A Christmas essay: a better way to help the homeless

A plan to house Vancouver's homeless is taking shape on the drawing board of a local architect. It calls for the rapid erection of temporary villages assembled from the same type of modular units that mining companies provide for remote workers.

"Stop Gap Housing" is what architect Gregory Henriquez calls it.

"All of us in this community have long been advocates for permanent housing," he said. "But we've gotten to the point where the numbers of homeless are so staggering that I'm left wondering if we will ever catch up doing it that way. I don't think we can. I think there has to be a stop-gap measure. And that's what this is."

Henriquez, whose Woodward's includes 200 units of social housing built to last hundreds of years, stressed that Stop Gap Housing would never replace permanent homes.

"It's portable dwellings. It's not meant to be a permanent fixture on the landscape. But it could serve for several years until we complete the construction of permanent housing," he said. "I think it's better than leaving people homeless."

It's also cheaper. Numerous studies suggest that this sort of housing would save B.C. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in police, ambulance, and health expenses.

And if built quickly, the modular housing plan even holds the potential to transform the 2010 Winter Games from an international embarrassment — during which the world would discover that British Columbia built multi-million-dollar condos for 5,000 Olympic athletes while doing nothing to house its legion of more than 10,000 homeless — into a showcase of Canadian compassion.

Colourful villages

Remote resource extraction companies have been using these modules to create spartan camps for decades.

"They use these all over the Athabaska tar sands," Henriquez said. "They call it workforce housing."

Henriquez took plans from Britco Structures, which operates plants in Agassiz and Penticton, and showed them to managers from the Portland Hotel Society, which rents to hundreds of the Downtown Eastside's hardest-to-house individuals.

The Portland team suggested that individual units — with ensuite bathrooms and fronts that open directly to the outdoors — would be more acceptable to individuals not accustomed to coping with neighbors, as well as to those reluctant to give up pets or bicycles.

Henriquez drew up plans for a motel-like village, with 48 suites clustered around a central courtyard. The colourful compound includes a managers' office, a covered patio, and a second-story meeting room all within a typical 120-by-200-foot city lot.

"The hard part is to make it pretty and nice. But we can do that. We're good at that stuff," Henriquez said. "You paint it some bright colors. You make it as festive as you can. And you house people with dignity."

Developer and former city council candidate Michael Geller, who is working on a similar plan, observed that some of the most tricked-out buildings in the city — the presentation centres that firms such as Concord Pacific erect to showcase their yet-to-be-built condo towers — are in fact modular structures.

"We're talking about using corrugated metal painted either in solid colours or with photo murals," Geller said. "These villages might wind up looking at lot like Granville Island."

Speed is beauty

"The speed at which we can accomplish this is the essence of its beauty," Henriquez said.

Indeed, the crux of Vancouver's exploding homelessness problem is as follows: social and economic dislocation is rendering British Columbians homeless much faster than BC Housing can build homes for them.

"The big issue has to do with permitting," Henriquez said. "For a normal social housing building, you might need rezoning, then you need a development permit, then a building permit. That takes years."

But Stop Gap Homes would rest on wooden blocking, not permanent foundations.

"These can all be done through temporary permitting," Henriquez said. "It's a 12-month permit that can be renewed."

Modular construction would shave a couple more years off construction time.

"We've talked to Britco. They have excess capacity because a lot of the oil sands stuff has been cancelled. They could build hundreds of these things within months," Henriquez said.

(And Britco is a B.C. company, with large factories in Agassiz and Penticton. Competitor Shelter Industries is based in Langley. A multi-million dollar order placed with either company would represent a timely stimulus for B.C.'s struggling forest products industry.)

Saving tax dollars

Henriquez is preparing a plan to erect 1,000 units of Stop Gap Housing on eight city sites within less than a year.

If combined with the reopening of almost 500 shuttered hotel rooms recently identified by the Carnegie Community Action Project, the Stop Gap plan would provide enough homes to house nearly all of the 1,547 individuals found in Vancouver during the spring 2008 homeless count, and leave hundreds of shelter beds left over for the newcomers expected to arrive as the 2010 Games approach.