#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 4

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All of 13 years of age, in 1930 my father left his family farm in Saskatchewan, leaving behind his mother and five siblings — his father had died when he was three years of age — set to ride the rails for the next 9 years, alighting in the Annapolis Valley in the later summer to pick apples, working in every province across Canada, for no more than a meal and a roof over his head at night sleeping in a barn, more often than not taking shelter in a hobo camp somewhere adjacent to the railway tracks that span our nation, undernourished always, starving at other times, my father having joined a homeless generation of Canadian youth scrambling to stay alive in the midst of the Dirty 30s, doing the best that they could.

Until, as my father told me one autumn afternoon, sitting at his kitchen table …

“In early September of 1939, I was living in a hobo camp on the outskirts of Revelstoke, on my way to the Okanagan to pick apples. There was talk in the camp that something was up in Europe, that the German Army had invaded Poland. On September 10th, I was in town looking for food out back of a restaurant when I heard a bunch of kids, saw them running down the street, screaming into the air, “We’re going to war. There’s a war. We’re going to fight those dirty …

Next thing I knew, there was a hand on my shoulder, a man in a uniform. “Son,” he said to me, “we’re at war now, saw it comin’. I’m with the Army recruitment office just down the street. Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll get you all signed up. Three squares a day, a nice clean uniform, and you’ll get to see the world. No more living in hobo camps for you.

So, I did, I went with him, signed up. For the first time in almost a decade, things were looking up. After I signed my name on the dotted line, the sergeant handed me an army uniform, saying, “Find a place to put this on.” I ran back to the hobo camp, more excited than I’d been in I don’t know how long. There was a pond nearby the camp, I stripped off my tattered old clothes, jumped in the pond, got myself nice and wet, dried myself with my old clothes, and set about to get dressed up in my spanking new uniform. I don’t think I’d ever felt better in my whole life.”


In 1945, returning members of our armed services were more than a little excited to be returning home

My father remained a private in the army for the next six years — having a Grade 1 education, and being unable to read tends to inhibit one’s advancement — before returning home with all of the other troops in the late summer of 1945, arriving in the port of Halifax, from whence he’d set off to fight the war six years previous.

My father, Jack, had heard much about life in Vancouver from those he’d served with overseas, so chose to make his way out west to build a life for himself.

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, 83% of Canadians lived in the rural areas of Canada, mostly as members of farming families, leaving only 17% of the population to reside in hub cities like Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver, with much lesser populations in the prairie cities, and provincial capitals. On the Lower Mainland, Richmond was called Lulu Island, and was largely a farming community, as was the case in what we now call the suburbs: Coquitlam, Surrey, and Maple Ridge,

Almost overnight after the war ended, the rural-urban mix in Canada was reversed.


Berlin, post WWII: Statisticians calculated for every inhabitant there was 30 cubic metres of rubble

Following the end of the conflict overseas, with the industrial heartland of Germany, not to mention a great swath of Europe, and the production capitals of Japan leveled by the ravages of war, North America soon became the industrial heartland, and the bread basket, for the world. There were jobs aplenty across the North American landscape, as the U.S. & Canada became industrial powerhouses.

Most soldiers arriving home from Europe, rather than choosing to return to the farming communities from whence they had come prior to the outbreak of the conflicts in Europe and Japan, moved to the cities to make their fortune, many of them choosing to marry. Thus began the much vaunted baby boom, of which this writer is a member, born in 1950, and modern society as we still know it today.

Prior to the 1930s, most rural towns and cities across North America had within their midst indigent, homeless populations, but these were folks who were generally well known in their communities, boys who became men, men who’d lost their way and turned to alcohol to numb their pain. The homeless in these towns, and even in our cities, were well cared for by their contemporaries, who’d gone to school with these men many years prior, knew them from the time they were boys.

