Rationalizing that the city has a disproportionate number of supportive housing compared to its population, and that outlying municipalities should step up and shoulder their share, Vancouver City Council voted in late February 2025 to temporarily halt the construction of supportive housing. The CEO and two Board members of the PHS Community Services Society, along with 90+ other concerned citizens spoke against the motion, which passed handily with Mayor Ken Sim and his ABC Party. The City claimed that they were adopting the most compassionate approach that would truly help the unhoused in the Downtown Eastside (DTES, disregarding the mountain of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of low-barrier supportive housing in sustaining people with complex needs and stemming the growing unhoused population. As one speaker against the motion argued, Vancouver also has a disproportionate portion of the jobs, wealth, health care and roads in the province but no one argues that they should be dispersed to outlying cities.
With historically high levels of homelessness and an ongoing drug poisoning crisis, should we reduce the proportion of housing in Vancouver that houses the most clinically complex, most behaviourally challenging and hardest to house people?
Decades worth of data from Canada, the UK and the US, has demonstrated repeatedly that low barrier supportive housing is the most effective and cost-effective means of retaining housing for people with complex care needs, improving safety, and reducing the burden on acute and emergency health care and policing resources.
Supportive housing provides essential services to people experiencing homelessness, violence, trauma and mental health problems across the city of Vancouver. Refusing to build much-needed supportive housing will not lower the number of people needing and seeking housing in Vancouver, it will only deepen the harm and trauma experienced by these people. The approach taken by the motion on the table treats preventable harm as an acceptable cost in a regional negotiation, which is most certainly should not be.
Halting the construction of new supportive housing units will also not ensure that other municipalities in British Columbia pick up a higher portion of supportive housing and services, only high-level negotiations with government and communities can broker the deals necessary to incentivize municipalities to a regional strategy to care for their most vulnerablized citizens. Currently, Vancouver has the sophisticated and high-level balance of services to provide for the complex needs for many of the homeless and poorly housed. It will take other municipalities years to develop the same level of warp-around care and in the meantime, the death rate will climb in Vancouver, not in the municipalities, and the reputation of our city will continue to decline around the globe.
It is generally understood that there are many police and emergency services calls to supportive housing. However, the appropriate question is how many calls for service would there be without supportive housing which provides 24/7 attendance to individuals in crisis, conflict de-escalation, wellness checks, advanced overdose response, and immediate emergency response? In 2024 alone, our one organization (PHS) provided advance overdose response in over 800 incidents and diverted police resources in thousands of incidents of mental health and other crisis and distress situations. Research shows that supportive housing, most of which is provided by non-profits, actually saves money by providing on-site preventive and care services that divert people from health care, police, prisons, and other costly public services.
Health care needs low barrier supportive housing. The University Health Network (UHN), the largest hospital network in Canada, is currently working to develop housing in Toronto specifically to address the hundreds of patients with no fixed address who disproportionally drain acute medical resources because they have nowhere else to go or be discharged to.
As well, low barrier supportive housing is currently the only viable means of delivering complex care on a meaningful scale. “Complex care” facilities are health authority pilot projects that in the main, envision better-resourced versions of what we are already operating. Health services are cost-effectively integrated with low barrier supportive housing which often have embedded clinics, clinical outreach medication management and home support.
Decreasing low-barrier supportive housing in Vancouver will increase the numbers of homeless people with severe conditions such as recurring psychotic episodes and severe substance use disorder. It will overtax police and health care. It will disperse a significant proportion of those with complex needs to seek help from sources – public, private, charitable; parks, libraries and emergency rooms — that are not equipped to provide low-barrier services or are already overwhelmed by such demands.
The DTES’ housing stock does need attention but the Council motion to halt the construction of supportive housing is not an effective planning initiative to address our housing deficit for people with complex needs. Instead, it is a way to provide opportunities for the redevelopment of the DTES at the expense of the city’s most vulnerable citizens. What we need is a concerted regional strategy, with close consultation with all stakeholders and levels of government, and Vancouver should be taking the lead on this.
Instead of taking the draconian approach reflected in the Council motion, Vancouver should be a model for how to house people with complex needs that other municipalities can emulate.
- First published in The Social Lens: A Social Work Action Blog, and is an amalgamation of the speaking notes from PHS CEO Micheal Vonn and Board members Professor Penny Gurstein (emeritus) and Professor Donna Baines, UBC.
