A homeless shelter at 201 Central Street is one of three in Vancouver that the City hopes to keep open indefinitely.

Credit: Jackie Wong

NEWS: Budget negotiations will determine fate of homeless shelters

Seven Vancouver homeless shelters are slated to close April 30, but if the Province and the City are able to reach an agreement on funding, three of them will remain open.

The three shelters in question — located at 201 Central Street, near Main Street Station; 51-B West Cordova, in Gastown; and at First United Church, in the Downtown Eastside — have been heavily used since their doors opened in 2008 as part of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT). The other four shelters, referred to as Winter Response neighbourhood-based shelters, are located on East Broadway, in Kitsilano, in the West End, and under the Granville Bridge.

While housing officials for the Province say they’re waiting on the City to offer to pay half the operating costs to keep the three shelters open, Vision Vancouver councillor Kerry Jang says the Province is shirking its responsibilities. “The province has to come up with those operating dollars,” he says. “That’s their job.”

As for the Province’s negotiations with the City, Jang says, “They’d never really spoken to us in detail. We [the City] don’t have the dollars because there has been no change in our budget.”

Provincial housing officials say the Province has provided more than $6.8 million in funding for HEAT shelters since December 2008. On top of that, they say, there are just over 600 year-round shelter beds in the city that receive annual provincial funding of almost $17 million.

At First United Church, Reverend Ric Matthews is still waiting for information on the future of the 250-person shelter he has run out of the church sanctuary since December 2008. “There’s been no formal conversation; we’ve been pretty reliant on what we can glean from Facebook pages of [provincial housing minister] Rich Coleman and the Globe and Mail and so on,” he says. “But during the Olympics, Gordon Campbell did very specifically shake my hand and say he wanted to reassure me that after the Olympics, their commitments to the issue of homelessness would not go away.”

While Matthews is sympathetic to the challenge of finding funds from both the City and the Province, the bottom line, he says, is that there is greater need for shelter for Vancouver’s homeless population than existing shelters are able to accommodate. “People have developed enough trust and comfort to be in [the shelters] that they don’t automatically, if there isn’t pressure, go back to being outside,” he says. “It’s not just because they’re cold that they’re coming in. It’s because they feel safe in here, and feel okay to be in here... At the end of the day, the problem with homelessness is not necessarily housing. It’s homes.”

Matthews describes the First United shelter’s users as being at the extreme end of society’s margins. “They’re folk who most deeply distrust society or have been hurt by it... These are folk who are least likely [to simply] just go back into some formal housing because we offer it to them,” he says.

Shelters like First United, Matthews says, serve as an intermediary home between living on the street and more structured housing. “This is the place where all their life possessions are, this is the place where their mail comes to, this is the place where they get their three meals a day, and this is the place where they sleep. Well, how do you define home other than that?”