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Welcome to She They Us, a podcast about making room in housing for women and gender-diverse people brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women’s Housing.
Join host Andrea Reimer to hear about why Canada’s housing crisis is hitting households led by women and gender-diverse people harder and what you can do about it.
Please be advised that the topics discussed in this series can be challenging to listen to and explore topics of homelessness, abuse, torture, racism, transphobia, and drug use. Please take care while listening and if you need support, unfortunately there isn't a national crisis line in Canada, but you can find provincial crisis lines and other resources on the podcast website.
So in terms of how the sector is feeling, like again, this was something not anticipated. It has the sector feeling pretty beat up. And I guess it's not surprising when you've got elected leaders punching down. How else is the sector going to feel? It is a sector that provides supports 24-7. It works around the clock
catching people that the system has failed to and now has fewer options to do so. It looks like we're just reverting back to an outreach model. So granola bars for everyone and referrals to nowhere.
Welcome back to She They Us, a podcast brought to you by the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing. I'm your host, Andrea Reimer. I'm a former city councillor for the City of Vancouver, an adjunct professor of practice at UBC's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, and a housing advocate who has experienced homelessness firsthand. In our last episode, we looked through a federal lens when it comes to the housing crisis. We met Ashley of North Bay, Ontario, who
due to rising costs of living, is forced to continue living with her ex-husband following their separation. We also met journalist Francis Bula and Canada's former Chief Innovation Fellow Mike Moffatt, who both talked about the need for and the challenges of complex policy responses to the housing crisis. Through our conversation, we unveiled pain points where the federal government is not well positioned to act.
when it comes to helping women and gender diverse people in Canada's housing crisis. So with this in mind, I thought we would narrow our scope a little bit and focus on local government and Vancouver specifically. Vancouver is one of the most expensive cities in Canada. And between ever rising rents and grocery prices skyrocketing, residents are struggling. Vancouver has wrestled with affordability for decades and as a result was one of the first cities to jump into action
on the national housing crisis. And it looks like it may be one of the first to stop taking action. Let's dive in. Today, we're going to start our conversation talking to Jill Atkey from the BC Nonprofit Housing Association. Jill has been with the organization for 15 years, seven of which she has served as the CEO.
My name is Jill Atkey. I'm the CEO at BC Nonprofit Housing Association and we are the umbrella body for nonprofit housing providers right throughout British Columbia. Just for a bit of context, there are about 800 nonprofit housing providers in British Columbia in virtually every small, mid-sized and large community in the province, delivering about 80,000 units of affordable housing
much of which was developed under old federal programs. And now we're building a lot of new housing for the first time in a generation. As I mentioned earlier, Jill has been at this for a long time. I asked her to talk about the politics and policies that have shaped the current crisis. We have a very long history in this country of incentivizing home ownership. We've done that both
through federal policy and also through provincial policy. So that's just sort of a broad statement to help people understand where our policy preference has been. But I would say too, it's ⁓ in some ways more of a ⁓ lack of policy that has helped shape the crisis as well. So a sense that the market can solve this problem by itself. I do need to step back and just provide a bit of historical perspective
because many of your listeners won't have been alive at that time, but we had, through the federal government, very, very strong incentives for the private sector to build purpose-built rentals. So those older three, four-story walk-ups you see in many communities, those were incentivized through policy in the 60s, 70s, and up until the early 80s, and then the federal government ended those incentives. So it's really at that time...
and you can see it in our built form in cities, ⁓ those buildings stopped being built. And then 10 years later, the early 1990s, they ended new affordable housing supply programs for nonprofits and co-ops. So up until that point in the peak years of those programs, it's surprising and it's even surprising to me when I look at the numbers, almost one in five homes in this country, ⁓ built in this country,
were nonprofit and co-op homes that were affordable when people moved into them on day one and then maintained that affordability in perpetuity. Those programs all stopped in the early 1990s. So we weren't building new supply, either market rental or affordable nonprofit or co-op rental. So that started to put some pressure on the existing supply. ⁓ Flash forward a bit of time, you know,
municipalities started looking at secondary suite policies. So that was a way of relieving some of that pressure. So we'll have people live in basements and help homeowners afford mortgages. So that again worked well for homeowners, worked well for some renters, but they didn't have the security of tenure that they probably wanted. So their homes were always at risk. And so because we weren't building new,
And then at the same time as we talked about earlier, housing affordability for homeowners and potential homeowners kind of got out of reach. People stayed in rental longer and there was no supply there. So that builds up pressure in the system. And again, it really is a system. That's what contributed in large part to driving up rents. It really was on the rental part of the continuum, a supply challenge.
