With most of Victoria’s tent city dismantled, the question becomes, what next? Many of the campers have moved into accommodation offered by the province. Others have not.
Some occupants have made it clear they don’t want to leave. Perhaps foreseeing this response, the province did not ask to have the site closed entirely.
Instead, after a cleanup operation, campers will still be allowed to use the park, though only overnight. Tents will have to be removed during daylight hours.
This is in every respect a depressing prospect. While the worst features of the permanent tent city — violence, crowding, threat of fire, a growing rat infestation — might be diminished, the broader reality will still persist.
Homeowners in the district will have to accommodate themselves to an ongoing encampment that should have no place in a green space essential to the city’s well-being.
Yet what options are there? The province and the city, acting together, have assembled 190 new housing spaces since last October and more are planned.
However, by some estimates, more than 1,300 people live on streets, in parks or in homeless shelters throughout the capital region. And that number continues to grow, due in part to the escalating price of rental accommodation in Victoria.
Meanwhile, our region, in turn, is merely a snapshot of what has become a national crisis. Across the country, 28,000 people are considered homeless, while many more live in emergency shelters. Child-poverty rates exceed those of most western nations, approaching 40 per cent among indigenous families.
It is these underlying realities — stubbornly high levels of poverty and unaffordable housing — that make homelessness so difficult to defeat.
Even so, while this issue has no short-term solution, there are some basic principles that all three levels of government should commit to.
First, we need far more low-income housing spaces than have so far been constructed. And we need them across B.C., not just in the major cities.
Second, the current shelter allowance maximum of $375 per month, paid to individuals in need, is inadequate in high-rent locations such as Victoria and the Lower Mainland. An allowance in the region of $450 is likely the minimum to make a genuine impact.
Taken together, these two measures would cost several hundred million dollars. Fortunately, it might be possible to find that money without milking local taxpayers.
The new foreign-buyers’ levy on home sales in Vancouver (possibly to be applied in other cities as well) is likely to raise significant revenues. The province and municipalities should ensure that every dollar will be spent on efforts to reduce poverty.
That leads to a third principle our governments should also embrace. Assuming steps are taken to mitigate homelessness, we need an urgent debate about the use of city parks by campers.
The argument in favour of this practice has been that it is an unfortunate but indispensable necessity. And as things stand, there is much truth in that.
Yet there is another aspect that must also be considered. Parks exist for the enjoyment of the community as a whole. They are how a city breathes.
But we suffocate if essential green spaces are taken over by tenters, whose encampments fundamentally alter the environment.
Once serious inroads have been made on the problem of homelessness (and only if they are), the time will come to restore our urban parks to their proper role. It might be a temporary necessity to allow continued use of the tent city as an overnight campground.
But this should not become a permanent arrangement. Otherwise, the heart of our city centre will be diminished, in ways that affect us all.
