The tents are up. The tents are down. The tents are back. The tents are gone. 

A very long and drawn out chess-game in Victoria continues to play out as the city looks for more ways to manage the homeless in its public spaces. The city’s efforts of containment were complicated further when a motion raised by the Mayor was voted down by council on Thursday. The motion encourages “ethnocultural facilities” to permit temporary overnight sheltering in parking lots on their properties in return for an increased tax exemption.

The proposed exemption for the parking lot portion on 13 properties listed, already subject to a permissive tax exemption, would be reduced by 20% each year, over a five-year period if they agree to the proposal. The organizations on the list include the Anglican Church of St. Barnabas, the BC Muslim Association, the Polish White Eagle Hall and Bayanihan Cultural Society.

The motion was defeated in a 5-4 vote. 

The parking lot proposal seems to run counter to the city's efforts to deter public sheltering and to get people into housing. While the city has seen a noticeable decrease in recent months in encampments and public sheltering, ongoing challenges make for band-aid solutions to deep socio-economic wounds. 

“The proposal does feel inconsistent with the direction that we've been going in as a city. The one major success that we've had since we've been elected in 2022 on the topic of homelessness, pertains to getting people into housing who have been sheltering in parks,” said Coun. Jeremy Caradonna.

The question of where unhoused people can be in Victoria, without being in contravention of bylaws now on the books, was the stump question in chambers as councillors debated the merits of the motion.  

Housing advocate Nikki Ottosen told Capital Daily that Irving Park may be ‘cleared’ but “people just moved on to avoid being harassed by bylaw.” Only a few of the people accepted an offer of housing, she said, which means the majority of the 11 who were there have simply moved somewhere else on the chessboard and that status quo remains largely the same. 

As far back as April 2023, the Aboriginal Coalition to End Homelessness, Cool Aid, Our Place, and Pacifica Housing were raising alarm, in a joint statement to the Times Colonist, that affordable housing units were “insufficient to meet the growing need or make up for older or remaining temporary sites that lack adequate infrastructure and staffing.”

As parks close, many still have nowhere to go

The city has made good on its April bylaw to prohibit sheltering in Irving and Vic West parks. As of Monday, Irving Park was cleared of a number of tents that were up over Labour Day weekend. Vic West was cleared last month and, in the places in those parks where people had their tents, extensive fencing has gone up for “grass remediation.” In Irving park, that fencing also complies with the Victoria bylaw that prohibits shelters going up within 100 metres of a play area or structure. 

The encampment in Irving Park remained one month after the Aug. 1 deadline as a kind of protest against “sweeps” in other parks and on Pandora; an Aug. 1 statement called for housing and for third-party oversight of bylaw enforcement.

Coun. Krista Loughton, who voted for the motion, said  “As we're winding down sheltering in parks and prohibiting sheltering in parks, the reality is that people still need a place to be. So, I think there's potential here and I think that it's worth exploring.” She has been hearing from outreach workers on the street that there's a real need for sober living spaces for people on very low incomes who don't want to go into supportive housing.

A resident who lives near Irving Park told Capital Daily she was “sad to see the city choosing grass over people.” She did not wish her name to be used for publication because she works for a housing advocacy group whose comments are a departure from its work. While it’s clear the city is doing all it can to move people indoors and out of parks, what constitutes a move “indoors” is not always welcomed by everyone. 

“People deserve to be housed,” she said, “but [emergency/low-barrier] housing doesn’t work for a lot of people because they feel enclosed and there is stealing—it’s not a nice place to be.” 

And that may be in a tent or a hut on a parking lot. Ottosen, founder of the Backpack Project, told Capital Daily that not all 11 people sheltering in Irving park had gone to housing. Many simply left the park for other locations to avoid harassment from by-law officers. So, the chess game continues.

A small step forward, or just a drop in the bucket? 

Mayor Marianne Alto said “We've worked tirelessly with the provincial government as partners to create support for housing, both emergency housing, supportive housing, affordable housing, below-market housing, any type of housing.”

It’s not true, though, that all housing is created equal.  

