Former seniors residence will provide 85 transitional units for those most at risk
Frances Bula
Sun
homeless person gets some sleep on Cordova Street. There may soon be many new housing units for the homeless. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER – The first project in what promises to be a massive B.C. push to get homeless people off the streets was unveiled Wednesday.
Housing Minister Rich Coleman announced the opening of Grace Mansion, a former seniors residence in the Downtown Eastside that will now become 85 units of transitional housing for those at risk of homelessness.
And he hinted that there is a much bigger announcement to come soon about the creation of hundreds of units of social housing — much more than the original 450 the government announced it was prepared to fund in its Housing Matters initiative last fall.
“Today’s announcement is just part of the bigger picture,” Coleman said. “There’s more to come, a lot more to come.”
He said many groups and cities have responded to the province’s call for proposals to build shelters and transitional housing for the homeless. One offer that has come in is from Coquitlam, which is willing to give a piece of land if the province can find a non-profit operator to manage any housing built on it.
On Wednesday in Vancouver, Coleman announced the province has put in $9 million to help the Salvation Army buy the Grace Mansion building, plus committed to 35 years of rent subsidies of almost $1 million a year. The Salvation Army contributed $2 million for the residence, for a total purchase price of $11 million. The building was assessed at $6.2 million this year, but B.C. Housing officials say that’s because it was only half-occupied. If the province had to build a new building with 85 units, it would have cost well over $11 million.
The plan is that residents will stay for a maximum of two years, after having benefited from support services to help them with employment, drug-addiction, literacy and lifeskill problems.
Although the province has been pushing the idea of creating new forms of social housing that have smaller rooms than the current 320 square feet allowable in Vancouver, the new residence’s rooms are 340 square feet and come complete with bathrooms and small kitchens.
B.C. Non-Profit Housing Association executive director Alice Sundberg said it’s exciting to see the province investing money in housing again.
But she said it’s not clear where people in that transitional housing are going to go after their two years is up.
“The province is not interested in building housing for people who are well. Their strategy is not broad enough.”
Vancouver has 12 sites sitting empty that it would like to use for social housing. There’s broad expectation that the future announcements Coleman hinted at will provide money to build housing and subsidize rents for several of those sites.
The Liberal government killed off all new construction of social housing in 2001. It later instituted a housing program aimed only at frail seniors, although the city of Vancouver did manage to negotiate money for social-housing projects, like the 200 units that will be included in the Woodward’s complex.
Since 2001, the counts of homeless populations in the Lower Mainland have doubled, while cities throughout B.C. have found themselves grappling in the last few years with visible homelessness.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