But that affordability erosion is happening right across the system. And so those are some of the intentional policy measures and then a lack of policy attention that all contributed to the crisis that we're in today. Working in this field for as long as she has, Jill has seen a lot of bad. I asked her to speak to where she's seen some good.
I would say Vancouver was for a long time a leader in this space and I think was of the three levels of government probably one of the earliest to recognize the challenge and you'll remember this from from your time on council Andrea incentivizing rental whether it's market rental or providing land for nonprofits and co-ops looking at
inclusionary zoning policies, so on major redevelopments requiring a certain portion of those be social housing. Those were all pretty groundbreaking policy initiatives when at the time that I think the municipality was feeling pretty let down by senior levels of government. So those have all been pretty core successes at the municipal level.
And many municipalities since then have followed suit on those early actions of the City of Vancouver. This feels like a good time to bring in former Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson to talk about what, how, and probably most importantly, why Vancouver did those things. I'm Gregor Robertson. I am the former mayor of Vancouver, 2008 to 18, and I am currently
wading into federal politics again, back in the political scene here in Vancouver, but have spent the last six years as a global ambassador for 13,000 cities around the world working on climate and energy. Full disclosure, as Jill mentioned, I was a member of that council at that time. One of the things that motivated Gregor to run for office was rising homelessness in Vancouver. In the two council terms before he was mayor,
2002 to 2008, homelessness rose by 150 % or 25 % per year in Vancouver. In the 10 years he was mayor, from 2008 to 2018, council's actions were able to slow this rise to 3.8 % per year or 38 % increase over 10 years. But it was a far cry from our hopes to end homelessness.
One of the biggest challenges was that while we could incentivize more rental housing, and we did, we had no control over existing rental housing prices. In a city where the majority of households rent, as rents rose, people were falling through a net that kept getting bigger holes. We tried a lot of things to get around the challenge of the province and federal government holding most of the cards on housing, but not being willing to use them. I asked Gregor to reflect back on that.
Because the federal and provincial governments were very reluctant to support our work on affordable housing and were not investing at all at the time in a significant way, we had to basically figure out whatever we could do as a city to make a dent and get the supply of everything from supportive housing and actually everything from shelters so people weren't sleeping in the street. That was the first priority
coming into office was opening 500 shelter beds in the first few weeks in the middle of winter. So people had somewhere to go inside. But from shelter beds to ⁓ supportive housing to affordable social housing that would qualify for some support from provincial or federal government, particularly provincial, but then also just to have rental supply, because we had decades of not building enough rental housing in Vancouver. All the developers basically would build
market housing, condos for market that they could make more money at. The city hadn't done anything to incentivize or regulate the development industry to build rental housing. And so we dug ourselves a very deep hole of not nearly enough rental housing, particularly as the economic crunch 2008, 2009, I think really intensified that slide of affordability.
And more and more people, as the prices of market housing went up, were forced to rent. And the rental housing wasn't there. So we saw rent skyrocketing ⁓ from all of those problems. And we put incentives in place for developers to start building rental housing. Those incentives used to exist at the federal level, know, way back when in the seventies, a lot of rental housing was built leveraging federal government incentives for developers to build rental.
That's a lot of the affordable rental stock we have in the city is from that era and the 60s and 70s. And we couldn't go as far as that, not having the budget to do that, but we could have some incentives with density in that more kind of middle market rental housing and ended up tipping that balance and over half of the housing that was being built turned into rental rather than ⁓ overwhelmingly market
condo housing. So we were successful with initiatives all along that spectrum, but we could have done way more if we'd had support from provincial and federal governments. There was a period during my tenure on council that it felt like things were leveling out. The 2011 homeless count showed an 82 % reduction in unsheltered residents to just 154 people. But then around 2014, once more,
We saw evictions and rent start steeply climbing again and consequently also homelessness. We didn't know it at the time, but that was the front end of a global housing crisis. asked Gregor what he would have done differently if he knew that. I feel like we did everything we could do. mean, that was those were the conversations that we had and the debates we had at council was.