In every society throughout history, dating back centuries, there has always been 4% of the population who find themselves locked out of conventional society, women and men alone and without resources, perhaps suffering from some mental health disability, mostly uneducated, alone, without family or resources, and as conventional society would state, without the “spunk” that would help them to lead productive lives of meaning, to be  part of the conventional work-a-day world.


The Raymur Housing Project, just south of Raymur and East Hastings — social housing in Vancouver.

In the 1950s, in perhaps a more empathetic time, when we actually cared for one another, provincial government social planners spanning the nation, in concert with their federal government counterparts, set about to house the homeless by creating “urban social housing complexes” to house the provinces’ poorest citizens, who would be brought to the city. In doing so, Canadian provinces adopted the multiple family dwelling, or “apartment”, model as the housing form to shelter the indigent population. In U.S. cities like Detroit, we are much more apt to call these “urban social housing complexes” by a more colloquial name: ghettos.


The Regent Park social housing community in Toronto, which expanded from the south Cabbagetown community in the Toronto of the 1930s, long one of the city’s worst slums, targeted by Toronto city planners for a grand urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s, which became known as Regent Park South.

As above, in Vancouver, the new community to house the poor was named The Raymur Project, where residents from across British Columbia were brought to Vancouver to live in the newly-conceived urban social housing complex.

Such projects, whether in Canada or the United States — in Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and New Orleans — proved abject, crime-ridden encampment failures.

Still and all, the homeless were off the streets, with a roof over their heads, pretty much hidden away from the eyes of conventional society, a forgotten population most people didn’t want to see, acknowledge or engage with on any level.

And so it remained through until the early 1980s, as we wrote on Tuesday.


An interview with Premier-in-Waiting David Eby, conducted by CBC Early Edition host, Stephen Quinn

Thus far on VanRamblings’ four-part series on homelessness + housing, we’ve tracked the history of homelessness in B.C., from the 1930s forward until now.

We have touched on a modular housing model as a temporary “fix” for our current homeless crisis, and suggested that homelessness is a national issue of critical importance that requires the intervention of the federal government, working with the provinces, to address the ongoing issue of human misery on our streets.

In the interview with Premier-in-Waiting, David Eby, Stephen Quinn holds Mr. Eby’s feet to the fire, questioning him on the resolution to homelessness in our city and province. Mr. Eby is forthcoming about what he feels is necessary: build social housing, lots of it, transitioning our homeless / barely housed population out of sub-standard, one room single occupancy resident accommodation, or temporary shelters, into livable, one-bedroom furnished apartments — with a bed, kitchen, bathroom and living room, TV, internet and all the amenities — this housing to be located in every neighbourhood across our city, what yesterday we referred to yesterday as the “Finnish model” in Wednesday’s VanRamblings’ column.

On the day VanRamblings attended David Eby’s campaign launch to become British Columbia’s 37th Premier, the event held at the Kitsilano Neighbourhood House —where Mr. Eby gave one of the best, most moving and humane political speeches we’ve ever heard  — we wondered how Mr. Eby was going to position himself in order that he might retain power when the next B.C. election is called.

In 1996, BC New Democratic Pary leader Glen Clark positioned himself as a working man, a boy who grew up on the east side of Vancouver, who had fought all his life for better for all of us. A working class hero. Mr. Eby, whose father practiced law in Ontario as a partner in a prestigious law firm, and whose mother was a school principal could hardly pull off the Glen Clark’s “pulled myself up with my bootstraps” man of the people working class hero approach. What then for Mr. Eby?

“ICBC is dumpster fire.” “Money laundering in B.C. is artificially inflating housing prices.” “B.C. car insurance rates are too high … we’ll convert to no fault insurance, lower insurance rates, and provide a $400 rebate cheque to all B.C. motorists.”


David Eby, British Columbia’s Premier-in-Waiting Man of Action, ready to fix B.C. homelessness crisis

VanRamblings believes that British Columbia’s new “man of action” Premier, 45 years-young David Robert Patrick Eby will upon assuming the office of Premier of British Columbia declare a homelessness crisis emergency in our city and province.


