Finding a Path Forward: BC's Homelessness Crisis was the title of the first event in a new education series launched by Lift Community Services on November 14 at qathet Art Centre.
Affordable and supportive housing solutions
Guest speaker for the evening, Pacifica Housing chief executive officer Carolina Ibarra, presented to the audience an eye-opening, enlightening and stark snapshot of the homelessness crisis on Vancouver Island.
For Ibarra, who joined Pacifica in 2020, social housing was not something she had a background in. However, she and her team have made headway building homes for people that range from low-barrier transition housing, independent living facilities, subsidized housing and housing with supports, and also market housing.
"I feel like my brain has been doing gymnastics for the past five-years as I wrap my head around everything that I'm learning," said Ibarra at the forum. "We have [Pacifica Housing] about 446 units and we're just about to open 88 more of independent living in a couple of weeks."
Housing on a spectrum
Ibarra outlined the wide-spectrum of different types of housing Pacifica has built, while partnering with various community organizations such as Victoria Cool Aid Society.
"We serve everyone from people who are living-rough, homeless and encampments, all the way to market rental," said Ibarra.
Homelessness crisis on Vancouver Island
One major theme in Ibarra's talk was that communities such as Nanaimo, Victoria, and even smaller rural places such as Central Saanich, have all gone through a similar process grappling with encampments popping up in their communities.
"This is somebody else's problem and somebody else needs to deal with this."
Ibarra said that is a common sentiment from people, but not surprising, as it's a natural human response to frustrating situations such as homelessness, drug addiction and encampments in public spaces. But, Iberra said, once communities were past the resistance to change, and arrived at the point of finding solutions by forming community partnerships, the results were mostly positive. She emphasized that a lot of the resistance comes from misconceptions about who is unhoused.
Falling through the cracks
The unfortunate reality, said Ibarra, is that many folks living in encampments in Central Saanich for example, were First Nations, seniors, and disabled people who had fallen through the cracks.
"We build a mix of affordable, independent living and supportive housing buildings," said Ibarra. "We also have a community services building [in Nanaimo], which actually serves the broader community that anyone can access and ask for help in finding rentals or eviction prevention."
Ibarra said Pacifica also operates in a number of communities between southern Vancouver Island and Nanaimo.
"We've got a broad range of people who actually move across that continuum [of housing], such as supportive housing, independent living and market rentals," said Ibarra. "There's many different ways to enter the continuum; most people will just come into market rental, some people need subsidized housing, some people are on the street, but it's not static, because people's lives can change, and so we provide different kinds of support."
Prevention is key
In 2018, a large homeless encampment formed in downtown Nanaimo and was given the name, "Discontent City."
"I think Nanaimo is like every community, the growing homelessness challenge was almost imperceptible as it grew, until something happened and it exploded," said Ibarra. "It had a huge community impact in terms of the discourse that it shaped and I will say that the community was not happy, obviously, and they were not welcoming to a lot of the solutions that were being proposed."
However, eventually a provincial order came out and there were six weeks in November to get people into housing, said Ibarra. Pacifica Housing quickly built and started operating a supportive housing site called Nikao, which consisted of four modular buildings with 66 units helping to house some of the 300 people who were living in the tent city.
Ibarra admits it's not the most aesthetically pleasing development because of the urgency and timeline to get people housed. However, she said Pacifica has many purpose-built housing developments for individuals who have faced homelessness due to mental health and/or substance use disorders that have gardens, community spaces, exercise rooms and cooking facilities with 24/7 on-site staff.
Open dialogue needed
Many communities at first are in denial about having a homelessness problem, said Ibarra, and many are resistant to the idea of opening supportive housing units due to negative headlines in the news and fear of increases in crime and disorder.
"When Pacific opened its first supportive housing site that was purpose built, a beautiful building, there was lots of community engagement done, there was opposition, but the community engagement helped overcome that," said Ibarra.
She said she sees a need for more family housing, seniors housing and subsidized housing in places like qathet. Many smaller places such as Duncan or Hope lack services and end up downloading them to bigger communities. Having the type of services provided by Lift is unique for a community this size, said Ibarra.
Dropping the ball
One big frustration, she added, is that there is a lot of finger-pointing from all levels of government (in BC and across Canada), but that encampments and homelessness can be prevented.
"Giving someone a tent and dropping them off at a park is not a solution," said Ibarra.
Situation in qathet
In 2023, City of Powell River’s point-in-time (PIT) homeless count was 126 individuals who were identified as experiencing homelessness. 74 per cent were adults aged 25 to 54 years of age and 18 per cent were considered seniors at 55 years plus.
The reason reported for housing loss in Powell River: 41 per cent said not enough income, 20 per cent said substance use and 20 per cent said landlord/tenant conflict.
"Some people just need housing or financial systems navigation," said Ibarra. "We find a lot of seniors who are potentially leaving their home for the first time due to redevelopment and they have absolutely no idea how to navigate this new world of rentals."
To see what some of the Pacifica Housing properties look like, go to pacificahousing.ca/properties.php. Lift Community Services has an Homelessness Action Toolkit that can be found at liftcommunityservices.org/toolkit.
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