You know, what else can we do? We pulled all the experts we could find from, not only from the city, but globally to advise us on what else can we do given the limitations of a city, both budgetary and with jurisdiction. I feel like we did everything we could, as you say, we threw everything we had at it. In 2015, Justin Trudeau and the Liberals took over federally and acknowledged, you know, they had some commitments to
tackling housing affordability in their platform, which had a lot of urban components to it, which I think we thought, good, there's someone coming that recognizes the problem. And in hindsight, we didn't put enough pressure on them to deliver programs, budget, jurisdiction, any of the above urgently, right now, like right away, as soon as they got into office. You know, I think we were assuming that would happen.
and they ended up going into a national housing strategy process that took years and lots of good engagement across the country. Although a lot of the country wasn't quite in the upheaval that we were in, but it delayed the whole process and they unfortunately never got the federal government back in the business of building housing, which used to happen up until the nineties. The federal government under CMHC used to build
a lot of the affordable housing in the country. And that stopped due to what were presumed to be budgetary constraints or concerns. And the federal government didn't build housing. The province couldn't make up the difference, particularly under conservative rule for four terms. The province flipped over in 2017 and similar thing happened. Lots of promises, okay, we're going to start helping you on affordable housing. To their credit, I think
Once we had both of those governments at the table with the intention to act on affordable housing, we did get movement. We were able to do things like 600 modular homes for people who are homeless in one year. We were able to put that up on different chunks of city and vacant land at record pace. So we were able to do some things that were on our list that required provincial and federal support, but it was right at the end of our
term of office and you know some of that has continued and scaled. The National Housing Accelerator program has finally kicked in and is building at more scale. I think we as a city continued and credit to the private sector especially the co-op sector the Co-op Housing Federation did an extraordinary job of creating a community land trust with the city initially and that's now I believe over 3,000 units of housing that are permanently affordable since 2016 so
Some of these things, take a while to scale up ⁓ and we got them going, we got them initiated. I think the empty homes tax has now generated $140 million in revenue for affordable housing. So I think some of these initiatives have made a massive difference in the six years since leaving office, but you know, took those initial years, they took longer and that's the challenge of government. How can you implement an impact in a crisis urgently?
I chatted with Gregor a few days before the federal election. In fact, he did the interview from his campaign office in Vancouver Fraser View, South Burnaby, where he was running with the Liberal Party. He ended up winning the seat and subsequently was appointed to cabinet as the Minister of Housing and Infrastructure. He shared with me some ideas on what he was hoping that this government would do differently. You're going to hear more about that in episode six.
Meanwhile, the last question I asked him for this episode is what he sees as the best approach to tackle the specific challenges households led by women and gender diverse people face in the housing crisis. I'd say there are all sorts of really tough challenges within the housing affordability universe to make sure that all people and particularly the most vulnerable and that would be women led households as you identified, have
access, have the opportunity to have safe and secure housing. And so how do we get at that? It's obviously really challenging for a federal government to do that from Ottawa. They can certainly help by providing data and some of the broader data sets that the federal government can access can help with this. But think ultimately a lot of this has to get worked out locally on the ground in communities.
And you know, it's really critical that local governments are at the table and shaping what housing's needed for their community and that they are in turn engaging with the community directly and making sure it's a representative of the community. It's not the loudest voices that show up, which often happens in government. Those who have access or a loud voice shape the policy or the direction.
And in this case, we have to make sure we're hearing from everybody and people who need it the most. So I think that's where the responsibility and incentives for local government to engage and shape the housing that gets built, that gets supported by public dollars in particular, that it is informed by the community and that it is serving ⁓ women and people with housing challenges that...
otherwise have been kind of kept away or locked out of the opportunities. And this is a great opportunity to a more just and more equitable approach to all this that serves all people. Meanwhile, current Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has not been so focused on those most impacted by the housing crisis. It's a pretty long list of changes he's made, but perhaps the one that's most shocked housing advocates was Sim's announcement that the city is getting out of supportive housing.
