Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has announced a plan to freeze supportive housing development in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). The plan is part of a wider set of policy changes targeting the DTES and spearheaded by Sim’s ABC Vancouver party.
Pundits have framed Sim’s announcement as random and off the cuff. ABC politicians have in fact been preparing the groundwork for DTES “reforms” since their emergence in 2021. The party was first elected in 2022 on a platform of austerity and gentrification for the DTES. The same campaign promised an aggressive expansion of the VPD, which they have since delivered on.
In 2023, then-ABC councillor Rebecca Bligh set the DTES plan into action with her ‘Uplifting the Downtown Eastside’ motion. The motion was approved by council in November 2023.
Bligh’s motion made a push to repeal the existing DTES Local Area plan in two parts: first, by opening up the neighborhood to faster market-driven development, and second, by effectively terminating the construction of social housing by changing its definition.
On February 24, city staff delivered their interim report following Bligh’s original motion. Far from being “vague and slipshod,” the 42-page report rehashes the same lines of argument about the DTES that Bligh, Sim, and ABC have been making since the beginning.
In tandem with the freeze on supportive housing, Sim and ABC have announced they will escalate policing through a new VPD initiative called Task Force Barrage, described as a $5 million police surge “hyper-focused on the Downtown Eastside.”
Freeze on social housing?
Is it possible to freeze what is already frozen? If we’re living through a freeze, Sim’s plan can best be understood as a deep freeze.
One of the most misleading aspects of mainstream coverage of Sim’s “freeze” is the suggestion that the provincial and federal government have been flooding the DTES with social housing. Nothing could be further from reality. Social and supportive housing construction has slowed to a near standstill.
The current provincial five-year target for supportive housing Vancouver-wide is 583 units. Yes, you heard that correctly: roughly 100 units per year in a city that has more than 4,000 people living without homes. The ABC 2022 platform promised to retire the “quantity-first approach” to supportive housing, but this approach simply doesn’t exist and has never existed.
Or wrap your head around this one: the BC NDP’s supportive housing target for the entire province is significantly smaller than the number of people without homes in Vancouver alone. Meanwhile tent cities are cropping up in almost every municipality and mid-sized town across the province. Vancouver is also on track to lose over 600 more high-quality modular units of supportive housing because the ABC-dominated city council refuses to extend leases or find new sites for the housing.
At the current rate, it would take decades to house those without homes. That’s if Eby and Kahlon’s trickle of social and supportive housing were allowed to continue. This also presupposes that the current rate of eviction and demoviction will somehow magically stop in its tracks so that the trickle could one day catch up. On the contrary, Sim and Eby’s policy decisions have triggered another eviction tsunami.
The Sim-Eby eviction tsunami works by opening affordable sub-areas – the DTES as much as the Broadway corridor and beyond – to aggressive redevelopment. One step forward, two steps back. Vacancy control, the one measure that could rein in spiralling rents, has been repeatedly rejected by Premier Eby and Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon.
New multi-unit housing developments could be great for affordability and even utopian to live in, especially if social housing, vacancy control, and genuine rent controls were introduced. But not when directly replacing the most dense and affordable areas of the city in a game of net-zero gains and senseless creative destruction. Meanwhile the single-family sprawl remains untouched in a logic that only benefits developers, property-owner equity, and their shared lust for the windfall profits of scarcity.
Bligh versus Sim?
Rebecca Bligh’s original ‘Uplifting the DTES’ motion came in two relevant parts. The first was to open up the zoning of the Downtown Eastside to allow for more rapid market development. The second was to “align” the City’s DTES definition of social housing with the existing provincial definition.
The province currently defines social housing as housing that is simply owned or managed by a nonprofit. The City’s DTES Local Area Plan (LAP), approved in 2014, states that a “social housing” building must include only one third of its units at welfare and pension rates. By contrast, the current provincial definition has zero affordability requirements whatsoever.
Last month’s 42-page city staff interim report doubles down on arguments Bligh and Sim have been making since the beginning of ABC (and during Bligh’s term as Vancouver city councillor with the right-wing NPA from 2018–2022). Two points are especially central: the claim that Vancouver provides too much social and supportive housing measured against other municipalities in the region, and the insistence that Vancouver’s SROs need to be replaced either by market units or social housing (this is alarmingly not specified). Bligh frequently argues that the only way to create “affordable” homes for middle-income Vancouverites is to build market housing in the DTES.
In this report and other statements, ABC has not committed to preserving SROs or temporary modular housing until adequate government funding is in place for their replacement. This is not surprising.
