The least surprising Vancouver news last week was that our homelessness count has not diminished: 2,181 daughters and sons on the street, a 2% increase in the past year, and a lame-duck mayor saying more needs to be done.
Well, duh.
We endure a grand conceit – a pretension, a delusion – that cities are equipped to combat major issues like homelessness.
Alongside is another great myth: that a tiny city like Vancouver might hold back the waves of global capital deluging our housing market – like the apocryphal King Canute trying to hold back the tide.
The hubris of our leadership, and seemingly of those today who would succeed them, should worry us. Their preposterous raising of expectations, atop the mayor’s claims that homelessness could be quelled or that affordable housing could be achieved, has created an era of blind municipal overreach.
A city can do little on its own, only slightly more in concert with a provincial government, only a bit better with a federal one, when it comes to staggering dilemmas like homelessness or housing affordability. But it doesn’t stop politicians and candidates from professing to be saviours to those who, quite rightly, want hope.
On the housing front, it is difficult to believe anything short of financial re-engineering – subsidies and redistributed income – would be meaningful. But we won’t do that, we know. At most we will impose taxes, prune the permit bureaucracy, diminish levies, rezone and supply what will be devoured by demand.
Whatever you do municipally, it will not bring housing into check. Not when capital is fleeing countries for safety and speculation. Not when interest rates are low. Not when we market ourselves to the planet. Not when we are dependent on these transactions to make our economy relatively strong.
Beware those who claim there is a fix. There isn’t. It is out of their control.
On homelessness, the disgrace of a rich city, little in the city’s ambit can fix what ails us – and this is us, meaning our problem, not a problem of the others.
We need to tackle what we have as a national, perhaps international, emergency. We need to summon resources as if a magnitude 8 earthquake had hit, with all the trappings of the first responders, the military support and the triage that accompanies a protracted natural disaster.
The $1 million a day into the Downtown Eastside largely serves an industry that in its heart might be valiant but is economically unproductive and dependent on the persistence of the misery. It is a conflicted business, and we owe it to the community to run them out of business for good.
But we don’t. We buy a lid for it. We finance our complicitness as if it were a business writeoff. We keep it from spreading into modular housing or extra safe injection sites or shelters sprawling from the poorest Canadian postal code. We absolve ourselves with statements like the mayor’s.
The ingredients for our demise as a city are upon us because we didn’t attend to our shelters. Young people do not speak hopefully; they worry deeply about their planet, their city and themselves. But they do not see the path I saw at their age of a career, a house, a community and a life. They are not entering this stage as much as they are trying to clutch it.
We need to recognize a bifurcated city – paper prisoners as homeowners with equity who can’t cash in, paper exiles as wannabe owners who can’t buy in. Let’s just not worsen it, as is the case with the capital hijack of the so-called school tax. Let’s stop the hoax that we have magic bullets.
On homelessness, let’s approach it as a menace to be wrestled and conciliated, meaning not only a healthy dose of compassion, but of money – big money, long-
lasting money, but still cheaper and saner in the end than what we are doing today.
What this municipal campaign needs is a gust of reality, but the early soundings are of more bloated promises. Time to talk truth, candidates. •
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
