Vancouver has a growing homeless problem. Part of it is due to cuts to mental health facilities as long as 10 years ago and partly because the various levels of government have ignored or bungled support for the residents of the downtown east side for at least as long.
With the Olympics coming in 3 years, the SRO (single room occupancy) hotels in the downtown east side were being bought up by speculators and spiffied up. How these people were going to recoup their investment in the few weeks around the Olympics is a mystery to me. I'd be very surprise if a family from Lethbridge is going to vacation in a neighborhood like the downtown east side.
Sam-I-am Sullivan, our mayor has proposed fining the homeless/indigents. City hall has even set up a $300,000 program to collect the fines. This is such a ludicrous idea I don't even know where to start. These people can't even scrape together enough money to provide niceties such as a roof over their head and these geniuses think they can muster up $75 to pay for a municipal fine .. then schlep over to city hall to pay it. I guess they're expected to pay on their cell phones and their platinum MasterCard.
The one bright light here .. is the provincial government bought 10 SRO hotels and a couple of condo developments in the past two months. They accomplished this through a numbered company, so hopefully they were able to acquire these properties at a fair price. This provides shelter for 495 people. These people are already in these hotels/condos, so no new beds have been created, but at least these buildings will be protected as social housing.