When Bligh voted to dismantle 98 units of high-quality modular housing at Larwill Place earlier in her term, she made the “gee-whiz” argument that permanent affordable housing is preferable to temporary fixes. Nobody can disagree with that, but it’s not a good faith argument for torpedoing the remaining 600 units of temporary modular housing. Genuine permanent options were not in the works. The plan is to demolish first and figure it out later, even if later means never.
In short, Bligh’s motion already anticipated and paved the way for Sim’s supportive housing freeze, both by proposing that DTES LAP zoning restrictions be lifted and by eliminating any meaningful definition of social housing. This did not stop the Greens and OneCity from voting in favor of the motion back in 2023. OneCity has now doubled down on its support for the Uplifting motion since, in their words, “change is inevitable.”
The falling out between the two politicians – Sim and Bligh – might be the result of a personal clash more than a difference of policy or ideology, despite a recent string of about-face comments by Bligh. The clash probably traces to Sim’s authoritarian style of governance. Sim’s extreme centralizing tendencies have already lost him elected representatives from his own ABC party, most notably at the Park Board, which Sim aims to abolish.
As Sim said at the time: “When you have more than one person accountable for anything, no one is accountable.” The message is that it’s Sim’s way or the highway as his governing coalition known as ABC Vancouver continues to crumble. ABC originally elected a total of 19 people to Park Board, School Board and Council in November 2022. That number is now down to 14. At least five former ABC members have been expelled or have voluntarily quit the party, including School Board chair Victoria Jung.
ABC doublespeak
Sim’s council motion to halt the construction of supportive housing comes replete with the usual ABC doublespeak about affordable housing. The section lamenting the poor quality of the SROs calls for their replacement by supportive housing. Where have we heard this doublespeak before? The very motion calling for a freeze on supportive housing calls for replacement supportive housing. How can this be?
This small dose of doublespeak actually says everything you need to know about what comes next, because the upcoming SRO replacement plan is a similar bait and switch. ABC council wants to demolish and convert the SROs without having funding for long-term shelter-rate housing in place, essentially demovicting long-term SRO tenants into homelessness.
In a best case scenario, a handful of SRO tenants might move back when renovations are complete, with no mechanism to track past tenants and no funding to keep rents at rates they can afford. This is already the original one-two punch in ‘Uplifting the DTES’: upzoning the DTES means increased property values, incentivizing SRO owners to sell and thereby evicting tenants to homelessness; but increased property values also means that buying land for non-market housing becomes more financially costly for governments who already say the cost is too high.
Another problem with Sim’s motion is the indefinite nature of the supportive housing freeze and, by design, the lack of measurable targets. It remains unclear when other municipalities have “stepped up” adequately enough to resume supportive housing in Vancouver. If the “burden” of constructing supportive housing should fall onto other regions, is Sim planning to monitor and ensure the development of municipalities outside of his jurisdiction? What’s next when influential constituents in faraway municipalities continue to oppose supportive housing, resulting in indefinite stalls?
Broken clock is right twice a day
Here are two things Ken Sim accidentally got right in his policy tirade about the DTES. First, that other municipalities in the Lower Mainland have not pulled their weight (unlike Sim, we also include Vancouver in this assessment); second, that the DTES suffers from what he calls a “poverty industrial complex.”
For years, Sim’s angle on poverty in Vancouver is that our city somehow suffers from an outmigration of marginalized people to Vancouver from other communities. It goes without saying that, much like Vancouver, the suburbs have done almost nothing to address the growth in housing precarity and homelessness.
What this conveniently ignores is that Vancouver itself is the eviction capital of the region. People evicted in Vancouver become homeless in Vancouver, end of story.
The attempt to render these local evictions into a far-flung suburban problem will go down as one of the great acts of deflection and buck-passing in the history of Vancouver city council. Vancouver is a well-oiled eviction machine with landlord profits at the top, churning the evicted out the bottom.
Sim’s additional claim that those evicted in the suburbs are statistically likely to leave their home communities, migrating from Metro Vancouver suburbs into Vancouver, also has no basis in reality. As Amanda Burrows reminds us, citing the City’s own staff reports, “78% of Vancouver’s homeless population became homeless living in Vancouver. Vancouver is their home. They just need a house.”
The promise to return evicted tenants “back to their home communities” is absurd and nonsensical. Last month’s staff report makes a big show of supporting people in “Staying Where One Has Connections” (Uplifting DTES Progress Update, page 17). We support you in your original communities, says ABC Vancouver, unless your original community is Vancouver.