220 Terminal Avenue, the first temporary modular housing building constructed on City-owned land

In declaring a homelessness crisis emergency Mr. Eby will, as a temporary measure, order the construction of 1500 units of modular housing, to be built on city and provincial Crown land with all possible haste, on suitable sites across Vancouver, those modular housing sites to be occupied no later than the autumn of 2023.

Premier Eby will then appoint a Commission with the mandate of reforming the multi-billion service model that allegedly provides succour to those resident on the DTES, “a broken system,” Mr. Eby has said, that ill serves those in need.


A tent encampment at Vancouver’s CRAB Park, which has maintained for two years. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

As a next order of business, VanRamblings believes that a Premier Eby will expedite the construction of social and affordable housing on city-owned (Vancouver is a creature of the provincial government), provincial Crown land, and in a co-operative agreement, on federally-owned Crown land, on a 66-or-99 year leasehold basis, ordering that the city of Vancouver will charge no development permit, or related fees, and that the approval process for construction of the social and affordable housing will occur sans City Hall red tape, and any measure of undue delay or intransigence on the part of the Planning, Urban Design and Development Services Department, lest the office of the Premier assume full responsibility for every aspect of the approval and construction of this necessary new housing.

#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 3

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British Columbia, should candidate to lead the BC NDP become our province’s 37th Premier, David Robert Patrick Eby — and the City of Vancouver, as well, should TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick be elected as Vancouver Mayor this upcoming October 15th — may be on the verge of adopting a revolutionary new approach to the provision of care for, and provision of housing for, our province’s homeless population, once and for all eliminating the scourge of a homelessness crisis that has for so long bedevilled our city, and our province.

In 2008, the Vancouver Police Department released a 56-page prescriptive visioning report titled Lost in Transition: How a Lack of Capacity in the Mental Health System is Failing Vancouver’s Mentally Ill and Draining Police Resources, that cogently argued for a near revolutionary reformation of the service model the VPD felt must be adopted to better provide for the necessary care for all those persons in need who are resident in the square mile around Main and Hastings, a report compiled and written by a particularly illustrious and celebrated cabal of PhD holding Vancouver police officers, long in the employ of the Vancouver Police Department.

In essence, the Lost in Transition report argued for the provincial appointment of a czar to oversee the provision of social services on the DTES. When the Lost in Transition report was updated in 2013, the world czar was replaced with the phrase, “the provincial appointment of an individual with the authority of a Deputy Minister”, and in the 2018 update of the Lost in Transition report, that individual was now called a Commissioner, a provincial appointee who would be given the authority to oversee a radical reformation of the DTES social services model.

In 2012, Charles Campbell — a former editor of The Georgia Straight — was commissioned by Vancouver Coastal Health to author a report on the provision of services on the DTES. Mr. Campbell’s report, Working With Health Agencies and Partners On Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside [PDF}, identified 277 social agencies providing services to those in need who were resident on the downtown eastside.

Arising out of the publication of both the Lost in Transition and Partners reports, a serious-minded and goal-oriented discussion on a reformation of the social services model that had long been in place on the DTES commenced in earnest.

This past weekend, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick apprised VanRamblings of a discussion she’d had with Chief Constable of the Vancouver Police Department, Adam Palmer, where the two touched on what might constitute a radical reformation of the social services model provided to habitués of the DTES, in order that those in need might receive better and more appropriate care, and how — working with the province — a plan might be developed that could eliminate homelessness across the city of Vancouver.