To help you understand why advocates are so concerned, I asked Jill to explain supportive housing. Yeah, so supportive housing, as the name suggests, is housing with built-in supports. It's kind of directed at a number of different population groups. So you could have seniors who live in supportive housing ⁓ who just require, in many cases, light supports, whether that's meals or help with housekeeping to maintain their housing.
We have supportive housing for youth, so youth aging out of care, who really are, as a colleague, Katherine McParland, before she passed, had described it as the superhighway to homelessness. So youth aging out of care with no real housing options, as well as people with mental health challenges, ⁓ substance use disorder. So it's housing with supports, with a pretty broad range as to how that's defined. So about that announcement.
Yeah, so by the time that motion came forward, just a bit of context, end of January, the mayor made an announcement that caught really everybody, not just the supportive housing sector by surprise, ⁓ that they were effectively announcing a pause on all supportive housing development throughout the city of Vancouver. So put that announcement forward at the end of January and then...
really was about four weeks later that an actual motion came forward to cancel and the motion wasn't a ban on all supportive housing it was a pause on types of supportive housing
until certain conditions were met, which effectively had the rest of the region catching up with the city of Vancouver ⁓ in terms of their regional share. It excluded things like seniors' supportive housing, supportive housing for youth, any supportive housing that was brought forward by Vancouver Coastal Health, one of our health authorities in the region. So there were a number of exclusions. Well, that helped to provide
clarity, what we were left with at the end of the day was really it was ⁓ and is now that it's being passed a pause and it's a temporary pause, we don't know how long temporary is, on housing for two specific population groups, those with mental illness and those who experience substance use disorder. So really it's directly targeted at those who are most vulnerable
and require the most supports. From my time on council, I know that many, if not most, unhoused people fall into one of those two categories. I asked her if that's still the case and she confirmed this. That's right. And again, those who are most vulnerable, you know, there's been a bit of conflation through this conversation between supportive housing and street disorder,
crime. ⁓ The reality is, and this is ⁓ straight from the Vancouver Police Department and some research they did, those experiencing homelessness are 20 times more likely to be the victims of violence, not the perpetrators of violence, the victims of violence. So it really is decisions like this that have the potential to make communities less safe, not more safe.
To better understand how much of a difference supportive housing can make in the lives of women and gender diverse people who have been hit by the housing crisis, I want to introduce you to Lisa. Lisa works in supportive housing, but she's also lived there. My name is Lisa Guerin I am a recovering addict. I have been clean for nine years. I am also a single mom to three boys, my son Shiloh, who is eight.
my nephew Daniel, who is eight, and my oldest son Riley, who is 12. I work for Atira Property Management. I am a program manager and I currently am the program manager of the Colonial Hotel, which is in Gastown. And it is about 122 years old. And it's a...
single room occupancy, low barrier to no barrier supportive housing program or vulnerable individuals in the downtown Eastside. I asked her to explain low barrier to no barrier housing. Low barrier to no barrier is housing that doesn't put up ⁓ barriers or complications for those who have mental health issues.
⁓ substance use disorder issues. for example, and they're also on social assistance, so they can't afford market housing or housing at all. And ⁓ for example, market housing, ⁓ lower end market housing, RGI housing, all that kind of housing, like you're expected to, well you're supposed to the rules in the SRO too, but there's more barriers in that housing
than there is for people in low barrier or no barrier housing. pretty much they can just be themselves. They don't have to worry about judgment. They don't have to worry about feeling unsafe in their home. If they're using, we do wellness checks. There's different agencies as well that they offer supportive housing as well. They have a little bit of a higher barrier than some other agencies.
