Fund it with property-transfer taxes, municipal politicians say

Frances Bula, with file from Jonathan Fowlie
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Some B.C. municipal politicians have urged the provincial government to use the hundreds of millions of dollars it collects in property-transfer taxes to help fund a housing program that will create housing.

However, at least one mayor said Tuesday it’s not really housing that’s needed. Instead, the province needs to put more into mental health and addictions treatment to get people off the street.

Whichever approach was argued, homelessness and housing dominated conversations at the Union of B.C. Municipalities annual meeting in Victoria this week. The meeting has attracted 1,900 councillors and regional district representatives from around the province.

“[Monday], we had a session on health that turned out to be about homelessness. A second session on affordable housing turned out to be about homelessness,” said New Westminster Mayor Wayne Wright, as he spoke Tuesday at a session for delegates from large urban centres.
Homelessness continued to be the theme of Wright’s day as he went to the washroom at the Empress Hotel, next to the convention centre, and found himself sharing it with a homeless man who was using it as his wash-up facility for the day.

Wright, along with many others, said the province has a crisis on its hands and no one is tackling it. “We spend billions on cancer research. Yet here we have a disease that’s in the middle of us that we’re not attacking the same way.”

Many politicians criticized, for the second day, Housing Minister Rich Coleman’s recently announced housing strategy, which will provide money to build shelters and transitional housing, along with giving housing subsidies to poor families living in private apartments who are spending a lot of money on housing in relation to their income.

Councillors like Dean Fortin of Victoria and Heather Deal of Vancouver argued that with vacancy rates near zero in those cities, housing subsidies won’t solve any problems, but will just raise rents.

Several politicians, including Alan Nixon from North Vancouver, Vic Derman of Saanich, and Al Hogarth of Maple Ridge, urged the provincial government to create a funding mechanism similar to the one now used for transportation, where part of the gas tax goes towards transit projects.
The property transfer tax, created in 1988 to discourage speculation, and which generated $830 million for the province last year, could be used to create a housing fund that others could add to.

That recommendation was echoed Tuesday afternoon, when delegates heard recommendations from an “economic opportunities” task force, which made the same suggestion.

But Mayor Gord Robson of Maple Ridge said his municipality doesn’t need housing, it needs treatment for its mentally ill and drug-addicted homeless people. Robson said a recent survey of all 177 homeless people in the Tri-Cities area showed that 98 per cent of them were either mentally ill or drug-addicted or both. “We don’t need housing, we need help. We can’t put them in jail. We can’t take them outside of town and shoot them. What do we do? They’re sick, it’s an epidemic, there’s thousands of them.”

The housing minister’s new assistant deputy minister, Mary Freeman, said the ministry wants to hear from communities about what is working and what isn’t so it can make adjustments.
The issue of affordable housing was once again addressed on Tuesday when Vancouver police arrested six protesters from the Downtown Eastside who had occupied an abandoned hotel.
The protesters moved into the empty North Star Hotel at 5 West Hastings St. on Sunday, demanding it be converted into social housing.

On Tuesday afternoon, VPD spokesman Const. Tim Fanning said the six people — three women and three men — were arrested and charged with assault by trespass. Fanning said the arrests were made without incident. “It went very smoothly. We kept the lines of communication open between the people running the protest and the leadership of the police operation and that helped keep things civil,” he said.