It was a great bike. I got it shortly after my daughter was born, about 6 years ago, and used it every day, back and forth from work. After it was stolen I glanced around three tent encampments around the city, and one supportive housing facility, in the hopes that I’d be able to spot it.
It’s not the first time my bike was stolen. The last time it was taken was when I was downtown and I found it next to the local homeless shelter. The folks had a mini-chop shop set up. I walked up, took my bike, and pedalled off before any of the folks could react.
That’s poverty, and I don’t mean to say that I wasn’t pissed about it, but I also don’t really hold much in the way of resentment after the fact, as I don’t have much doubt over how slippery my morals would be if I were homeless.
I actually have a pretty extensive experience working with the homeless. I spent six years working at Pacifica Housing in their streets-to-homes program, it’s where I was hired after I graduated from UVic with a degree in Social Work. In the six years I worked there I watched the rental market slowly evaporate for the clients I serve.
When I started, in around 2013, it was not impossible to find a bachelor apartment for 600 a month. That, plus the subsidy from BC housing that S2H offered, was enough from someone on PWD (Persons With Disability, about $1235 a month - give or take) to afford accommodation in the city. As time went on the subsidy grew and the rental market shrank.
In 2018 my job title became ‘Landlord Liaison’, which meant that I was the one who drummed up rental spaces for our clients. I would go into work, review the listings, make the calls, and if I got a viewing anywhere, I would find a client. Some might think this backward, that you’re supposed to have the person and then get the space, but the market moved so quickly that if I didn’t reserve a spot it would be gone by the afternoon.
I had a lurking sense that my job was becoming obsolete, and I was right. BC Housing was backing away from rental subsidies as, given the market, it was money tossed into a bottomless hole, and my program had stopped taking on new clients. I always thought that our program stood on thin legs -- that we were subsidizing the landlords, that no public equity was being created. Sure we were keeping people off the streets, but we were also working with a clientele that had addiction and mental health issues, and putting them under the regulation of the Residential Tenancy Act wasn’t necessarily doing them any favours either. But it was the best the market could provide, so I practiced the lesser of the evils and kept the rain off of my clients as best I could.
Things were bad then, and they’ve gotten worse since. With the landing of the pandemic, all the side spaces, shelters, couches, parks, have been closed or overfilled. This reminds me of living in Toronto when the eastern seaboard power outage happened in August 2003, and the entire subway system shut down. Suddenly the streets of Toronto were a LOT more crowded. Likewise, with the pandemic, we have a more accurate picture of just HOW BAD housing in this city is.
Reasons for why the housing situation is so bad are numerous, and I’ll get to some of them in a few moments. But let me first address one of the major myths that we’ve been telling ourselves about the homeless in Victoria: people make themselves homeless for the weather; the Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness recently completed their latest “point-in-time” count. Of the 1523 individuals found to be homeless in the city, 64% have been in the city for over 5 years. 20% have been here 1-5 years, and 12% for under a year. So the vast majority of the people sleeping rough are people who have been calling Victoria home for a long time.
To give a more detailed account of those assumptions, I want to address a form letter that Councillor Geoff Young has been issuing in response to people who have been writing to him about the level of homelessness in the city/Beacon Hill Park. The gist of the letter is Councilor Young attempting to address ALL the concerns that people are having around the rise of (visible) homelessness in the city and I’m not going to address the whole of the letter (you can email Councilor Young for a copy) but rather just the main bullet points where Mr. Young address the question of where “these people” will go after the city by-law officers have “moved them along”:
- No. There’s a huge waiting list for these facilities. Some shelter spaces, like the Salvation Army and Rock Bay Landing, have “day of” waitlists, but they simply don’t have the number of beds to accommodate the amount of homeless people we’re seeing in these pandemic times.
- Or return to the cycles of abuse they’re fleeing. Nobody really chooses to be homeless. If you’ve left your home community for the streets of Victoria, you’ve probably done so because you think it’s safer on the streets, and if that’s the case - what are you running from?
