1. Open 500-1500 more shelter beds, mostly low barrier. In Vancouver we have about 3150 people with no fixed address and only about 1500 shelter beds.

2. Extend the leases or find modular housing sites in Vancouver. There are 144 units of nice modular homes that are boarded up and the rest of the 700 plus units whose leases will expire in the next few years.

3. Build a tiny home village for people living in the CRAB park community. This is what the CRAB Community wants. There is no other place for them to go. It would be safer than what they have now.

4. Fund the Lifeline program proposed by the Building Community Society that would provide support funds and housing for the most vulnerable and isolated living on the street. Many folks on the street have complex problems and need a lot of help. This voluntary program could do outreach to find them and help.

5. Open one or more hangout spaces where people living on the street can go during the day to sleep, eat, use the washroom, shower, etc. This is a desperate need as many of the shelters close during the day.

6. Require landlords to get Residential Tenancy Branch approval and have a homeless prevention plan before evictions from social, supportive and SRO housing will be legal. This is a popular recommendation for people who have been evicted with nowhere to go.

7. Increase medical outreach in the DTES. Lots of folks living on the street need medical help but don’t have transportation or know where to go to get it.

8. Increase laundry and shower services in the DTES. Many people living on the street asked for this.

9. Put an information kiosk at Main and Hastings and Pigeon Park that lists services that are available and where they are. People living on the street asked for this as many don’t know which services are available or where they are.

1. Fund the DTES Community Land Trust with $200M to buy and renovate SRO hotels and operate them using their tenant-led organizing model. This is a very popular program with DTES residents who like the tenant-led organizing model and the fact that the community would own the housing.

2. Find sites for housing modules from Larwill, Little Mountain, and Jackson and Powell and move ASAP. Many people can’t understand why the government would board up nice housing during a housing crisis.

3. Find sites for and fund enough shelter spaces for all houseless people. This is similar to the recommendation for immediate action that didn’t happen at the beginning of winter and is still essential.

4. Require that all social housing be accessible to very low income people on social assistance and pension, and provide enough funds to make this possible. Implementing this recommendation could create about 1000 more shelter rate units in Vancouver before 2030 and ensure that low income people are not excluded from social housing.

5. Rent parking lot from the Port and set up and fund a tiny home village for the CRAB community. This recommendation from the first set was not implemented immediately but is still important to the DTES community.

6. Fund and speed up building 100% shelter/pension rate self-contained housing at Regent, Balmoral and Gore and Hastings temple sites. It’s important to renovate or rebuild on these vacant sites first, before renovation or rebuilding SROs that have tenants who will have to be evicted. That way, government investment will result in additional better housing, not just better housing.

7. Fund the Lifeline program for the most isolated and alienated among the street homeless with portable funding of $30,000 to $50,000 to support a plan for housing and other elements that will contribute to stability for an individual. This is intended to be a housing first program and completely voluntary. This recommendation was made as an urgent one and still hasn’t been implemented so the DTES community wanted it repeated to the government.

8. Raise social assistance rates to $2300 a month (CERB plus inflation til 2023) and tie to inflation. Poverty is the biggest cause of houselessness and could be significantly reduced if social assistance rates were increased.

Recommendations for all levels of government working together

1. Fund Affordable Housing Advocacy. Provide sustained and adequate funding for community groups across BC to work for dignified housing that low income people can afford.

2. Fund a strategy to eliminate houselessness with adequate, dignified housing for all.

3. Build at least 1 million Non-Market Housing units over the next 10 years in Canada to provide stable housing for the 2.4 million Canadians currently living below the poverty line. Consider having the government build the housing directly.

4. Ensure that low-income people can afford new non market housing by designating at least half of all non-market housing for people living on social assistance and basic pension.

5. Tax the rich to fund affordable non-market housing. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has some good recommendations for how to do this.

Recommendations for Federal Government

1. Restore and drastically scale up the Rapid Housing Initiative to provide new homes that people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness can afford. The Rapid Housing Initiative is the federal program that funded cities and provinces to buy hotels during COVID.

2. Change the criteria for the National Housing Co-investment Fund so that privately-owned SRO’s can benefit from the funding if they keep rents at shelter/pension rate. This change could help preserve SROs until we get enough new housing to replace them.

3. Create a National Fund for Community Land Trusts to buy and build community-owned housing that low income people can afford. This could ensure that the community has housing they can afford in perpetuity, even if a government that wanted to sell off social housing was in power.

Recommendations for Provincial Government

1. Develop specific plans to stop the flows of people into homelessness from hospitals, jails, kids aging out of care, as outlined in the BC Indigenous Homelessness Strategy and recognized in Belonging In BC.

2. Provide a $200 million Fund to the DTES Community Land Trust to buy, own, and run SROs that are in relatively good shape to operate under their tenant leadership model. Explore funding other land trust groups in the DTES. This recommendation is extremely popular in the DTES.

3. Bring in province-wide vacancy control to stop the loss of affordability in SROs and other rental housing. Without vacancy control we could lose affordability up to 200 DTES SRO units per year.

4. Provide more rent supplements, including increasing the SAFER limit to the actual cost of rents. SAFER is a senior rent supplement designed to ensure that seniors renting market housing don’t have to pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. But with current rules, that only works if your rent is $803 or less in Vancouver, way lower than average rents. Other rent supplements are small in number and it's hard to figure out how to access them.

5. Amend the Transit Oriented Development legislation to require a certain percent of new development be at shelter/pension rate and to ensure that displaced tenants are rehoused in appropriate housing at their current or lower rents. There is a danger that this policy will cause displacement of hundreds DTES SRO residents close to the Main St. skytrain station.

6. Work with Supportive and Transitional Housing Residents and Operators to better align funding, Operating Agreements, Tenant Agency and Accountability, and RTA Protections.

7. Massively scale up funding for tenant advocates. Tenants told CHP they have a hard time finding help when their landlord wants to evict them.

Recommendations for city government

1. Extend the leases for all modular supportive housing or provide land for all modular housing when their leases expire so we don’t lose those desperately needed, self-contained units.

2. Stop displacement due to gentrification caused by St.Pauls hospital, Transit oriented development, and other pressures to use the DTES for expensive housing.

Recommendations for the tri-level SRO Revitalization Strategy

1. Commit to adequate funding for SRO strategy from all levels of government ASAP.

2. Ensure all SROs are redeveloped into shelter-rate non-market housing. There is a danger that if SROs are redeveloped, two-thirds of the units could rent at above the shelter allowance. This would reduce the number of units available to low income people.

3. Start with renovating or rebuilding empty SROs like the Balmoral, Regent, and Gore and Hastings site before tenanted SROs to make sure that we maintain a net increase in housing to reduce homelessness.

4. Work with groups like the SRO-Collaborative to support tenant-based initiatives and community building in redeveloped buildings.

Recommendations for Housing Management

1. Create a fund that organizations who support specific communities including Chinese seniors, sex workers, people who use drugs, people who are trying not to use drugs, Indigenous elders, women and men can apply to for developing housing operation agreements that suit their community.

2. Reduce drug-related crime in buildings by regulating a safe supply of drugs for people who use drugs.

3. Fund Tenant Associations to support tenants who organize their buildings to be safe and enjoyable places to live.