speaker: adequate housing is not available in this city. I read in the report that unhoused people have half the life expectancy of housed people in BC. Yeah, exactly. It's a pretty shocking statistic. Yeah, and it's every day is survival, like people just trying to get through that day, and it's a lot of work. You've called the report, this isn't working. Can you unpack that for me? What isn't working?
Speaker: Yeah, so it's really trying to show that the narrative around housing, especially the financialization of housing that became really dominant in the late 80s and into the 90s has been
Speaker: causing a net loss in affordable housing as rents have grown so much faster than real wages over the decades. And that's still something that the government and the private rental market and developers are all doubling down on is that housing provided by for -profit
Speaker: developers and operators is the housing that we need. But what we're seeing is that doesn't work. That's not working. We're losing so much more photo housing than we're gaining. We're actually in Vancouver over between 2016 to 2021, we lost 10 times as much affordable housing as we gained within that model. So what we're calling on is a return back to
Speaker: how housing was prior to the 90s, which was the federal government spending very substantial amounts of money on co -op housing and other non -market housing that was built for people rather than for profit. I know that the city of Vancouver passed a vacancy control bylaw in an attempt to preserve SRO rooms in the downtown east side. What happened to that?
Speaker: So it worked initially. And then a couple of the landlords from SROs that were affected took the city to court and they were backed by Landlord BC, which is a pretty large lobbying organization. And that hearing in the fall, the decision was made last month, I believe, and
Speaker: Essentially, it was saying that the city did not have the jurisdiction to be able to set that or create that policy. And so what it's saying is that it has to come from the province to be able to have sort of vacancy controls that will make sure that we are keeping the most affordable housing that we have. And I guess another thing that's happened with SROs is fires in the downtown Eastside. Yeah, we found that we're losing
Speaker: around 200 units a year to both fire and maintenance closures, so neglect. And that's, yeah, these buildings are over 100 years old and they have very outdated water systems. There was just the inquest into the winter's fire.
Speaker: About a month ago, and one of the results from that was a demand that all SROs get much more robust fire suppression systems. So that's a good thing.
Speaker: The city has a Downtown Eastside local area plan that virtually prohibits condos around Oppenheimer Park, and it also requires a third of social housing in the Downtown Eastside be rented at shelter rate. Is a third enough?
Speaker: It is based off of the demand that we have, we're going to need a lot. That's actually a really, really progressive and innovative policy. As far as we know, it's the only neighborhood zoning that requires shelter rate housing in the country. And it has resulted in two buildings that have added a bunch of new shelter rate housing and eight or more buildings that are currently in development that will have that one third
Speaker: as shelter rates, so it's a great way for including shelter rate housing into new buildings, but the fact that it's isolated to the Downtown Eastside means that all the shelter rate housing that is being built in this city and most of it that's being built in the province is in this neighborhood. So one of the things we're calling for is for other municipalities and ideally the province to adopt a definition of social housing that includes shelter rate.
Speaker: The city of Vancouver is not planning to renew the leases on modular housing sites around the city or find new sites for the units to be moved to. What kind of impact is that going to have? Well, I mean, the immediate impact is that we are losing between 816 and 860 shelter rate units over the next seven years. So that loss is
Speaker: huge and we're not and we're that in addition to the the rate that we're losing affordable housing to increase rents is creating a net loss in shelter rate housing and so yeah I mean it's as we're losing more housing than we're gaining it's going to be pushing more and more people out onto the street. What do you hear from people about how they feel about living in modular housing?
Speaker: uh... it's compared to anything else that's down here like compared to living in s r o it's amazing you've got it's a self -contained unit so it has a kitchen and has a washroom the only problem i would say is that well one the fact that it's temporary means that the leases are temporary means that now people are being evicted and so there's they're experiencing a lot of harm going back to that eviction process the communities that they formed within those buildings are being
Speaker: totally dispersed and now people are going back into substandard housing into SROs so that that's terrible.
Speaker: And another thing is most of the new shelter rate housing that's built and the shelter rate housing that's available in the modular units is through a supportive model, which doesn't give people as much independence as they would like and they deserve in many situations. And so people are pretty critical of that management model, but as a physical housing structure, they're great.
Speaker: There's a section of the report where you look at community created alternatives and one of them is the Downtown Eastside Community Land Trust. Can you tell me about that? What's that? Yeah, so that is a really great model. Land trusts are used around North America as a way to purchase land and keep it within a nonprofit or in this case within this community so that it is not available to
Speaker: speculation to private businesses or private owners who are wanting to make a profit off of the land or off of the building. And so what they're trying to do is buy up SROs, private SROs, that are vulnerable to massive rent increases or vulnerable to redevelopment into more expensive housing and keeping those buildings within the community. It also is championing a tenant governance model
Speaker: that kind of builds off of the existing tenant governance that exists in many of these SROs that are organized by the SRO Collaborative. So they have these tenant -based initiatives where tenants are all engaged and taking care of each other through harm reduction, food programs, room repairs.
Speaker: And they're expanding on that to actually give them voting rights within the building. So the Kiefer was the first building that they are now going to be able to manage within that model, but they want to run up to 10 buildings in the coming years under that model.
Speaker: And this requires investment from the province? Exactly, yeah. And the province did create a program, the Rental Protection Fund, which gives nonprofits the ability to purchase older rental buildings to bring them into affordability, but it excluded SROs. And so what they're trying to do is to get the province to create a new fund or expand that fund to also include SROs so that they can apply for it and start to bring SROs into community ownership.
Speaker: There's a whole bunch of recommendations in the report that you developed along with the community. Tell me about that process of collaboration. Yeah, so one of the really fortunate things about living and working in the Downtown Eastside is almost everybody is involved through some sort of community organization.
Speaker: And so whenever we're trying to get feedback on this sort of stuff, we can just go to all these community organizations and talk with them. So we were going to the Aboriginal Front Door Society, the Overdose Prevention Society, Van Do, the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society.
Speaker: talking with these groups of residents about these recommendations. Part of it was like just bringing this into conversation and educating each other on what the issues are. And then, yeah, being able to get people really excited about what the opportunities are. And people were very clear about wanting to stay in this neighborhood, wanting the government to build more housing that they can afford. A lot of the stuff, a lot of the recommendations are kind of hard to disagree with.
Speaker: It's really just better housing and it's getting the government to commit to making that housing affordable. But yeah, and then we had four town halls, each with a turn of over 60 people, which is great and super engaging. And yeah, it's an amazing place to organize because the majority of people here really care about their living situations and working towards something better.
Speaker: What are the next steps now that you've come out with this report? Yeah, so now it's working to get these recommendations implemented. So it's educating people across the city.
Speaker: connecting with other groups that are advocating for better housing, like the Vancouver Tenants Union, the BCGEU, and then getting really loud about this. So we're planning a demonstration towards the end of April, where we're going to be talking about some of the key recommendations of things that the government can do right now, like prioritizing, redeveloping the Balmoral, the Regent into shelter rate housing, and then just getting people educated, getting people involved
Speaker: especially leading into the fall provincial election. So reaching out, everyone getting connected with their MLAs and making sure that their MLAs know that this is something that they care about and the government needs to act on. Great. Well, thanks so much for talking to me today, Devin. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Devin O 'Leary, one of the authors of This Isn't Working, the Carnegie Housing Project's 2024 report released last month. And you can find the report at CarnegieHousingProject .ca.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
