Housing advocates and residents pull no punches with Victoria City Council

Things got heated between community housing advocates, unhoused residents, and Victoria City Council last Thursday night. For members of the public who presented at the Dec. 12 meeting, it was an opportunity to express their anger, frustration, and deep sorrow in the face of the deaths of several of their friends and chosen family in recent weeks. Their grief and anger were palpable. And they were righteous.

“Last night was a difficult night,” Mayor Marianne Alto said in an interview with Capital Daily the following day. The pathways to preventing some of those deaths are many, but not all of them lead back to council, she argues.

“Council does not have the authority or the mandate to deal with most of the issues that are driving what was legitimately expressed last night. At the same time, I think it's important for council to understand that, for many people, there is nowhere else for them to show their rage and their grief and pain that is absolutely legitimate. Even though it's tough to hear, it's an important part of the job,” Alto said.

Nikki Ottosen from the Backpack Project disagrees with the mayor’s accounting for accountability. In her impassioned presentation, she highlighted recent deaths and alleged human rights violations against the unhoused community. She criticized the council for not implementing federal housing advocate recommendations and for removing shelter options that, she says, have led to 13 deaths in Victoria in a space of three weeks.

Ottosen specifically raised the preventable death of community leader Shae Smith and what she described as the ongoing harassment of another. She and Smith are one of three who have filed a petition for a judicial review of the city’s decision to close Irving and Vic West Parks in April to overnight sheltering, which Ottosen says is against their Charter rights.

Their petition stems from the 2009 BC Court of Appeal ruling in the case of Victoria (city) v. Adams that Victoria could not prevent people from sheltering in parks overnight if it didn’t have enough indoor spaces for them to go.

She condemned what she called the council's “inhumane policies” and promised continued advocacy and even legal action until housing for all is achieved. Amid the fallout from the meeting, Victoria is considering whether it should spend an additional $4.7M  to enforce the city’s daytime sheltering ban.

The Canadian Human Rights Commission has said “encampments represent an effort by people who are unhoused to claim their human right to housing and meet their most basic needs for shelter.” International human rights standards prohibit measures that would arbitrarily and unnecessarily deprive individuals of housing, including temporary or informal shelters such as encampments.

According to the commission, “any relocation must be consistent with the right to adequate housing: alternative shelter must be provided: that is secure, habitable, culturally appropriate, in a suitable location and where access to essential supports and services can be maintained.”

Since a June 12  altercation between a homeless person with an acquired brain injury and a paramedic, the city has engaged in the regular removal of tents and belongings from city streets. These “sweeps,” as they are referred to by the unhoused community, are enforced and overseen by Victoria bylaw officers.

Blue interlocking fencing was erected along Pandora in October to deter people from sheltering along its 900 block near Vancouver.

“Bylaw has gone rogue,” Ottenson said.

“This mayor and council has literally doubled down on the war against people who live in extreme poverty in our community by removing parts from the allowable sheltering list with not enough shelter spaces in the city and so now our friends and our loved ones are dying. Every death is because the person's Section 7 Charter rights and the ability to provide themselves with shelter is taken away by the removal of tents, blankets, clothing, medication, food, ID, and immediate survival items,” Ottosen said.

Her friend Shae Smith had been living in Beacon Hill Park and other areas of the city. Most recently, he pitched a tent on a Victoria side street and died, alone.

The hardship of life on the streets and in the parks takes its mental toll

A short documentary produced by the Existence Project features Smith’s experience of being unhoused in Victoria. In the film, Smith attributes three factors as key contributors to homelessness—” financial circumstances, family, mental health and addiction.”

Aligned with the work of researchers studying the causes and impacts of homelessness, Smith did not separate mental health from addiction. Smith left his Surrey home at the age of 14. After decades of hardscrabble living, he didn’t come without complexities. According to a post on the doc’s YouTube channel, he’d had some dust-ups with shop owners downtown.

The knock-on effects of extreme poverty and street entrenchment are many and they all feed one another, creating vicious cycles that are hard for many to break. Here to Help BC, a website devoted to information on mental health and substance use, states that by the year 2000, homelessness was consistently linked by social scientists and medical professionals to mental illness and substance use disorders.

“You can’t just go and get a job. You can’t have anyone looking after your tent. You have to be on guard of your tent virtually 24/7 or you don’t have a place to sleep, at all. Seven to seven means you don’t have any stability in your life at all and that’s not healthy, ” Smith says in the documentary. In three remaining parks residents may erect shelters but only between the hours of 7pm and 7am.