VanRamblings believes — based on what David Eby told The Vancouver Sun’s Katie DeRosa last Friday, and may also have arisen from TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver Mayoral candidate Colleen Hardwick’s discussion with VPD Chief Adam Palmer — the following aspects of a revisioning of the social services model for the DTES may be on the table …

  • As David Eby told Ms. DeRosa last week, “There really hasn’t been a co-ordinated strategy or a plan about how we get out of the problems of the Downtown Eastside. I think … putting an invisible fence around the neighbourhood and saying ‘this is the best we can do’ and just hope that things work out, it’s a strategy that will no longer carry us forward.” Eby said if he’s successful in his bid to replace Premier John Horgan … he’ll co-ordinate a long-term response to the issues in the Downtown Eastside with help from the federal government, the city & concerned groups;
  • In 2008, discussion surrounding the publication of the Lost in Transition report touched on / recommended consideration of the following: merging the 277 social services agencies on the DTES into 30 umbrella organizations. Each of the 277 social agencies employs an Executive Director, Director of Finance, Director of Human Resources, Manager of Supported Housing, among other senior administrative staff — each earning up to $325,000 annually — a duplication of services and administration funded by the province, at a cost of almost $1 billion dollars, annually. The initial 2008 VPD Lost in Transition report questioned if such duplication of services properly served the interests of those who are resident, and cared for, on the DTES;
  • There was also discussion upon the publication of the Lost in Transition report, and a recommendation within the report, that argued for the provincial appointment of a Commissioner who would oversee the reformation of the provision of services on the DTES, a person with the authority of a Deputy Minister who would report only to a provincially appointed Board of Directors who would oversee the transition of the current service model, reporting as well as to the office of the Premier.

For a great long while, there has been much talk about the DTES on the perpetuation of a “poverty pimp industry” within the community, an “industry” that pays well upwards of a billion dollars annually to fund a social services administrative structure on the downtown eastside that better serves the interests of those highly paid administrators over those persons who our society is truly meant to care for.

At present, as well, and impeding change are the various unions representing their members: there are 10,000 union employees who work on the DTES, represented by the BCGEU, HEU, CUPE and the Health Sciences Association, whose members fill union coffers with 2.7% of their gross pay each and every two week pay period.

At one social services agency where VanRamblings was employed, senior staff worked fewer — and were available on site for fewer — than 30 weeks a year. Each time an administrator traveled to Nova Scotia, or some other locale, for a 3-day conference — air fare, accommodation and expenses provided by the employer (that’d be you and me) — each day away meant the banking of two days in compensatory “vacation pay”, or more than one week of paid time off. Same thing for attending evening meetings, and working “overtime”, wherein the administrator banked more paid days off. Nice work if you can get, paid for at taxpayer expense.

And don’t get us started on the absenteeism rate for employees working on the DTES, averaging 6 paid days off per month, despite what the union contract says, replaced by on-call staff who generally work more hours than full-time employees.

As a final note today on VanRamblings’ four-part series on homelessness and housing: Premier-to-be (let’s face it, come December, we all know who will become British Columbia’s 37th Premier) David Eby has made a commitment to moving away from a corrupted and wholly unsuitable SRO (Single Resident Occupancy) housing model providing shelter for B.C.’s homeless population, while moving towards something akin to Finland’s ‘Housing First’ concept, where those who are affected by homelessness are provided with a self-contained apartment — with their own bathroom, bedroom / sleep area, kitchen / dining room, fully furnished with amenities provided for — and counseling, without any preconditions.

Four out of five of those previously affected homeless persons, in time, make their way back into a stable life, re-joining our society as productively happy citizens.

All this represents a responsible, fiscally sound model of service provision to those in need, so much better than accepting homelessness, and perpetuating an administratively corrupt model that has for far too long ill-served indigent persons.

#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 2

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When Gregor Robertson was first elected to office as Mayor of the City of Vancouver in 2008, as he had throughout his months of campaigning, the new Mayor made a commitment to eliminate homelessness in Vancouver by 2015.

That Mayor Robertson and his Vision Vancouver Councillors were unable to fulfill that laudatory commitment occurs partly as a consequence of what we wrote yesterday — that the steady and unrelenting influx of homeless persons into our city annually frustrates meeting that otherwise laudatory goal — and partly resulting from politics: neither the right-of-centre federal government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, nor the right-leaning provincial administration of Premier Gordon Campbell were kindly disposed to providing assistance to someone they viewed as their political enemy, a recent provincial BC NDP MLA turned Vancouver Mayor.