There is something highly ironic about Sim berating municipalities for being NIMBYs while putting forward a NIMBY proposal for the ages. Sim laments the NIMBYism of the suburbs, yet in the next breath decries the concentration of low-income housing and services in the DTES – all while blocking any motion to densify neighbourhoods with expensive single-family homes, like Shaughnessy (here too, the Bligh record rears its head). This concentration exists in no small part because of historic and persistent exclusionary policies within the boundaries of Vancouver itself.
City of segregation and exclusion
Vancouver is founded on racialized and class segregations that forced Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside into existence. White supremacy and property-owner exclusion, including racist redlining and racial covenants, were foundational for Vancouver well into the 20th century, de jure, and they now exist de facto well into our present. These spaces of segregation are at one and the same time a genealogy of the layers of segregation that founded them.
Sim says his plan is about “integrating the DTES into the broader Vancouver community,” as though wealthier neighbourhoods will suddenly stop being sites of expulsion, exclusion, and eviction. Ironically, Sim and ABC have always been the first to rally behind expulsion to keep non-DTES areas of the city exclusive and exclusionary.
Optimistic commentators like the CBC’s Gloria Macarenko have generously interpreted Sim’s proposal as a bold new approach to “spread out housing and support services across the city.” Unfortunately, that’s just not the plan, and Macarenko could have learned a lot if she listened to her guest – longtime VANDU board member Dave Hamm. She also could have consulted Sim’s own motion, which bans supportive housing across Vancouver, not just the DTES.
Sim wants to disburse and displace without even the slightest pretense of putting up funding for relocation. An original leaked version of his government’s plan also outlined an explicit intention to move Indigenous individuals out of the DTES, although this section was quietly removed. Last week the BC Assembly of First Nations, the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs all spoke out against Sim’s plan. Delilah Gregg of WAHRS did not mince words, calling it a plan for genocide and gentrification.
Sim’s plan for the future already reflects his administration’s actions to date, with aggressive street sweeps and continual funding increases for beat policing, including a new Community Policing Centre in Woodward’s. This is especially troubling from an Indigenous perspective, says Gregg: “So many people are already traumatized by police, and now you’ve got them out here 24/7 checking everything and everybody. It’s not good, it’s not a good thing.”
Before singling out Sim, we should recall that Vision Vancouver’s original 2014 DTES LAP itself came with dispersal targets. In their recent coverage of Sim’s DTES policy, some commentators claimed that the original LAP has “always been about protecting residents of the DTES.” In reality, the 2014 LAP oversaw a staggering loss of low-income housing units in the DTES, all while the city more than doubled its funding for the VPD. In 2014, housing and community activists won limited but important protections for the Oppenheimer sub-strict (DEOD), but the DEOD covers only one out of nine sub-areas.
This is a helpful reminder that while Sim throws punches at the LAP and so-called “supportive housing,” we should not automatically defend those deeply flawed policies. As Dave Hamm reminds us, the gradual shift towards supportive housing instead of social housing has come with a host of surveillance, carceral, and highly controlling restrictions built in. This so-called social housing does not respect human autonomy and basic tenancy rights under the BC Residential Tenancy Act.
Nonprofit industrial complex
Sim’s second accidental bullseye concerns the so-called “poverty industrial complex.” Some academics and activists have coined the term nonprofit industrial complex to describe the emergence of nonprofit organizations in those areas of society most neglected both by the market and public services.
In a context of service cuts and long-term austerity, nonprofits step in to create systems of quasi-private healthcare and service provision. The nonprofit industrial complex “allows the government and the wealthy to shirk responsibility for deepening health and social inequities,” to quote one study.
While fulfilling a classical charity function, service providers also become essential for the organization and maintenance of the existing social system. Nonprofits take contracts directly from the state and become arms-length actors in the implementation of state policies.
The nonprofit industrial complex does many things, including making radical and social movement organizations dependent on state and philanthropic funding. Despite emerging from below, nonprofits gradually align with the neoliberal state and private interests, pressured to support their objectives. Funding contracts are cut when nonprofits do not publicly endorse and align with higher-level priorities and agendas.
Moreover, nonprofits tend to become preoccupied with reproducing themselves rather than meaningfully abolishing or even challenging the systems that necessitate their existence in the first place, as they must continually seek out revenue. Nonprofit CEOs and directors at the top can become concerned with their careers and public image, and benefit financially from this status quo with above-average salaries that give them a stake in the existing arrangement. Some nonprofits might be interpreted as doing their best within a broken system, but they’re also an integral part of that system.
In BC, we have a system of nonprofit “hunger games” where nonprofits are placed directly in competition with one another in a budgetary race to the bottom. Take for example, the many nonprofit organizations that manage supportive housing. These buildings are fundamentally run on principles of cost-reduction. Organizations bid for contracts laid out by the province and are offered funding based on how many residents they can house with as little cost to BC Housing as possible. This results in staff burnout, inadequate housing conditions, and supports that often exist in name only.