- As the point of time count shows, 12% -- about 180 -- are out of towners who have been in Victoria less than a year, and I’m willing to bet they're from the island and have left for reasons I mentioned in the point above.
A surprisingly large number of campers have homes, sometimes shelter rooms or publicly provided housing, or even permanent homes, that they would return to
- Not to say that this NEVER happens, yeah when you’re dealing with mental health issues, or people who are learning how to live inside again, there can be a push-pull relationship to the newly acquired shelter/lease on life you’ve been given, but it’s a minority within a minority, and I would challenge counsellor Young’s calling it “a surprisingly large.” I’m sure there’s a few, but not enough to really make a dent in the 1523 that are floating around the city.
- No. Nobody enjoys being homeless. And a lot of these people are actually holding down jobs in their homelessness, they are fighting a battle on both fronts that way. But what all the studies show is that after you become homeless, stigma and lack of references/resources makes getting rehoused all the more harder. Once you slip it’s really hard to get back up.
- When you’re homeless petty crime becomes a necessity of survival. But petty crime is also petty time, unless they’ve built up enough of a record for a federal charge, then they’ll just breeze in and out of provincial courts – which is more costly for the taxpayer given the expense of public defenders, judges, jailers, etc. This is why advocates stand by the Housing First approach, as it is cheaper than shelters given that we can begin to step away from this legal merry-go-round with permanent housing.
- NO. We don’t institutionalize anymore. This statement is particularly out of touch. There is the temporary psychiatric hospital in Port Coquitlam for those who fall under the Mental Health Act; there is the Eric Martin Pavilion, which is more of a temporary holding facility for people to pass through whatever psychoise they’re working through; and a few supportive housing facilities in town also have massive waiting lists, but there’s no bastion of “permanent residential institutions for the mental ill” that has the capacity to absorb even half of the numbers we’re talking about - and that’s assuming that half those numbers met the criteria of mental disorders which are stiffer criteria than situational depression (which everyone who is homeless has) or anxiety (which everyone in a pandemic has).
- BC Housing is eager to empty out the hotels they’re presently renting with the homeless they’re presently accommodating. As these spaces are still privately owned, unless mandated by the government these private agencies can evict on a dime if they want, which is to say there is no stability for people with mental health issues, addiction issues, or who are on income assistance to afford these options without support.
SO now I’m going to address possible solutions to the above problems. I have two magic bullets. What most advocates will tell you is that “there is no magic bullet” to the housing crisis, and that’s true, but we’ve all got our own pet theories as to how to manage things better. So here are my two:
Tiny houses. The Tyee has recently published a few articles on this front, and I don’t think I’m going to say anything above and beyond what they’ve said, but briefly: Tiny house movements have been getting more traction for the level of affordability plus a leave of autonomy that is needed for success to happen in recovery. When I say affordability here I am talking about public affordability: shelters are expensive, and they don’t really offer much of a return when we’re talking about the scale of the problem we’re looking to address. 3.5 million dollars will buy you 50 permanent beds, say, and those are transition beds that just means the other 1500 people who are on the waiting list are still in Beacon Hill Park, or wherever. By contrast you can put up a lot of tiny houses for cheaper. The houses would need a smallish NGO to manage their recovery programs and do case-management for the population housed there, but overall, you get a comprehensive stretch for your tax-dollar.
My other magic bullet is land value capture, which is cutting closer to the root of the problem. A lot of literature is coming out these days around the financialization of housing. What that means is our treatment as housing as a commodity, as opposed to a necessity, has resulted in housing further and further abstracted from any kind of relationship to the community that stands upon it. This has been the subject of a recent documentary featuring the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Leilai Farha, who targets Blackstone investments in the movie. This is pertinent for Victoria as Blackstone has partnered with Starlight investments, which presently owns about 18 buildings in Victoria, for a total of 894 units of housing.
