Thoughts on BC Politics and More

A new housing minister means new policies. For Kamloops, it means a new supportive housing project won’t offer drug recovery supports despite assurances earlier this year. That’s according to councillor Bill Sarai, who said previous housing minister Ravi Kahlon would have arranged for a contentious BC Housing project to restrict drug use for its tenants in favour of recovery supports. “We had a minister in a meeting that said he would support recovery-based housing if we had data to support it,” Sarai said at a council meeting today, Dec. 9. He was speaking while council debated whether to lobby new Housing Minister Christine Boyle to change plans for an North Kamloops supportive housing project. It’s a project that was met with opposition from neighbourhood residents, who voiced concern over the prospect that the project would allow drug use and exacerbate social issues in the neighbourhood, including petty crime, open drug use and homelessness ... CLICK HE...

The province’s refusal to consider a request from Nanaimo city council to provide sober housing for those who qualify for supportive housing has the mayor of Nanaimo scratching his head. In an interview, Mayor Leonard Krog said he can’t understand why the province won’t give people trying to recover from addiction a fighting chance to succeed. “Surely, if we can offer facilities where people who are in active addiction can take their drugs safely, and we’re prepared to staff and fund those, is it unreasonable to expect that we would be able to provide housing for people who, hopefully, have a chance to not end up on the streets in the horrible conditions that many live in now”  ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The presence of second-hand fentanyl smoke is so severe at some British Columbia supportive housing facilities that workers cannot escape “substantial exposure,” even if they stay in their offices and don’t venture into hallways or tenants rooms. That is the among the findings of tests conducted at 14 British Columbia supportive housing facilities, results that contributed to the province’s decision to form a working group aimed at tackling safety issues — including second-hand fentanyl exposure. The assessments, conducted by Sauve Safety Services for BC Housing, tested facilities in Vancouver and Victoria — finding elevated levels of airborne fentanyl even in the main office of all three buildings tested in Vancouver ... CLICK HERE for the full story 

BC's housing minister responded to more than a year of complaints by supportive housing providers this week by announcing a “review” of their concerns, the latest in a series of slow-moving, navel-gazing exercises by the New Democratic government. Ravi Kahlon said a new “working group” of police, supportive housing providers, BC Housing and others will tackle the issue of weapons, violence and unchecked drug use by tenants unfit to stay in supportive housing but who can’t be easily evicted by the providers under the Residential Tenancy Act. “We’re tasking this working group to come back to us with solutions,” said Kahlon ... CLICK HERE for the full story

  Image: Vancouver Sun -- May 2017 The BC government has tasked a working group to make recommendations on ways to remove drug-trafficking and weapons from supportive housing buildings, including possible changes to the Residential Tenancy Act. Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon announced a time-limited working group in a press conference on Monday. “We’re tasking this working group to come back to us with solutions, and we have made a commitment that we will enact the recommendations that come from them,” Kahlon said. The working group will include supportive housing providers, law enforcement, union representatives, as well as First Nations and tenant advocates. The aim is to better equip supportive housing providers to remove residents involved in drug trafficking, weapons and crime ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Residents in Vancouver’s affluent Kitsilano neighbourhood waged a fierce three-year legal and political battle against a planned supportive-housing development on city-owned land. They won. In April the city backed down, signing a consent agreement to halt rezoning for the project and paying the Kitsilano Coalition $3,445 in legal costs. Advocates fear this is just the latest sign of a bleak future for supportive housing in the province ... CLICK HERE for the full story

British Columbia’s housing minister says he is concerned about the future of supportive-housing projects in Vancouver after the city quashed construction plans in a west-side neighbourhood amid a legal battle with residents over the rezoning changes. The rezoning for the 129-unit, 13-storey project in Kitsilano was rescinded April 30, after a consent order between a local residents’ group and the city essentially overturned a 2022 approval. In an interview with The Globe and Mail, BC Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said he was surprised by the city’s decision to abandon fighting a lawsuit the Kitsilano Coalition for Children and Family Safety Society had brought claiming the city’s public-hearing process for the rezoning was flawed ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Yesterday, Claire Rattée, MLA for Skeena and Official Opposition Critic for Mental Health and Addictions, stood with Tyler Gibbs — the son of Diane Chandler, a 60-year-old woman who died alone in her room at Foxglove, a provincially-funded supportive housing facility operated by RainCity Housing in Surrey. Her body remained undiscovered for 11 days. “What happened to Diane Chandler is not just a tragedy, it’s a failure of every safeguard that was supposed to protect her,” said Rattée. “This government calls it supportive housing. But where was the support? Where was the oversight? Where was the care?” Gibbs only learned of the details surrounding his mother’s death once he inquired during her cremation a month later. During that same time, Tyler learned that the facility had mistaken Diane for another tenant during a wellness check, another resident who tragically passed away a few days after this incident. “If the staff thought that this other resident was Diane, where did they think ...

