A resident of the new tiny-homes village offering temporary housing adjacent to Royal Athletic Park has been evicted after deliberately setting a fire in his wastepaper basket and triggering smoke alarms.
The man is the second resident of a new temporary housing facility in Victoria to have been evicted in recent days for starting fires.
In the tiny-homes case, there was no damage to the unit and no arrest. Staff put out the Monday fire and the fire department did not attend, said Grant McKenzie, communications director for Our Place Society, which holds the contract to operate the facility.
In the other case, a man who had recently moved into the new Russell Street shelter in Vic West was arrested and charged in connection with a Saturday fire that caused about $400,000 in damage to a nearby building.
B.C. Housing is working with non-profit societies and the City of Victoria to find housing for the close to 200 people who have been living outdoors in parks and parking lots. The province has been buying hotels and other buildings to convert into temporary housing.
The tiny-home village on Caledonia Avenue was set up with 30 units created from shipping containers. Smoking is not allowed in units. An outdoor smoking area is being developed, McKenzie said Tuesday.
The fire was set on purpose, he said, noting residents must sign an agreement that they will follow the rules of the facility. “This was someone who obviously did not like any rules.”
The first people moved into the village on Friday and all units, including the one recently vacated and left in a messy state by the man who started the fire, are spoken for, McKenzie said.
In Victoria, a range of shelter levels is in place for people to move gradually toward permanent housing, starting with a mat in a gymnasium. For example, once someone who had been living on the streets is stabilized, they could leave the gym and move into Russell Street, where someone else might be ready to move into a hotel or the tiny-homes village, McKenzie said.
B.C. Housing’s mandate is to clear out the parks, and that is what they are doing, he said, but managers of shelters have no say in who is going into which facility.
In response to the Russell Street incident, B.C. Housing said in a statement Monday that placement in the shelter is based on an assessment that looks at an individual’s physical and mental health, addictions, history of homelessness and preferences.
Our Place has asked the province to ensure that people are assessed to determine whether they are suited to the site where they are going to be housed, McKenzie said, adding the man who started the fire in the wastebasket, for example, may have been better assigned to a gym as a starting point.
As people arrive from living outdoors, where there are no rules, it can take time for them to adjust to more structured living, McKenzie said.
“What we really want to see happening is that once everybody is in these housing units, we want to be able to move people around,” he said. “Because not everybody is going to be a perfect fit right off the bat at the site that they are chosen for.”
The latest incident prompted McKenzie to call again for a complex-care facility in Victoria, especially for those for whom day-to-day life is often overwhelming.
Our Place will see someone in the midst of a psychotic episode banging their head on the wall with their face covered in blood, and the person will be taken to a hospital emergency department, only to be sent back in an hour via taxi, he said.
McKenzie said he would like to see a secure facility with 50 to 100 beds, staffed around the clock with health professionals, similar to Our Place’s New Roads therapeutic centre in View Royal. That facility is dedicated to working with people to end cycles of substance abuse, criminal behaviour and homelessness.