Still and all, things weren’t as bad as they might have been.

In the autumn of 2006, then Non-Partisan Association (NPA) Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan negotiated an agreement with B.C. Liberal Housing Minister Rich Coleman to build 12 new social housing projects in the City of Vancouver.

The original agreement Mayor Sullivan struck with the provincial government was to build 20 social housing projects — in 2007, Minister Coleman reconsidered Mayor Sullivan’s original 20 project proposal, signing on to build the full 20 social housing project contingent, with the understanding that the properties would be sold to the province for $1 apiece, and that the City of Vancouver would both expedite the construction of the projects — cutting all City Hall red tape — while foregoing the usual $1 million dollars for each project in development fees. The deal was done.

The actual number built: 14 social housing projects, with the final 6 projects jettisoned by Vision Vancouver when they were elected to civic government.

One of the first projects to open its doors was the McLaren Housing project, a 12-storey, 110 multi-tenant residential supportive social housing complex located at 1249 Howe Street, in downtown Vancouver, just south of Davie Street.

Also in the mix in 2007: Mayor Sullivan convinced Minister Coleman to purchase and renovate 23 (a number which rose to 30) SRO hotels located on the DTES, renovate them to make them livable for the new tenants / formerly homeless persons who would live in the newly renovated hotels, ensuring that a reputable social agency would be hired to operate each hotel, and provide support services.

The 2008 homeless count results indicated there were 2,660 homeless living rough in the City of Vancouver, couch surfing, living in their cars, and living in shelters.

In early 2013, when construction was completed on all 14 social housing projects, and 30 renovated DTES hotels, with tenants moved in, the homeless count that year indicated a rising number of 2,777 homeless persons — even given that all the new 6000 social housing and renovated SRO hotel units were fully occupied.

How does one build 6,000 new units of social housing in the City of Vancouver, and the homeless count rises? See yesterday’s VanRamblings’ column.

Time for A Bit of B.C. Homelessness History

In 1981, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that “the state does not have the authority to institutionalize and warehouse its citizens” who suffer from a mental health disability, that this population embodies the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as do all citizens.

As such, SCOTUS ordered the United States federal government, and all U.S. states, to de-institutionalize all those persons who were resident in mental health facilities located across the United States of America.

The Supreme Court of Canada made a similar ruling the following year.

In British Columbia what that meant was: all persons resident in facilities such as the Woodlands Asylum in New Westminster (pictured above), at Riverview and Essondale in Coquitlam, at the Willingdon Treatment facility in Burnaby, and the Tranquille Sanitorium in Kamloops (pictured below) must be released from each of these facilities with all due haste, in order that those persons who’d been locked away from society for decades might once again be free to join society.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, VanRamblings worked with a number of Woodlands’ former residents, who told stories of a hell on Earth, as they were locked away for years from the eyes of society. Horror stories of abuse were reported in the media, the electroshock therapy, lobotomies conducted with a butter knife under an eyelid — when nerve pathways in the frontal lobe were severed, rendering the person apathetic, emotionally unavailable and passive — and the inhumane, Marquis de Sade-like, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest conditions which many residents had suffered through relentlessly for decades on end.

Said one resident of the Woodland facility to VanRamblings: “I was a resident, a prisoner in Woodlands for 3 decades, institutionalized when my parents died in a car accident when I was a  young boy, locked away with no contact with the outside world for decades.

Friday night was bathing night. No matter the time of year, no matter the weather, the inmates — for that’s what we were — of Woodlands would be lined up naked, outside along the concourse leading to the shower facility. Sometimes we’d be in the cold for half an hour. Upon entering the brick shower room, we would be hosed down with a hose with great velocity, like a fire hose, sometimes lifted off our feet and thrust against the wall behind us. When the staffperson conducting the shower thought we were clean enough, we were dismissed, returning naked to our room.”

