Supportive housing project to include drug-use area

Residents of a supportive housing complex slated to open next spring in downtown Penticton will have access to a host of amenities — including a designated space to use drugs.

“In response to the opioid crisis in B.C., we are guided by the Interior Health Authority's overdose prevention best practices,” project developer BC Housing said in a statement.

“This housing will use a high-support harm reduction approach to reduce the risk of death. This includes providing an overdose prevention area and ensuring harm reduction supplies are available to residents.”

Less formal than supervised injection sites, overdose prevention sites were authorized by a provincial ministerial order in 2016 to respond to the opioid crisis.

“People can consume substances, but the staff or the peers that are on site are generally just there to respond in case there’s an overdose,” Corinne Dolman, Interior Health’s practice lead for mental health and substance use, told the Herald previously.

“Some of the sites in Vancouver, for example, in some of the housing complexes, they’re peer-run or run by some of the residents in the complex, and they’re provided with some basic training on responding to an overdose.”

Other amenities at the Penticton complex — 62 units in a four-storey building on two lots currently numbered 594 and 600 Winnipeg St. — will include meals, laundry, connections to health, employment and educational services, and even help applying for financial assistance.

The site will also boast an “outdoor amenity space for smoking and dog walking,” according to BC Housing, and facility operator ASK Wellness will provide around-the-clock security.

“The safety of residents, staff and neighbours is our first priority and we are committed to being a good neighbour to everyone,” the statement added.

Residents will be low-income adults who “live in the area, with a history of homelessness and who need additional support services to maintain housing.”

Construction is expected to begin this fall and finish in spring 2019. It’s part of the B.C. government’s $291-million plan to build 2,000 housing units for society’s most vulnerable.

City council gave its blessing to the project this week after turning down the first proposed site on Green Avenue in July.