A temporary or mat shelter is, to some, less agreeable than living in a tent. The enduring idea that vulnerable people in need are not entitled to the grace of being “choosers” is one that has come up in provincial court cases and in arguments made to Victoria council by advocates such as Ottosen. In 2008, the BC Supreme Court ruled against the city in favour of a group of unhoused people who argued that forcibly evicting them was unconstitutional. The court cited the inadequate number of shelter beds of other housing options available at the time in its decision.  

For Loughton, Alto, and Coun. Dave Thompson, doing something—anything—is better than doing nothing at all or giving up.

For Alto, the proposal “is one more small tool that may or may not be useful.” 

“The most important part of this, I think, is that it indicates that we continue to try,” she said. “We continue to try because we have to try, and what we've been doing so far has just not done the work.” 

Both Loughton and Thompson wanted to make clear, during the proceedings, they were not approving unregulated encampments in their consideration of the motion, but simply as another option for consideration. Loughton and Thompson said they would be happy to see the motion play out  for things such as tiny homes, dry sheltering and sheltering for seniors who have been evicted from their living situations. Thompson said the crisis is a “complex puzzle with a lot of pieces to reduce harms being caused by housed and unhoused people by the status quo which is a disaster.” 

Coun. Marg Gardiner pointed to a key and underlying reality of the homeless crisis, not easily solvable by housing options or space alone. “Part of our discussion today isn’t about housing, it’s about mental health and addiction. I don’t know why we don’t put a tent up in front of Island Health. This is a health issue not a housing issue,” she said.

Councillors unsure organizations can handle the serious challenges of hosting the homeless

Gardiner raised the unprovoked and fatal attack on one person and serious injury of another early Wednesday morning on Vancouver’s east side. It was carried out by a man Vancouver police chief described at a presser as “a very troubled man who has a lengthy history of mental health-related incidents, which have resulted in more than 60 documented contacts with police throughout Metro Vancouver.”

The July 12 attack of a paramedic on Pandora by an unhoused person following a seizure revealed the unpredictability of what can happen. Coun. Stephen Hammond said, “The problem isn't looking after people who are homeless, it’s the fact that when we're dealing with people who are the hardest to house, which includes people with drug addictions and or mental health problems, there are known negative consequences that follow.”

Safety concerns were front and centre for Caradonna as well. He spoke to the limited capacity of both the operators of the facilities in question and the city to control situations that potentially go sideways. 

“Victoria bylaw already has trouble getting on top of this issue in public locations like parks and on sidewalks, and I think the challenge becomes compounded if it's on private property,” he said. 

“Bylaw has no access to private property and would actually not be able to go on these properties to actually enforce what's going on. They don't have the capacity, they don't have the training, or the knowledge to do that. You need professional operators like Our Place, like Pacifica. It feels like potentially a problematic downloading of work to small NGOs who are not prepared to take this on,” said Caradonna.

Councillors will wait on next fall update

For Caradonna, it’s also a matter of timing and waiting to see what provincial calvary will bring. “On August 1, we requested that our partners around the HEARTH and HART table bring back to us a plan, a plan on homelessness we can reasonably achieve over the next 18 months, and I personally would like to wait and see what comes of that plan before making more ad hoc decisions.” That update is imminent.

“I'm supportive of designated spaces, whether that be tent pads or a tiny home village, or other shelters over the next 18 months, but at a certain point in the future we are going to have to draw a line in the sand and say we have no more capacity in Victoria,” said Caradonna.

In Feb. 2024, the province entered into a memorandum of understanding with Victoria, in collaboration with BC Housing and the Ministry of Housing, to implement the HEARTH program. The MOU commits both governments to work together to support people who are unhoused and sheltering in encampments. HEARTH is a supportive housing program administered by BC Housing for the development and operation of new emergency housing and shelter options. 

However, one of the ongoing challenges for Victoria Loughton has commented on in the past, is the lack of large tracts of land available for new HEARTH development sites. 

The HART was piloted by BC Housing in Victoria in 2017 after a large homeless encampment appeared on the Victoria Provincial Courthouse lawn. HART does "on the spot" housing assessments, social assistance applications and provides other community support to unhoused persons in partnership with BC Housing, City of Victoria Bylaw Enforcement Services, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, Pacifica Housing, and Island Health. 

Caradonna is asking his colleagues to stop the chess clock and see what’s in the HEARTH/HART plan.