You may recall that Starlight made some headlines in Victoria a few years ago when their tenants in James Bay took them to arbitration for the asbestos that was jiggled around when they were renovating, and there were a number of tenants that left because after two years of listening to the jackhammers they couldn't take it anymore.
Alright, so that makes Starlight a nuisance and not a good landlord, but a threat to affordable housing? Well it does get worse; with the present pandemic, big capital is moving into BC to buy up rental stock while it’s cheap. This Vancouver Sun article details the efforts that the NGO community in Vancouver is taking to try and preserve the remaining low-cost rental housing that was built in the 50s, 60s, and 70s - and by preserve I mean they’ll keep Starlight from buying it, renovating it, and jacking the rents up by 50% or more. I’ll add that this should count as public theft as those buildings were originally built with government subsidies back in the day when this country provided subsidies to the market to build rental housing. Now the market is buying them up at a time when the public needs them most.
I’ll say that this is a good move on the part of the NGOs, but it’s also a move to keep things from getting worse -- it’s not a “fix”. And even a fix that just looks at the “supply” side of the equation is providing a neoclassical economic solution to a financialized problem. Just adding more houses/rental units will not fix the housing crisis, and that’s because it’s not a housing crisis - it’s a real estate crisis.
What Land Value Capture (LVC) would cap the crisis - or at least not make it as rampant. The basic premise is simple enough: you tax the value of the land.
LVC is an alternative property tax with slightly different characteristics. Like business rates and council tax, it is levied annually. Like business rates, it is levied on the rental value of property but, unlike both council tax and business rates, it is levied solely on the unimproved site value of property. Therefore it falls on the owner rather than the occupier, and on the highest value use permitted on the site.(Wrightman, Andy. A Land Value Tax for England: Fair, efficient, Sustainable. March 2013.)
In BC we have seen the cost of land explode because real estate has become the way in which wealth is extracted from the existing buildings and infrastructure, but both of these are tied in human necessity, everybody needs a place to live and a way to get there. Speculation essentially squats on what’s already there and balloons the profit of it, as the tennis ball of property is tossed back and forth between investors, and the price rising with each hit of the racket.
An effective LVC applied in Victoria would be a counter-weight to the speculation that happens in this city. On the one hand it would disincentivize market forces from scooping up all our aging rental housing, and thereby preserve what affordable housing stock is left, and for those still wishing to construct in the city, it would provide a pool of funding that would go back into the city infrastructure - transportation projects that would make accessible the city’s core for those who have had to move due to the cost of housing, or more local affordable housing.
In this brilliant article in the Jacobin, Dan Darrah details how we got to this point in Canada, via a long history of government backing away from public services to let the market take the space. Once upon a time, the government was an active player in the housing market: it subsidized the construction of rental properties, built social housing, below market housing, and funded co-operatives. These interventions resulted in market competition that kept the price of housing down. If you go through the article, you’ll be shocked by what CHMC used to do - and it is that “used to,” that lack, is a BIG part of why so many are doing without right now. We must not look up those camped out in Beacon Hill as individuals who are trying to “drop out” of our society, but as folks who, if we maintained the economic supports that we had in place 40 years ago, would be doing alright. We’re talking about public theft in so many ways.
I find it deeply egregious that there seems to be a shift to the reactionary right in these conversations. There is a growing tendency on the part of many observing the plight of the homeless to indulge the simplistic urge to blame the individual in front of them, and while this is frustrating, it is understandable; it is part of the cognitive-miserliness from which bad habits are formed. It is a human trait. That said we, as a citizenry, should be vigilant in resisting these bad habits individually and collectively. So when we see douchebags like this start advocating for the harassment of the homeless, we must be aware that he is playing into these bad habits, and this collective frustration that we are all feeling in this time of social and economic stagnation, is being pinned on a scapegoat. This has been the way that facism has reared its ugly head over the years, through simple blame and easy fear.