If that makes sense. So like Atira will house those who are extremely hard to house. So somebody who typically, for example, wouldn't know, has been living outside for a very long time and doesn't know how to or is just moving inside for the first time. Those are the type of people that we house. Lisa has had a challenging housing journey herself. Yeah. So I came to Vancouver from Calgary in 2010. And when I came here,
I was heavily in my addiction and I was homeless. And I bounced around from a couple SROs. Like I lived at the Roosevelt. That was the first one that I lived in. I wasn't successful in my housing there. I was moved in there from a shelter. I didn't know Vancouver very well. Support workers, like pretty much it was supposed to be a supportive housing
program, but it was just staff behind a desk. There was no, so I wasn't successful there. I ended up being evicted. I didn't know how to get on social assistance. I didn't know where to go. So I ended up being evicted. And from there I went and I lived at the Cobalt Hotel, which is up on Main, and I lived there for a couple of years. And then I ended up homeless again. And I...
ended up one of my friends who I visited her at her unit, her home, quite a bit, she ended up taking me to the Colonial Hotel to talk to a support worker there and they housed me that day. So yeah, I lived there for, when did I move in? I think I moved in in 2014 and I was there right up until 2016 in May
when I had my son. yeah, so, and then from there I went after I had my son, thankfully I ended up going to a transition shelter because you can't have a baby and go back to the Colonial, right? And Atira women stepped in again and I ended up becoming a tenant at the Sorella house with my son and I was there in their family program. And now in 2019, I came to work for Atira.
And now I'm the manager of the Colonial Hotel, building, the SRO I used to live in. I asked her if she could tell me what difference it made in her life to have access to supportive housing. I found out that I was pregnant with my son and I wanted to keep him. I didn't want him to be taken away from me. So I did whatever I needed to do to get clean and to be able to take him home.
And there is an amazing program at the BC Women's Hospital called FIR Square, the Families in Recovery ⁓ program, and there's SheWay, and they help mothers and children in the Downtown Eastside be successful in keeping their children and keeping moms and babies together. So I was fortunate that I ended up at FIR Square and
FIR Square is like, it's a program where moms who are pregnant can go there like, I think it's a month or two before they have baby. They can stay in the hospital, they can get themselves clean and sober, they can learn how to be a parent, they can look for housing so they can, with like support from the staff at the FIR Square program and at Sheway. ⁓ And then they can leave, they get to leave with the baby and I remember what it was like
for me leaving with my son, like I was screaming at his dad to like, get in the cab, get in the cab before they change their mind. You know, it's like, let's get out of here before they change their mind and they don't want to let me take my son home. I asked Lisa what life would have been like if she had found out that she was pregnant while sleeping on the streets or if she'd found out when she was in a different SRO without the supports. How might that have changed the pathway for her and her children?
When I was pregnant with my son Riley, it was here in Vancouver and I was living in the Cobalt Hotel. That's a prime example of the difference ⁓ in my story here because when I had my son Riley, I was living in the Cobalt and that's a privately owned SRO with no wraparound supports. Nobody came to connect with me. I had heard about these programs but didn't know where they were.
I ended up going to St. Paul's and my son was apprehended at birth. So what happens when that happens? When you, you know, you just go right back into the addiction and you start spiraling, right? When I got pregnant with my son Shiloh, I was living in the Colonial Hotel, but there was the support workers, the staff, the wraparound supports that got me connected to FIR Square to She-Way, to the people I needed to be.
⁓ And I got to leave with my son. I asked her if she ever felt unsafe in supportive housing. It can be. It can be very intimidating and scary at times. But at the same time, you get to know all your neighbours and it becomes a very small, tight knit little community in the building between the tenants. And everybody looks out for each other. And in the SROs, like we do our best to
keep all the bad things everybody hears about out. We do our best. We have cameras, we have staff doing rounds, managers doing rounds. And then, Sorella House, when I was living there with my son, I was mixed in, like the building was mixed. Like there was women with families and then there was single women. The building, being just women, was a lot quieter.
And for the Colonial, well the Colonial's always been kind of wild, but it's okay now. I don't know, never, I personally, myself, I didn't feel unsafe in either building. I can't speak for other people and their feelings, but I never felt like I was unsafe at any time in either building. Or my son was unsafe at Sorella.