The humane plan of action to transition those millions of persons across the United States and Canada who had long been imprisoned in “mental health” facilities “to protect the health of society”, into homes in neighbourhoods adjacent to the mental health facilities, cared for and supported in community housing settings that would allow these persons freedom of movement, to live their lives with a modicum of respect and dignity, to  find a job, or love, never came to pass.

In the 1980s, North American governments consisted of socially maladaptive, right wing, penny pinching ideologues, each seemingly without hearts or a conscience: U.S. President Ronald Ronald Reagan, Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and in British Columbia, a miserly Premier Bill Bennett, who were unwilling to spend one red cent to house and care for these newly “free” persons.

And, of course, you know where this newly-released but homeless population took refuge: on our streets, in our back alleys, under bridges, alone and uncared for, the beginning of a homelessness crisis that maintains until this day, those living rough who no longer had access to the medication they received at Riverview or Tranquille, self-medicating with drugs from the street, paid for through the commitment of crime. A new disorder now reigned on our streets, a smell of death.

Upon being elected Premier of the province of British Columbia, on election night Thursday, October 17 1991, Mike Harcourt pledged to alleviate the misery of those persons who were living and dying on Vancouver city streets. Safe haven was the order of the day: the province stuck a deal with dozens of DTES SROs — facilities inspected for their livability — where the government would pay the shelter portion of the income assistance cheque directly to the landlord / owner of the SRO.

Building wrap-around services for these former residents of Tranquille, Riverview and Woodlands now living on the downtown eastside, all remained quiet on the social services front for a decade. The homeless were off the street and cared for, a continuing homelessness crisis ended, until two watershed events took place …

  • Soon after becoming Alberta’s 12th Premier, on Monday, December 14th, 1992, a newly-elected Ralph Klein made a controversial decision to ship the province’s welfare recipients to British Columbia, giving them a bus ticket and waving them goodbye. Alberta’s indigent de-population programme proved so successful that it was adopted by provinces across our federation — in 1995, the government of Ontario Premier Mike Harris offered up to $1,500 in travel expenses to welfare recipients to move to B.C, and in 2016, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix published a story that stated two young First Nations men were each given one-way bus tickets from North Battleford to Vancouver and Victoria — in a practice that remains active to this day;
  • In 2001, British Columbians elected a far-right, disreputable Mike Harris clone as our Premier: Gordon Muir Campbell. Even before the new Premier got started cancelling union contracts, Gordon Campbell passed an Order in Council requiring all recipients of income assistance and persons with disability to re-apply for their benefits, proclaiming to the masses, “There is immense fraud in B.C.’s welfare system. My government is going to root it out, and save the Treasury billions of dollars.” Yeah, well, that didn’t happen, did it? What happened instead is that Campbell cancelled the NDP programme that paid for SRO accommodation for Vancouver’s soon-to-be homeless population, thrusting hundreds of income recipients onto Vancouver streets.

So, 2001: Canadians provinces sending their homeless to B.C., as Canada’s new dumping ground for our nation’s indigent population, while a cruel Gordon Campbell government de-housed hundreds / thousands of income assistance recipients, forcing them onto the streets. No wonder Gordon Campbell came perilously close to losing government in the 2005 British Columbia provincial election.

Clearly, all you have to do is look around, or watch the news, to realize the homelessness crisis in Vancouver has not abated, has only gotten progressively worse since 2001. Lives of desperation, and a population of the perpetually unhoused.

What is to be done? How do we end the human misery of homelessness?

VanRamblings will present a bit more history on our province’s homeless in Wednesday’s column, and present a a revolutionary programme of restoration, recovery and deliverance, as envisioned by both soon-to-be Premier David Robert Patrick Eby, and certain-to-become Mayor on October 15, 2022, TEAM … for a Livable Vancouver’s, that Irish gal you love so very, very much, Colleen Hardwick.