Sim is correct that some people benefit greatly from the conditions of poverty and social abandonment in the DTES – conditions that politicians like himself help create. In recent years, commentators like Adam Zivo on the far right have spun a reactionary version of this logic, showing superficial concern for those entrapped by the carceral system, and pretending that the political right has any intention of funding, supporting, or creating an alternative centered on care and belonging.
It is this reactionary version of the poverty industrial complex thesis that Sim has evidently embraced. Instead of zeroing in on the cycle of displacement and criminalization, Sim and company emphasize only the endless cycles of funding. The financial amounts are always far smaller than claimed, historically shrinking with each passing year of austerity as a percentage of GDP and state spending. Those small amounts are also increasingly used for the carceral and punitive arms of the social welfare apparatus.
Sim rightly states that money is siphoned off into the pockets of functionaries, bureaucrats, and overpaid upper management – but the Mayor and his ABC coterie should genuinely try to see their critique through to the end. By doing so they might come closer to a more accurate picture of the poverty industrial complex – one often emphasized by residents and activists in the DTES themselves.
Living in the shelter industrial complex
Homeless and housing activists have been raising the alarm on this phenomenon for decades. The shelter industrial complex refers to the “churn” experienced by unhoused and underhoused people, going from shelter to transitional housing without any kind of long-term, appropriate, dignified housing at the end of the cycle.
From shelter to shelter, jail to remand, and onwards to increasingly substandard “transitional” housing like SROs in Vancouver, the cycle is often cruel and interminable. More rarely, a person may find placement within a supportive housing building, but the exemption of RTA rules through “program agreements” make living conditions difficult. Onerous surveillance, guest bans, and other restrictions – combined with substandard maintenance and facilities – cause many to choose to leave because they feel safer in encampment communities, especially during warmer months. Those same rules also lead to countless evictions back onto the street.
Even for those able to hold onto their often-miniscule supportive housing unit, there are no “exit” options into more independent social and affordable housing. The low mnimum wage and abysmally low social assistance rates make it impossible to enter the housing market. This lack of an exit strategy can create a dead-end sense of dread. “Right now, people in the DTES feel they’re discarded,” Dave Hamm says in his interview with the CBC. “They’re stigmatized, and nobody cares. They just keep being cycled through this carceral system, like jails and treatment centres and supportive housing with no real exit plan that has any hope for them.”
Cutting off what little funding exists for new supportive housing will certainly accentuate the shelter industrial complex, as organizations compete harder for fewer resources, resulting in the churn of more and more unhoused and underhoused people across institutions that purport to house their clients, but ultimately cannot offer a path to better housing conditions for all. These same people will then be slandered as “hard to house,” as though adequate housing and dignified conditions are there for the taking.
Yet the underlying cause of homelessness and evictions come from those who benefit financially from the system – a system based on land grabs, conversions, demolitions and systemic evictions that allow the replacement of low-income tenants for those who can always pay more. Without real rent control, and reducing or altogether getting rid of the financial incentive for eviction, we will continue to see the number of homeless Vancouverites climb to ever-staggering heights.
Conclusion: Sim’s developer city
Sim’s motion to indefinitely end the construction of new supportive housing in Vancouver is a small step towards a more complete long term project of gentrification in the DTES. Both Sim and Bligh’s goal of “uplifting” the DTES mean the acceleration of market-rate housing in the area, with the inevitable displacement into homelessness that will result.
With council eyeing a revision of the DTES Local Area Plan, we can expect Sim and the rest of his ABC council to attempt a rezoning during the remainder of their tenure. That, or “spot rezoning” applied to lucrative sites for property speculation and redevelopment.
To deflect from his plans, Sim has tried to construct the image of a deluge of unhoused folks from local municipalities rushing to Vancouver. According to Metro Vancouver’s 2023 homeless count, however, 81% of unhoused residents reside in the community in which they were previously housed. ABC and Sim have somehow convinced themselves that halting the construction of supportive housing will limit rather than exacerbate displacement.
Sim has also attempted to undermine the web of nonprofits who seek to manage the multiple ongoing crises in Vancouver. He observes that some nonprofits seek to benefit from the conditions of the DTES, but his proposed “solutions” of policing and market-rate development do nothing to address the causes of homelessness.
When asked about the mayor’s uplifting doublespeak, Dave Hamm retorts, “they want to uplift the community? I think they just want to “up” it, take it away, and gentrify it.”