B.C. housing minister reacts to Sim’s Downtown Eastside plan

The mayor of Vancouver’s plan to transform the Downtown Eastside by offering less supportive housing is drawing criticism from local authorities.

As part of a plan designed to revitalize Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Mayor Ken Sim announced Thursday that the city will pause the construction of net new supportive housing units.

Sim claims the current state of the Downtown Eastside has led to a “cycle of instability and decline,” weighing unfairly on Vancouver.

A statement from the city says Vancouver currently houses 77 per cent of the region’s supportive housing, despite comprising only 25 per cent of the region’s population.

On Friday, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon told 1130 NewsRadio he agrees that the province needs a regional approach to supportive housing, but he’s concerned Sim is conflating supportive housing with increased crime and violence.

“I do have some concerns when you link social housing or affordable housing or supportive housing to crime. Because we’ve seen the stats, and the stats show that the challenge is actually people not having housing, people sleeping in parks, sleeping in encampments. That is more of a risk to community safety than actually having housing available for people,” said Kahlon.

He says he wants all communities to do their part, but says Sim’s plan misses the mark.

“By taking resources away, we’re actually not going to make the community safer. We’re not going to address the challenges that individuals have, and we’re not going to be able to address the regional challenges we have.”

Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke holds a somewhat less sanitized view of Sim’s announcement. She says it never helps to point fingers, city to city, but says Sim might need “a little history lesson.”

“Look back a couple of decades and see that Vancouver has always not only asked for more money, for housing and services, in not only the Downtown Eastside, but other areas of the city, And so that is exactly what they asked for. And now he is complaining that he has too much, too many services in his city. Well, I can tell you that the city of Surrey has never received anywhere close to the kind of numbers and dollars that Vancouver received. In fact, we received only a third of the regional average for non market housing. So it’s a concern to us, but I think there’s another piece to this,” said Locke.

She said Surrey is “all about doing more” to take on its fair share, but simply doesn’t have the same concentration of unhoused people in the same area.

“We also know that Surrey provides more more beds for people in recovery,” Locke claimed. “So we have more recovery beds than almost all of Metro Vancouver put together. We have more facilities in our city than anywhere else.”