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In the last election housing and homelessness were top issues at every all-candidates meeting and at most every doorstep. Candidates were judged by their commitment to dealing with the housing crunch in Victoria and how they would respond to the chaos in the community that arose from the conflicts between a growing homeless street population and others in the community.
Both issues remain critical to the agenda of council as we approach the next election, though significant steps forward have turned down the heat on some of the most problematic symptoms of homelessness and the lack of affordable housing. Here are some of the reasons for the change, and what we hope to accomplish on our next term.
Council put the issue at the top of our priority list.
Some projects were already in progress, but council’s support for shelters and other services helped to ensure that those in the most critical need were afforded an opportunity to get out of the rain or the cold and into shelter, not just into a tent.
We opened a new Streetlink shelter that provided more space and more services to the street population and provided Cool-Aid with the facility they needed to serve their clients. It’s been a great success and helped downtown where the lack of space and quality of facilities spilled problems out onto the streets of Chinatown.
This council also made a priority of putting together funding to help “Our Place” provide more meals and more support to “family” members during the day when people are hungry and have nowhere else to go. We’re continuing our pressure on the province to come up with more funding to get the meals program going again and keep “Our Place” open 24 – 7. It’s critical for our community and for the “Our Place” family. They are part of our community too.
We went out on a limb to purchase failing hotels and put the first one into service housing some of the most difficult of our city’s homeless population. It gives them a place to live and that’s the first step to rebuilding lives and takes some issues off of the street and out of hard pressed communities. It’s working for everyone and with our leadership, other levels of government have come to the table and are helping to fund the capital investment in improvement costs needed to keep the new facility open. We’re working with many partners to re-open the other property for first nations families in need to support more of our community into the comfort of their own homes. Victorian’s don’t often care who tackles the issue; they just want it done.
Affordable housing is the other part of the equation. We haven’t ended homelessness and the hard work has only just begun, but we’re making progress too on providing housing diversity to keep more people housed and reduce the danger of putting more people on the streets. Just as importantly we are trying to make sure that people who work in Victoria can live in Victoria.
• Housing Options
• No net loss of rental
• Secondary suite grant program
• BC Housing partnerships
• Heritage restoration tax relief
Car-lite housing
One of the more expensive pieces of downtown housing is too much parking. Restrictive zoning often prescribes to many parking spaces that can cost $50K or more for underground parking. It’s a deal-breaker for many developments 
and makes housing expensive for young working people who often don’t need parking – 22% of households in Victoria don’t have a vehicle; why do we force them to pay for parking? We’ve been flexible and provided variances for small lot developments, secondary suites and denser multi-unit housing accessible to transit, within walking distance of downtown, or well supported by cycling routes and other facilities. It’s helping to keep the cost of housing down.
Our next step will be to revisit parking requirements to make them more current and to keep development costs down. It will make housing more affordable and supports a new community design that relies on sustainable transportation choices.
Our next step has to be making a fair trade with the development community – parking variances will come with a contribution to the city’s sustainable transportation fund to ensure we have the means to support a better pedestrian environment, more cycling facilities and new investments in transit to support real travel choices.