Affordable Housing - the Housing Crisis
MVCCA Open letter on Housing
The crisis of homelessness within the CRD was made evident during the summer of 2018 at the Regina Park encampment. Very few of those individuals have subsequently found accommodations. Some possible types of shelter include: sustainable tent cities, emergency shelters, transitional housing, and social housing (rent-geared-to-income). It requires a dedicated non-profit society or government agency such as BC Housing to operate these kinds of facilities but all levels of government have a role to play in homelessness solutions and prevention.
Those who are currently homeless may require counselling, medical help, addiction treatment or other services to help them achieve a life where they are safe and provided with support. There are people living in area parks. Making them decamp every morning only serves to keep them homeless and invisible. Moving encampments from one place to another, is ridiculously expensive. MVCCA is proud of our neighbourhood which welcomed a facility for the ‘hard to house’, and we have personally benefited from our interactions with those individuals. As a society we have allowed cut backs to social services, to the point where we are now being forced to see the consequences.
So what can Saanich and the other municipalities do?
prepared by Mt View Colquitz Community Association
MVCCA Open letter on Housing
The crisis of homelessness within the CRD was made evident during the summer of 2018 at the Regina Park encampment. Very few of those individuals have subsequently found accommodations. Some possible types of shelter include: sustainable tent cities, emergency shelters, transitional housing, and social housing (rent-geared-to-income). It requires a dedicated non-profit society or government agency such as BC Housing to operate these kinds of facilities but all levels of government have a role to play in homelessness solutions and prevention.
Those who are currently homeless may require counselling, medical help, addiction treatment or other services to help them achieve a life where they are safe and provided with support. There are people living in area parks. Making them decamp every morning only serves to keep them homeless and invisible. Moving encampments from one place to another, is ridiculously expensive. MVCCA is proud of our neighbourhood which welcomed a facility for the ‘hard to house’, and we have personally benefited from our interactions with those individuals. As a society we have allowed cut backs to social services, to the point where we are now being forced to see the consequences.
So what can Saanich and the other municipalities do?
- acquire land suitable for social housing and other future uses
- arrange to lease land to be used for temporary housing, this may be land that is privately owned, or that of other institutions including B.C Hydro and the Dept. of Highways
- create incentives for homeowners to provide spaces such as granny suites or tiny houses
- change the bylaw governing duplexes to allow that the owner not live there
- increase the amount that developers pay into the Saanich affordable housing fund when they build market units
- show leadership by giving support for reasonable social housing projects throughout the municipality, even where some vocal neighbours are in opposition
- organize a workgroup or task force to explore and develop alternative systems by which to respond to the homeless encampments For example, see Bellingham’s Winter Haven project https://homesnow.org/winter-haven/
prepared by Mt View Colquitz Community Association