City seeks cash for next 600 modular homes
Sometimes, after a formerly homeless person has moved from living in parks, shelters or on the streets, and into a temporary modular housing unit, they’ll sleep on the floor for the first little while.
“That’s because they don’t want to get comfortable in a bed, because they don’t believe it’s going to last,” said Tanya Fader, interim director of housing for the PHS Community Services Society, which operates four Vancouver modular housing sites. “It’s not uncommon for someone moving in from a long history of being outside to not trust that it’s actually going to last, that it’s real, that it’s actually their home.”
Fader and others who work with residents of Vancouver’s modular housing units hail the program as cost-effective for governments, fast to build and transformative for the lives of previously homeless tenants.
This week marks a milestone for Vancouver’s pre-fabricated homes, as residents move into the last of 10 sites, totalling 606 units, hitting the target set out at the program’s launch in September 2017.
And while those tenants settle into their new homes, city staff are assessing possible sites for the next 600 modular homes. There’s little question the demand is there, in a city that counted 2,181 “residents facing homelessness” last year.
But even if the city figures out where to put those homes, the question remains of how to fund them. Vancouver’s initial round of 600 units (after an earlier pilot project) received contributions from three levels of government. The B.C. NDP launched the program with an investment that ended up costing $80 million, and will provide another $11.4 million in operating funding this year.
The City of Vancouver provided land for the 10 sites, spread through the west side, east side and downtown. Although the city couldn’t provide an estimate for the combined value of those parcels of land, everyone knows land in Vancouver isn’t cheap.
Those 600 units wouldn’t have been built without the efforts of the previous Vision Vancouvermajority council.
Not every municipality is so keen on modular housing, Housing Minister Selina Robinson told the crowd at last weekend’s opening event for that 10th project, located on the edge of Strathcona, at Union Street and Gore Avenue. CBC reported Robinson said the province has offered multiple times to build modular housing in Maple Ridge — the suburban city where a homeless camp grew over the last two years to a reported population of 150 people — only to “keep getting refused” by the municipality.
The federal government’s contribution to those first 600 units, announced last month was $1.5 million. The comparatively small size of the feds’ contribution wasn’t lost on some of those now hoping for more support from Ottawa.
Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, who spent seven years in Ottawa as an NDP MP before his election last year as mayor, seems to want to pressure the federal Liberals during this election year to put their money where their mouths are on housing.
Last month, in a one-on-one interview shortly before the B.C. 2019 budget was delivered, Stewart threw the focus to Ottawa, calling the recently announced $1.5-million contribution as “pretty low.”
At a news conference the following week, Stewart said: “The province has come through in a big way, with the first 600 units, so we hope they’ll continue that trend. At the federal level, there is lots of room for them to help. We have heard lots of good things, and we constantly hear about the (National Housing Strategy’s) $40 billion over 10 years, but not a lot of that money is landing on the ground.”
And the next day, at city council, Stewart stepped it up another notch, saying senior governments were “making lots of noise (about housing), but really not delivering much money.”
Details weren’t available about any planned federal funding for future modular housing in B.C. But in an emailed statement Valerie Glazer, press secretary for the federal minister of families, children and social development, wrote that between Nov. 1, 2015, and Dec. 31, 2018, more than $820 million was invested in housing initiatives for B.C.
“We recognize there’s still much work to do,” Glazer wrote. “We are happy to work with partners to fund projects and proponents. There are several projects underway through the National Housing Strategy that have yet to be announced and are currently in the process of being reviewed and approved.”
Even if the term “temporary modular housing ” wasn’t widely known before the B.C. NDP launched the program in 2017, the concept isn’t new to local housing operators. In 2009, PHS sent a proposal to the province detailing the concept of “temporary prefabricated housing,” which could be built quickly to house the homeless on empty lots throughout Vancouver.
The 2009 proposal included possible sites for prefabricated housing, the first of which was at Union and Gore — exactly where tenants are moving into new prefabricated homes this week, a decade later. As for why the idea never went anywhere in 2009, PHS executive director Andy Bond said he couldn’t comment directly because at that time he wasn’t in his current role heading the organization.
But previous Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson made it clear in earlier comments that he felt his government’s housing efforts weren’t always supported by the B.C. Liberal and federal Conservative governments.
Bond, when asked how Vancouver can get the next 600 homes built, replied: “I would be hopeful there would be more federal money coming in.”
The city and the province, between them, managed to build Vancouver’s first 600 modular homes without a lot of support from the federal government. They’ll hope for more help on the next 600 modular homes.