#VanPoli | Homelessness + Housing | A Series | Part 1

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Each and every year for the past two decades, and more, hundreds of new homeless persons arrive on our shores to call Vancouver their new home.

These homeless persons, arriving without any money or resources, come down to Vancouver from the north of our province, from the Okanagan, Vancouver Island or some other provincial locale. More of the newly arrived homeless make their way to Vancouver from the Prairies, Ontario, Québec or the Maritimes, more often than not having been provided with a bus / train or plane ticket furnished by their provincial social services Ministry, having been told, “Go west, where the skies are blue, the weather warm, the people friendly, and the streets are paved with gold.”

A surprisingly large contingent of Vancouver’s new homeless arriving in our city each year, somehow make their way across the U.S. borders to both the north and south, arriving (mostly) from California — but, as well, from a polygot collection of other U.S. states — as well as from Mexico, and Central and South America.

Then, there are Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian or Filipino citizens who jump ship (or who were onboard for the long journey across the Pacific, as stowaways) to arrive in Vancouver, here to stay, they hope, here to make Vancouver their new home.

Upon arrival, these émigrés to our lustrous Pacific shores often make contact with one of the hundred or more outreach workers populating the downtown eastside, those angels of mercy helping the newly arrived find a place to stay, registering them for social assistance, or persons with disability coverage, making sure that they’re covered by B.C. Medical, ensuring their needs are otherwise looked after.

Then, among the newly arrived émigrés, there is the contingent who want to stay under the radar: the heavily drug dependent, and the drug dealers.

Apart from Vancouver’s (mostly) good weather, the other key reason this new homeless population moves to Vancouver relates to the ready availability of drugs. Vancouver is North America’s largest drug distribution centre. Heroin arriving from Afghanistan through Amsterdam will find its way to Vancouver, to be carried across the continent. The raw ingredients to make fentanyl arrives in Vancouver from China (the Canadian government long ago staunched the supply of raw fentanyl into Vancouver … now fentanyl has to be “mixed”, locally, in Vancouver).

Of the new arrivals each year, approximately one-third of the new “out of town” homeless population remain in Vancouver, many sleeping in doorwells, under park benches, in alley ways, in garages, loading bays, under bridges, in and around Jericho or Stanley Parks, or have found themselves shelter, or life in an SRO.

Many others make their way to municipalities across the Metro Vancouver region, mostly to Surrey and Burnaby, but as well to the Tri-Cities (Coquitlam, Port Moody and Port Coquitlam), Ladner, Langley and Richmond, Haney, Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, not to mention the North Shore.

A contingent of members of the Vancouver homeless population make their way into the Fraser Valley (as far out as Chilliwack, Agassiz and Hope) or over to Vancouver Island — mostly Victoria, Nanaimo and Duncan, but across the entire Island, as a whole — with a sizeable number heading to the Okanagan’s inviting climes.

A remaining number of homeless persons return home — with the provincial government, more often than not providing the fare home — having enjoyed (or not) their brief vacation on the west, with a smaller number deported or in jail.

All of the above is by way of saying, when the annual Homeless Count is conducted each March, the number of homeless persons always rises, sometimes by substantial numbers, and not because it’s persons — seniors, or others — who have found themselves evicted from their apartments because rents have become too high, or young people who have aged out of the care system (or lack thereof) provided by the province of British Columbia.

Rather, this is a sorry tale of human misery.

In some sense, then, the problem of resolving Vancouver’s homelessness crisis would seem irresolvable — the more housing that is built, the more modular housing structures constructed, the more hotels purchased by the province, the more SROs that are renovated by the province to make this kind of congregate housing livable, the more shelters that are made available, the more homeless persons who will arrive on our shores, this year, and  all the years beyond.

Today’s VanRamblings’ column is not prescriptive, nor do we attempt to provide historical context — we’ll do that later in the week, plus offer what we feel may be a short term fix to help alleviate the lives of human misery for persons who are living at a bare subsistence level,  as VanRamblings sets about to present an historical context dating back decades, through until today.