A staff update to city council Tuesday on the state of homelessness came with many numbers but the one number missing from the presentation was how many people are living on the street.
In a year that Mayor Gregor Robertson promised to end street homelessness, city staff say the street population is difficult to determine because of a variety of factors, including tracking where the 536 people counted last March are today.
"We do see properties closing and other issues coming forward which may increase the numbers but that's quite difficult to quantify at the moment," said the city's chief housing officer, Mukhtar Latif, noting the city won't know how many people remain on the street until another homeless count is conducted in March.
Asked by reporters whether the mayor's goal of ending street homelessness will be achieved this spring, Latif said the city is "working towards that deadline and doing our best to achieve that. That's all we can say at the moment."
Latif acknowledged the last accurate number for the homeless population was the one he disclosed in an affidavit filed last fall as part of the city's application to get an injunction to remove campers in Oppenheimer Park.
In his affidavit, Latif wrote that about 200 of the 536 homeless people had been housed in temporary housing at the former Biltmore Hotel, the former Ramada on East Hastings and the Kingsway Continental. Some also moved into new social housing on Burrard Street.
More people were expected to move off the street and into new social housing slated to open before the end of 2014 and into early 2015, including a 139-unit building at 111 Princess Ave., which opened in December.
Taylor Manor, a 56-unit building at Adanac and Boundary, is scheduled to open in mid-March and be home to people with mental illness. That opening will be followed a month later by the 146-unit social housing building at 220 Princess Ave., which will house women-led families, with about 50 children.
This winter, homeless people also moved into shelters and found temporary housing at the former Quality Inn at 1335 Howe, where 140 tenants now live. City shelters and temporary winter response shelters have been at capacity, staff said in their presentation, although they couldn't explain why extreme weather response shelters — which opened about 10 times this winter — only had 50 per cent of a combined 160 mats occupied when the weather turned bad.
During staff's presentation, city manager Penny Ballem noted another difficulty in determining an accurate number of people living on the street was where former tenants of single-room-occupancy hotels under renovation have ended up.
Though B.C. Housing has an agreement with the city to relocate tenants during renovations, Ballem said the city hasn't been able to account for 80 to 100 people who once lived in the hotels. She said they "appear to have disappeared."
"If you go to the history over the last five years of the puts and takes, there's no question that every time we open [a building] and then the province closes [a hotel], we lose capacity," she told council, noting the province has shifted to supplying rent subsidies to former hotel tenants to live in apartments throughout the city. But whether those 80 to 100 people found accommodations is not something the city knows.
Both the mayor and Vision Coun. Kerry Jang repeated their calls to put pressure on the provincial and federal governments to build more housing in Vancouver. While Jang acknowledged the partnership between the city and the province to build 14 supportive housing buildings worth about $300 million, he said the city needs more social housing and added that provincial Housing Minister Rich Coleman "doesn't know what he's talking about sometimes."
"All he looks at is that it's cheaper to give somebody a rent supplement so they can go into some privately owned apartment somewhere around the city," Jang said. "We are at record low vacancy rates. So we said to the province: 'Where would you put people with a rent subsidy, if there's no place to rent?' No answer."
In an interview with the Courier Wednesday, Coleman said no tenants have been displaced from the hotels under renovation. He also said people are finding accommodation in the city with rent subsidies. The subsidies, he added, allow people to live in neighbourhoods where they are not stigmatized because of their socio-economic status.
B.C. Housing sent a statement to the Courier saying the province has invested more than $86.2 million in Vancouver in the last year to support 5,800 housing units for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. That includes funding for 750 permanent, year round shelters and another 260 extreme weather spaces.
The province also invested $143-million in partnership with the federal government to renovate 13 single room occupancy hotels in the Downtown Eastside, "protecting 1,400 units for those in greatest need," the statement said.
"There's no jurisdiction that I can find in the country that has received more in funding for supportive housing than the city of Vancouver has," said Coleman by telephone from Prince George.
Asked whether he thought Vancouver would end street homelessness this year, Coleman said "in all the counts and in all the figures that I've seen, I think they're there. With the numbers [of units] coming on stream, they should be very encouraged by the success we've had with them."
This year's homeless count will be conducted March 23 and 24.
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