Where is the best place to locate social housing in the City of Vancouver?
Nowhere, apparently, unless it’s in the Downtown Eastside. But since that area is overly concentrated with such facilities and observers routinely complain about the poverty pimps and the ever expanding poverty industry in that neighbourhood, let’s move all social housing to industrial areas where families and children never ever have to look at or come into contact with the residents of any form of social housing. Shield your eyes, children. There’s a homeless person moving into a shelter.
Better yet, let’s send all those people who desperately need social housing to get back on their feet into huts in the deep dark forests beyond the horizon and forget they ever existed. Out of sight, out of mind. They should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps already.
Jonathan Swift, where are you to solve our social ills?
This may all sound ridiculous, but is it given the outrage the city faced at an open house last week for temporary social housing in a former Ramada Hotel on East Hastings near Skeena? Not just that open house, but almost any that involves social housing around the city.
Unless a social housing project is destined for the Downtown Eastside, the proposal meets with opposition. This problem isn’t unique to Vancouver. A proposal for a 20-unit housing project for homeless men in downtown Abbotsford faced stiff opposition earlier this summer.
Let’s review the Ramada proposal: temporary social housing located on a busy traffic and transit corridor to house select seniors and the working poor. Quote from area resident: “We don’t want this shelter,” one woman bellowed as reported in Cheryl Rossi’s Dec. 13 story.
A parent chimed in with “My concern is really related to the safety and welfare of the kids, full stop.”
If locating social housing on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city where transit is readily available isn’t a good spot, I’d like to know where is.
Not everyone at the meeting was against the proposal of course — because it’s a good idea, which they came to realize once they were able to speak to the people who will be operating the building. They’d only wished the city had properly informed them of the proposal instead of creating fear from a dearth of details. Déjà vu anyone?
This proposal would have been a no-brainer if the city understood that once the term “social housing” or “shelter” is used in areas where people own homes (renters don’t get as upset), people prick up their ears. The city does grasp this of course, but why did it not anticipate a large number of people to attend the open house to find out more? And why did they hold the open house in what was essentially a tiny hallway at the former hotel?
Can the entire blame be laid at the feet of Vision Vancouver and its chronic inability to effectively communicate with residents on its grand plans, sometimes throwing in last-minute changes? Partially.
Perhaps there is also another reason. That would be the revolving door of staffers at city hall who have left — including at least 50 senior staffers — since Gregor Robertson became mayor and hired Penny Ballem as city manager. Could these departures be having a negative impact on morale that’s resulting in staffers unable to properly do their jobs? The loss of corporate memory and expertise, not to mention disruption in continuity, when long-term staffers leave can’t help but have harmful repercussions on workflow and morale. When is the last time you spoke to a city employee who said without any hint of sarcasm, “I love my job. Morale? Why, it couldn’t be better.”
TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE
On a happier note, kudos to council for choosing to send Coun. Tim Stevenson, who is gay, to gay-unfriendly Russia as Vancouver’s representative at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games. While in Sochi, Stevenson hopes to address the International Olympic Committee on safeguarding gay rights in its charter. I hope he wears a rainbow-coloured scarf, jacket and hat and carries around Masha Gessen’s controversial 2012 book The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. I suggest anyone heading to Sochi read and openly carry this book around as a form of protest for everything Putin has done while in office (anti-gay legislation and destroying most democratic reforms made under Yeltsin for instance).