Ottosen described the impact of constant insecurity and bylaw officers’ enforcement against illegal sheltering. “People are not only displaced from the area, their human rights are stripped of them, thrown in the garbage, and they are forced to areas where they are alone, without community, and they lose contact with outreach and support teams,” she said.

“There is plenty of research to show that when this kind of trauma happens to people, they use more substances, and they use alone, which is exactly what you should be trying to avoid if you want to serve and protect people in our community during a public health state of emergency,” Ottosen told council.

“I obviously don't agree that the city is responsible,” Alto said. “I think that [responsibility] sits at other tables, but I also understand that there's an enormous amount of pain, and unfortunately for them, there are a few tables at which to express it.”

The city is responsible for expanding the shelter ban in parks in August and the daily clearing of Pandora, however, it’s BC Housing that is responsible for the lack of an adequate supply of supportive housing in the city. Island Health is responsible for providing mental health services. “You also have to look at all the gaps in social services, health care and supportive services, and the coordination of all of those things,” said Alto.

The majority of a proposed $4.13M city budget increase would go to increasing labour for bylaw and police officers and would take up to a year to fully implement from a human resources perspective.

A staff report Enforcing the Legal Prohibition of Daytime Sheltering in Victoria submitted to the committee of the whole on Dec.12, states that “while enforcement is a necessary part of an overall strategy to end sheltering, and the only role for the city to play, it does not address the underlying causes of homelessness that result in sheltering. Without significant intervention and coordination of the provincial ministries of health, mental health and addictions, housing, and poverty reduction, to address addiction, mental health, trauma, systemic racism, and systemic issues in the criminal justice system, the issue of sheltering will not be solved by enforcement alone.”

In a recent Open Minds podcast interview, Correnne Antrobus, a founding member of Moms Stop the Harm, whose daughter is a street-entrenched substance user asked host Christopher Balkaran to “imagine you are homeless and you’re dragging around your small things that bylaw take every day. It must be so incredibly sad and anxiety-producing and so they do more drugs to manage it.”

Moms Stop the Harm is a national organization founded by BC mothers who have lost children to overdose.

“They use drugs to stay awake, so they don’t get their stuff stolen,” Antrobus said.

Interrupting the cycle of addiction is different for everyone and can mean multiple attempts. “Addiction, on average, is a seven-time relapse. And we’re seeing a difference in the level of danger on the streets. People will do survival crimes to get it [drugs]. “First of all, if someone is homeless, that’s a big problem.”

The violence isn’t just on the streets. It happens in shelters

Darryl Williams who also presented at the meeting told the council about his experience in the shelter where he was offered space. “The drug use in that place is mad crazy; no security past five, doors propped open. There’s cockroaches, rats, mice. There’s been over five stabbings there.”

He explained that recovering addicts are frequently offered spaces in wet shelters. A wet shelter accepts people who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol and offers a supervised space to use or consume them. Exposure to violence and lack of proximity to community and services support is one of the reasons people get pushed back out onto the streets alone.

“People don't deserve to die alone on the streets because the city is trying to hide the homelessness crisis we’re in,” Ottosen said.

Mayor Marianne Alto is aware of the housing crisis and the jurisdictional bounds of her capacity to resolve it.

She told Capital Daily in an interview, “What drives the reality of homelessness in every municipality fundamentally begins with poverty, gaps in social services, gaps in housing, gaps in supportive services, gaps in all of the things that people should have a right but that none of which are our jurisdiction.”

“I always applaud the provincial government for the work they're doing in creating housing. It's good work, and we've supported it by and large. But at the same time, it's taking a really long time, and meanwhile, 10 people have died,” Alto said.

When asked what it felt like, as mayor, to have those deaths occur in her city she said, “People assume that the longer you are in public life, that the thicker your skin gets, but the reality is that you just get better at hiding the effect.”

Some light on the supportive housing horizon

Victoria’s Cool Aid Society is poised to open Crosstown, a $50M, 154-unit mixed-use building with affordable, market, and supportive housing rental units at 584 Burnside East, near Finlayson. Move-in date is scheduled for early February.

On Dec 5, three organizations submitted applications to the council for funding from the Victoria Housing Fund to build up to 247 units of low to moderate-income housing. The three proposals came from the Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness Society (ACEHS), Capital Region Housing Corporation (CRHC), and M’akola Housing Society (MHS). Two of the three projects focus on Indigenous housing. ACEHS is asking for $262k to build 34 units on Mason St. MHS is asking for $757k to build 55 units in Langford and 824 Alston streets.

The CRHC is requesting $1.12M to build 158 affordable rental units on the 900 block on Pandora, near Vancouver.