Carnegie Community Action Project response to Mayor’s Roundtable on affordable

and rental housing, April 25, 2009 (contact: 604-839-0379)

The Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) represents about 5000 mostly low
income residents of the Downtown Eastside. Many of these people are homeless, or try
to rent accommodation for the welfare shelter allowance of $375 per month. That’s why
CCAP’s focus is on housing people who are homeless or live in SROs. Here are some
points we would like to make:

1. The city, hopefully with the help of other levels of government, must find a way to
keep existing shelters open past June 30th, until they are not needed, and must open
more so that every homeless person can be inside if they want to. Have you checked
out the bottom floors of provincially owned hotels as possible additional shelter
sites?

2. New, decent, self contained housing with a bathroom, kitchen and a total of about 400
sq. ft minimum must be built to replace the 3700 privately owned SROs and even the
government and non profit owned SROs. Many people who are forced by poverty to
live in SROs feel disrespected by society as a whole. For those who have health
issues, this dis-respect slows recovery. Everyone in this rich country needs to have a
private bathroom and kitchen and a little bit of space for their stuff and their lives.
The SROs are not upgraded to modern earthquake standards. City policy calls for
replacing the SROs with decent housing, but there is no proactive strategy to do this.
At the current rate, it could take up to 40 years. The city needs a proactive strategy to
get more decent, self contained low income housing built in the DTES. The city
should acquire more DTES lots for low income housing and embark on a well-
thought out lobby campaign with all sectors in Vancouver and with other cities,
to get federal and provincial funds committed to low income housing.

3. On a city-wide basis, there should be policies that require new housing

developments to be one third low income, one third middle income, and one
third higher income as a minimum. Affordable housing for low income workers in
Vancouver would help employers save money on wages and promote less commuting
and green house gas emissions.

Two cautions:

Incentives to create affordable housing: While there may be incentives that help with
creating low income housing, at CCAP we don’t want condo towers allowed with the
excuse that they might be able to provide a tiny fraction of low income housing.
According to pro-forma work we’ve seen, last year, when the economy was good, it
would take 7 to 10 condo units to fund one low income singles unit. In the DTES, this
would overwhelm our community with condos and drive out low income folks, housing
and services. Now, with the bad economy, it may not be possible to build any new low
income units from anticipated condo profit. This type of incentive won’t work in the
DTES.

Rental housing: While CCAP agrees that we need more rental housing in Vancouver,
Council members should know that market rental will not solve housing problems for
SRO dwellers and homeless people, or even the working poor. Last year it cost about
$1200 a month to amortize a 400 sq. ft. singles unit. This would require an income of
$23.08 an hour, or over $40,000 per year for a new singles unit. This means that the
real housing solution for low income people is government built social housing.