What about her safety when living on the streets? Outside is like a whole different situation. It's more dangerous, I believe, for women, especially. It's dangerous for everybody, but more so for women in ⁓ tent encampments. Just falling asleep outside anywhere as a woman is absolutely not safe. I would do everything possible not to sleep outside.
But it did have to happen and yeah, sometimes you're just so tired because you've been up for days, you have no choice, right? And then you don't really like, you're out cold because you've been up for days. You don't know what's going on around you, which makes you very vulnerable and makes it very dangerous. Before finishing my conversation with Lisa, I asked her what she would say to Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim if she could. Mr. Ken Sim.
You can't take away supportive housing. You can't remove people from their community into other communities that they're unfamiliar away from their supports and expect them to be successful in their housing. It's just not going to happen. So yes, the SROs or the supportive housing programs that we have are not great. They're in old buildings.
like 100 plus year old buildings, so you don't get rid of them. You renovate them, bring them up to date, know, maybe make them a little bit bigger. Just renovate them, right? Keep them there, keep people in their community and keep people connected to what they know or they're not gonna be successful. And then instead of having, and then you're gonna have all these other places with all these displaced people who don't know how...
to fit into whatever community or city you've decided to send them to. And then you're going to have angry people living in those communities who are like, why would you do this? For the last word, I'm going back to Jill. I asked her what she wished people knew about supportive housing. She tells me many of the things you've heard from Lisa, but one thing really stands out for me.
It's a model that works. It was under a conservative federal government that we adopted this as official policy right across the country. Before that time, people had to graduate into housing. You had to be clean. You had to be sober. You had to be able to maintain your housing. We did away with that model, and it would be a real shame to go back into it. So how does that feel, to be potentially headed backwards after so much work to move forwards?
So in terms of how the sector is feeling, again, this was something not anticipated, an announcement was made, it caught the sector off guard and I would say over the course of ⁓ layered pandemics, right? So we had the global health pandemic, but the sector was already grappling with a drug poisoning crisis. And then this comes on top of all of that and it has the sector feeling
pretty beat up and I guess it's not surprising when you've got elected leaders punching down, how else is the sector going to feel? It is a sector that provides supports 24-7, it works around the clock, catching people that the system has failed to and now has fewer options to do so. I had one provider characterize it as, you know, it looks like we're just...
reverting back to an outreach model. So granola bars for everyone and referrals to nowhere. And when you have a sector that's got expertise in this, ⁓ how to support people and the best that they can offer is a granola bar. It creates an environment for pretty significant moral distress. We know what the solutions are. We know what is going to help people and we can't offer those services because leadership
our leadership has decided to limit those options. So the decision is kind of one thing, the decision around the motion, but how it got framed was another that has another set of complications or implications both for the sector and the people served by it. So in his original statement, the mayor referred to the sector as the poverty industrial complex.
First of all, not a great place to start a productive conversation. somehow the solution got characterized as the problem. housing is now responsible for street disorder. Housing providers have failed to reform the system while at the same time trying to catch people falling through a broken system.
As I said to Council when I spoke to this motion in opposition, system reform is necessary. It's not the job of the nonprofit sector who is trying to support people. It's the job of leadership and leaders need to step up on system reform if and when it needs to happen. with no safe housing to go to, where do people end up? In the next episode of She, They, Us.
We explore how the healthcare system is experiencing increasing pressure when it comes to helping those, especially women and gender diverse people, who are experiencing homelessness. We will speak with researcher Jesse Jenkinson from Unity Health Toronto. The healthcare system is becoming a place that people are using as a warming center and we don't want to kick people out in the winter and we also can't have this happening. Like the emergency department was getting, you know, quite full.
and we're trying to help people find beds, like talking to the frontline workers, they were on the phone trying to help people find beds. There was just nowhere to go. All the beds were full. Thank you to Jill, Gregor and Lisa for sharing their expertise on today's episode. And a big thank you to Lisa for reliving some very challenging days. I hope you'll honour her bravery to speak up
by sharing this episode to help more people understand how action and inaction can make a difference for the women and gender diverse people at the front lines of Canada's housing crisis. Thank you for joining us. I'm Andrea Reimer on behalf of the Pan-Canadian Voice for Women's Housing.
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