A new chapter for old Army & Navy building
Former home of department store to temporarily house 60 of city's most vulnerable people
While Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is still feeling the loss of the Army & Navy, the discount department store's former home will soon open its doors to a new incarnation that will once again serve the community, but in a new way.
The exterior of the old Army & Navy building at 15-27 West Hastings St. was all boarded up and closed last week, looking more or less as it has since the retailer became a COVID19 casualty last year after 101 years in business. But inside, construction workers were busy on the final stages of converting the space into a homeless shelter.
During a tour of the facility last week, while crews with power tools buzzed around the building's interior, Tanya Fader showed the “sleeping pods” that will soon provide beds for up to 60 people.
“We've come a long way since throwing a mat on a gym floor, or people sleeping in a church pew,” said Fader, director of housing for the PHS Community Services Society, the non-profit running the shelter.
The “pods” are like little cubicles separated by halfwalls, with each self-contained unit containing a bed, locker and bedside table. During last week's visit, each bed was topped with a folded clean towel, toiletries and a Halloween-sized chocolate bar on each pillow. Bedside tables had a small succulent plant on top, and a safe syringe-disposal unit inside.
B.C. Housing started using the sleeping pod concept in shelters last year, including a temporary emergency shelter, also operated by PHS, set up in Victoria's Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre, the 7,000seat arena that, in normal times, played host to major concerts and Western Hockey League games.
The pods' physical separation was meant to reduce COVID-19 transmission, Fader said, and their experience in Victoria showed “it served that purpose, but then it also served some extra ones as well.” The pods provided more privacy and a better experience for residents seeking stability during difficult times, Fader said, and PHS saw success in Victoria with transitioning residents from the shelter to longer-term housing.
The shelter pod is one example of the myriad ways, big and small, in which COVID-19 has spurred innovations that could outlast the pandemic, from local governments rethinking public spaces such as plazas, patios and promenades, to life-anddeath matters like the B.C. government asking Ottawa earlier this year to decriminalize drug possession.
“I think that COVID, as with many things, has allowed us to change our response in ways that actually end up having other benefits,” Fader said. The pods, she said, “work incredibly well: letting people establish their own space, they have their locker to put their own stuff … You're not switching which mat you're sleeping on every night, you have your own space.”
PHS senior housing manager Duncan Higgon, standing at one of the soon-to-beused pods last week, said: “This wall is tremendously important.”
In February, nine months after the retailer's closure, it was announced that B.C. Housing and the city would co-lease the old department store building from the Army & Navy's owners, to convert the space into housing for the homeless.
Reached this week, Army & Navy Properties president & CEO Jacqui Cohen said she was proud that the Hastings building will once again provide something of value to the DTES.
“Army & Navy was a community constant for 101 years. When I made the difficult decision last year to close our operations due to the insurmountable challenges of COVID, I knew I wanted the future of the buildings — like their past — to be of benefit to the communities,” Cohen said in an emailed statement. “My Grandpa Sam would be very proud, as am I, to have our family's Army & Navy building used to temporarily support 60 of our city's most vulnerable individuals.”
B.C. Housing is operating another pod-style centre at the Plaza of Nations, and another shelter is expected to open in the coming weeks in a renovated city-owned building at 875 Terminal Ave., which was most recently leased to the Vancouver Trolley Company. Those new facilities, like other existing homeless shelters, are meant as temporary, emergency measures to bring people indoors, allow them to stabilize, and connect them with proper housing.
That last step — finding longer-term homes — often proved especially difficult in the past. But the provincial, federal and city governments, working together, have recently acquired several hotels for conversion into social housing, and are building several, new, deeply affordable projects. B.C. Housing said this week almost all the campers from Strathcona Park's tent city have moved indoors now, and more than 1,700 spaces for homeless residents are opening in Vancouver over the next two years.
COVID-19 has exacerbated Vancouver's (and B.C.'s) homeless problem in many ways. But Fader said she's encouraged by all the new housing coming online soon, and she's hopeful that, within a couple of years, we could be in better shape than before the pandemic.
“To survive in this work, you have to be realistically pessimistic,” Fader said, “but ultimately you have to be full of hope and optimism.”