Housing providers need better tools to stop criminal elements creeping into supportive housing and taking advantage of a vulnerable population, says Victoria’s top cop, who argues police should be more involved in the early stages of housing decisions. Chief Del Manak, giving his final quarterly report to council before his retirement this year, said he wants to see the province strengthen the Residential Tenancy Act so operators can keep criminals out of supportive-housing facilities. “When you have safety compromised, that has to trump most other things,” Manak said. “[Housing providers] are asked to do a very difficult job. If they’re asking … [for] tools to help keep their location safe, keep their staff safe and keep residents safe, then we need to be listening to what their concerns are and working with them and giving them the tools they’re asking for" ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Representatives of BC’s growing network of “supportive housing” facilities formed an association last week to go public with an urgent plea for Premier David Eby: let us regain control by giving us authority to ban weapons from housing units and evict people who are dangerous to staff and residents. The common public reaction to this was, what? They can’t do that now? Can’t they just call the cops? In many cases, no, they can’t. And now there’s been an apparent murder in a converted old motel in Victoria, one of many incidents where criminal intruders gain access to housing and use it as a base for drug dealing and associated violence ... CLICK HERE for the full story

“This System Is Broken” MLA Claire Rattée Demands Immediate Action and Cross-Ministerial Review   VICTORIA, B.C.:   Claire Rattée, MLA for Skeena and Official Opposition Critic for Mental Health and Addictions, is calling for immediate intervention and a full systemic review following the case of an 18-year-old Indigenous woman who has been failed repeatedly by British Columbia’s care systems. The young woman has been living in a homeless encampment for nearly a year. She is being sexually assaulted, using fentanyl and meth, and has experienced multiple near-death overdoses. Despite her pleas for help and her father's ongoing advocacy, no coordinated intervention has taken place. Her case, which includes serious allegations of abuse and neglect, highlights glaring gaps across multiple government ministries and systems: She was molested in a hospital by a convicted nurse and later placed with male staff despite documented trauma. She was placed in a su...

As BC Housing buys up more properties in Kamloops, some councillors have grown concerned about the lost tax revenue. Just how they plan to tackle the issue isn't clear yet, but they've identified the problem: more supportive housing means less property taxes in city coffers ... "We get all excited when we cut the ribbon on a new hotel or new commercial property, but in the same breath they're getting taken off the market. We're not really adding anything to our tax base as we're trying to grow it" ... Across the province, former motels and new builds dedicated to supportive housing can't be taxed by the municipal government, even if they charge rent ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon spent the weekend tut-tutting Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s new plan to halt construction of supportive housing, arguing the move will make the notorious Downtown Eastside neighbourhood even less safe. “If we're saying that we're going to not support the people that are already in the community until we wait for somebody else to do something, it's just going to cause more unrest in the community,” Kahlon told the CBC. The housing minister said he shared the mayor’s frustration that other communities in the region haven’t pulled their weight on supporting housing, “but by saying that we're not going to have supportive housing, it means more people will be homeless, more people will be sleeping in parks, and that actually is a bigger detriment to community safety than actually having housing available for them" ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Housing providers are split on recent changes to B.C.’s residential tenancy regulations that will allow wellness checks and no-guest policies in supportive housing. Don McTavish, director of housing and shelters at Cool Aid, said the province made a “bold move” to change a regulation that will take rights away from residents, but the change will help housing staff keep vulnerable people safe by giving staff power to enter a unit to check on people and control who enters the housing facilities. The province announced last week it would amend the Residential Tenancy Act to clearly define supportive housing and exempt it from sections of the act that prohibit guest policies and wellness checks. B.C. Housing is developing standards for conducting wellness checks in good faith and reasonable guest policies ... CLICK HERE for the full story

The homeless are assumed to be universally dysfunctional, drug-addicted, criminal half-wits; therefore, the only housing I was able to find is “supportive housing” in a former hotel. ... Some of us have never used drugs or drink, broken any laws or made “bad choices” — unless turning to farming full-time when denied good employment because of rampant sexism counts as a “bad choice.” As for being “lazy” and “not wanting to work”: I did not get my three titanium joints by watching a television set. A lifelong farmer, I lost my home and my prize-winning herd almost five years ago. I am now one of the fortunate “housed.” I thought some might be interested in what this is like ... CLICK HERE for the full story

BC Green Party wants weather shelters to stay open all year to support the homeless As cold, wet weather hits most parts of British Columbia, some elected officials are calling for the provincial government to keep extreme weather shelters open year-round.  B.C. Green Party Leader Sonia Furstenau told CBC News that not keeping those shelters open means municipalities have to scramble to find locations, staff and resources when temperatures hit a certain temperature.  "It is a really inefficient way of making sure that people are literally not freezing to death," she told On the Coast host Gloria Macarenko last week. "We have to do so much better than that" ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Atira fined for failing to maintain alarms and fire extinguishers in supportive housing.   After a fatal blaze at the Winters Hotel killed two tenants, a Vancouver fire services inspection blitz found that Atira Property Management Inc. had failed to maintain fire alarms at four other SRO buildings, court document show The inspections also showed the supportive-housing operator had not properly maintained fire extinguishers at two of the buildings ... CLICK HERE for the full story

An embattled supportive housing provider has decided to sell a $1.2-million loft office space and will no longer operate a troubled single-room occupancy hotel, following a conflict of interest scandal that raised serious concerns about how the organization has been awarded millions in government funding. While the interim CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society says progress has been made since she took on the job on May 30, she adds there is still more work to be done to ensure safe conditions for residents and staff at Atira-operated buildings ... CLICK HERE for the full story

Nearly five months after a damning audit revealed mismanagement at Atira Women’s Resource Society, another one of the housing provider’s staffers has come forward with allegations of unsafe working conditions ... ... “I feel that when issues are brought forward to management, there’s a culture within management to maybe bend the truth or cover them up, act like it didn’t happen or come up with a BAND-AID solution. There’s no thought behind the solutions to these problems and they’re not making meaningful changes that make our working circumstances any safer" ... CLICK HERE for the full story