27 Feb 2023 Council meeting Safety

Councillor Hemmens Motion re: Emergency Basic Shelter Housing

Motion
That Council direct Staff to prepare a report to be delivered by June 1, 2023, outlining the costs of designing, constructing and servicing (water and electric) basic shelter housing for up to 100 people on City property.
Minutes, page 9
The City’s vote record words it differently
That Council direct Staff to prepare a report outlining the costs of designing, constructing and servicing (water and electric) emergency basic shelter housing for 100 people on City property.
Sources
Agenda itemCity agenda
Put forward by Erin Hemmens Source

Erin Hemmens Yes

Councillor Hemmonds. Then Councillor Armstrong. Thank you, Your Worship. And I apologize for that gobbledygook wording. That was just lost in translation. So what I mean by basic shelf shelter is I'm not committing to a certain design. I don't have an idea in place. What I'm looking for is a function and that's to get folks under a roof and off the ground. It could include purpose-built platforms. I'm thinking similar to the covered picnic shelters on Seesachin. sprung structures or even repurposing currently used assets, such as the Bowen stables. The reason I'm asking for this, and I just, I think I want to say the caveat here is that I haven't workshopped this thoroughly and that's been very intentional. I've shared it with the mayor. This is simply asking for information. This is not forcing us to go anywhere. This is just asking for deeper information about a crisis that we're facing. The other caveat here is that I was your co-chair of the Health and Housing Task Force, so I spent nearly three years looking very, very closely at this issue. The motion that was removed tonight, Councillor Manley's motion, if I don't, I'm sure you guys read it, but it kind of highlights the predicament we're in, and that's that we're kind of forced into sending strongly worded letters to other levels of government to take care of a problem that we are facing. They're facing it as well but it's on our doorstep. So my motion is far more geared towards action and I would 100% support Councillor Maloney's motion if he were here and it were delivered but this motion is focused more on providing actual amenities in our community to address this crisis. So just some background. So recent conversations with RCMP place our number of homeless or unsheltered people about 650. A lot of those folks are hiding in bushes. A lot of those folks are not facing active addiction. A lot of those folks are trying their best to avoid detection and they include seniors, they include families, they include youth and they include single women. According to a September 2021 report, Nanaimo has the most homeless people per capita in the country. BC Housing is working very hard in our community, but it's not near enough and the suffering extends beyond those without homes and bleeds into our business community and our neighborhoods, which we at the city deal with every single day. We're investing historic amounts into emergency security services, support services, and we're gaining no ground. In fact, a strong argument could be made that we're backsliding. Our city isn't large enough to attract the provincial investment of hotel purchases such as those seen in Vancouver and Victoria following COVID, nor are we small enough to quickly scale up small innovations such as those seen in Couch and Port Alberni. We've been sitting on three and a half million dollars in provincial funding because we can't find a location for the navigation centre. So provincial dollars are there to support us. I didn't include this in my motion because tonight is about a first step. It's simply about asking for information and giving staff three months to compile that information. But if we get there, if and when we get there, I am going to argue very strongly that we work with our service providers and again, based on my experience at the Health and Housing Task Force table, our service providers are poised to do this kind of work. I would argue that we find our 100 easiest to house residents. I would argue that in our community we could easily find 100 people who are in terrible circumstances who would benefit tremendously from having a solid roof over their heads. And I'm not talking about those in active addiction. I'm not talking about those with multiple comorbidities. I'm again talking about the seniors living in their cars, I'm talking about the single moms with their kids. Sinanamo First Nation and our partnership with the four plexus gives us a really good precedent for this. And based on our staff report, a measure of the success of that housing model is based on the recipients being triaged into a path of those most likely to succeed. Otherwise known in… These are dry facilities, and that's an important piece of their success. In the end, I think I just want to talk about leadership. Again, going back to Councillor Manley's motion, we are continually placed into a position of advocacy, and I would argue that we're doing a fairly good job of that. We're stretching provincial dollars to the best of our abilities, but leadership needs to step forward with solutions in a complex problem. And the city is not going to solve this. This is not our job to take on. But everything I have seen in my political career is that a city that comes with a plan, with things fleshed out, with partnerships alive, they're more likely to receive funding for the specific programming than those who are just saying, please help us, we're drowning. And I think to date, with some successes, a lot of our advocacy has framed around, I think this gives us a very specific, tangible something that we are interested in, that we are invested in. And again, we're not moving on this. This is just a step in the direction that's going to give us information that will allow us to make future decisions. Thank you.

Sheryl Armstrong No

Thank you. I won't be supporting the motion. I don't believe that the city is in the business of providing housing. We had that conversation Friday, and that was what the majority felt at that time. We already have an affordable housing strategy plan, which addresses all the concerns that Councillor Hemmonds has done. We've had numerous, numerous reports on what city land is available for this. We've had all sorts. We've gone through spring housing. We've gone through all of that, so we're just duplicating work for staff again. The other thing is we know that BC Housing is responsible for this. It's their mandate, so I think I have no issues working with them. They already know what land we have available. We've done this numerous times. It's a repeat. We've already heard from staff they're over capacity. We've heard from service providers there's nobody available to run these. We've heard that. We heard that on the Friday. And secondly, and I'll remind people like we heard at our asset management, only 8% of all tax dollars go to the municipality, 42% to the province and 50% to the feds.

Hilary Eastmure Yes

Councillor Hemmonds outlined and coming to the table with a potential space that could work for this I think is one thing that we can do as a city and there are operators who could come in and and do this kind of work who may not necessarily already be working in our community and who have expressed interest so I I don't want to give up on this problem. I know it's a really big one. So I at least would like to see the information on this. And regardless of whether you think 100 people is too many on a particular site, we can change it if the information doesn't support having 100 people in a place like this. But I need to see that information. So that's why I'll be supporting this. Thank you.