A Tale of Three Housing Projects: The View from Victoria

Published in Victoria Street News, January 2009

As the homelessness crisis in British Columbia’s capital region grows worse with each passing day, we can learn from previous attempts to build housing for all. In a wealthy country like Canada, homelessness has been – and remains today – a public policy choice, rather than some inevitable act of god. Neoliberal “downsizing” created the current homelessness crisis, in a rush to cut taxes and eliminate services, and it will be solved when citizens force their governments to build non-market housing again.

For the 1,500 homeless people in BC’s capital region, life is a constant struggle – without access to safe shelter, healthy food, and adequate medical care. The region has the highest rate of poverty of any urban area in the country, according to Statistics Canada, with over 20% of the local population living in “low income.” Home ownership is out of reach in a real-estate market driven by high-end condos and half-million dollar homes. The rental vacancy rate, meanwhile, hovers below one percent.[1]

Homelessness is a big problem, but the solution already exists on the ground. About 10,000 Greater Victorians sleep every night in non-profit and co-op housing units that operate outside the private real-estate market – housing mostly built before the neoconservative and neoliberal onslaught: attractive townhouse units of M’akola, Pacifica, and kindred non-for-profit housing societies; downtown single-bedroom apartments and bachelor suites of the Victoria Cool Aid Society and Our Place; cottages and care homes run by seniors citizens’ housing associations; and participatory housing co-ops such as Spring Ridge, Mitraniketan, and Tyee.

As citizens strive to eliminate homelessness in BC’s capital region, in partnership with the state, we can learn from this history.

Case 1: Blanshard Courts and the Limits of Public Housing

The state is one of the few agencies with the fiscal and regulatory powers to help provide shelter for every Canadian. At key moments in the 20^th century (after the two world wars and during the inflation crisis of the 1970s), the Canadian government embraced an interventionist approach to housing policy that put roofs over the heads of a million Canadians. Acute housing shortages and mobilized citizens provided the impetus for government action.

City of Victoria officials, armed with a crowbar, evict the last “holdout” residents of the Blanshard-Rose neighbourhood, 1969. Credit: Victoria Press Photo

Victoria’s Blanshard Courts is the product of one such wave – the “urban renewal” and public housing zeal that swept North America and European cities in the 1950s and 1960s. The project was guided by a land-use philosophy that sought to eradicate “slum” neighbourhoods – areas in need of repair, which also nurtured tightly-knit ethnic and working-class communities. Under the aegis of the Urban Renewal Program and Central Mortgage and Housing Agency (later renamed Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC), the federal government drove the expansion of low-cost rental housing.

In the late 1960s, Victoria’s Blanshard-Rose neighbourhood fell victim to urban renewal. A total of 157 households were displaced, as old homes were razed to the ground to make way for the downtown extension of the Patricia Bay Highway and the Blanshard Courts project.

The City of Victoria began investigating options for urban renewal in 1960, commissioning technical studies and identifying 28 acres of land near Blanshard and Bay streets as urgently needing renewal. The area contained “a high concentration of the worst quality houses which are beyond rehabilitation,” a report found, and was needed for “a major road, Blanshard extension,” and was “ripe for redevelopment for motels.” The “need for low-rental housing” was included at the bottom of the list.[2] The Blanshard-Rose area included strong Italian and South Asian communities, grouped around the Italian Community Hall and nearby Sikh Temple.

In 1966, the City signed a deal with the provincial government and CMHC to “renew” Blanshard-Rose. Offers to purchase the land were initially unsuccessful. Homeowners, particularly seniors and social welfare recipients, lacked the financial means to obtain alternate accommodation. “Some of these residents…find it virtually impossible to rent from private owners of realty under any circumstances,” a relocation officer advised city officials. Agreements of sale were initially obtained for only 46 of 127 private parcels, but by 1969 the city had obtained clear title to all properties. However, several renters refused to vacate the premises. City officials, armed with a crowbar, forcefully entered a Blanshard Street home to evict the last “holdout” tenants.[3]

Blanshard Courts rose out of the ashes of the old Blanshard-Rose neighbourhood, alongside the new four-lane Patricia Bay Highway extension. The former residents dispersed around Victoria and surrounding municipalities, with 84% telling researchers that they would have preferred to have remained in their old neighbourhood.[4] A smattering of residents moved into Blanshard Courts, which consisted of 90 subsidized, townhouse-style units. Shortly after the public housing opened, the University of Victoria’s Martlet newspaper shed light on the project:

“Although this development has been successful for elderly people who are now able to spend enough money on food, it has resulted in the crowding of more than 400 children in a 1 ½ block radius. Welfare workers report that wide scale boredom, depression and other trouble results from this cramping of people.” A grassroots social work facility called the Community Action Centre advised “eliminating the possibility of similar housing complexes being built in the future.”[5]

As the last homes were bulldozed in Victoria’s Blanshard-Rose neighbourhood to make way for the Pat Bay highway and Blanshard Courts, a federal Task Force on Housing and Urban Renewal, headed by Liberal cabinet minister Paul Hellyer, issued its final report. The 1969 Hellyer Report recommended an end to federal funding for the “wholesale destruction of older housing.” The report dealt a deathblow to grandiose urban renewal schemes in Canada.[6]

Case 2: Cool Aid and Non-Profits Fill the Gap

Out of the ashes of top-down, coercive urban renewal, dozens of grassroots housing initiatives flourished, as governments increasingly turned to the non-profit sector to deliver social services. One such example is the Victoria Cool Aid Society, which grew from a small volunteer army into a professional organization that today houses 400 homeless people.

In July 1967, two transient youth were arrested by Victoria police in recently refurbished Centennial Square, on charges of “vagrancy,” which outlawed idleness. One of the young men was sentenced to ten days in prison. It was the era of “flower power,” with young people rejecting “the establishment” and staging huge “Love-Ins” around the city. United Church minister L.D. Wallwork described the jailing of the hippies as “corruption of the law,” while the local Chamber of Commerce launched an investigation into the Victoria Youth Council. “It’s my opinion that the business community feels threatened,” said 22-year-old Colin Constant, after he was detained for sitting on the side of the Centennial Square fountain.[7]

The following summer, in June 1968, the Victoria Youth Council launched the “Cool-Aid” emergency telephone hotline to assist youth in need. It was “primarily aimed at finding low-cost housing for transient young people,” the Victoria Daily Times reported. Youth council organizer Charles Barber described the service as a “working-model.” “If something is not done, there could be hundreds of perfectly respectable and innocent kids arrested for vagrancy this summer,” he warned.[8]

By the end of 1968, the Victoria Youth Council had opened a hostel for transient youth at 953 Balmoral Road, on the edge of downtown, called “Streetlink.” Three years later, the group acquired the Emmanual Baptist Church (now the Belfry Theatre) in the Fernwood neighbourhood as the hostel’s new home. For 50 cents per night, youth received dinner, breakfast, a shower, and a dormitory bed. The next year, in 1972, a dental clinic opened and two years after that, a medical clinic, funded by the provincial health ministry for youth staying at “Streetlink.” The Victoria Cool Aid Society was incorporated as a non-profit society in October 1976.[9]

Over time, Cool Aid’s clientele shifted, away from the restless young travelers toward an older, more hardened demographic. This reflected growth of a permanent marginalized underclass in Canada – estranged from both the labour force and the private real-estate market. “Most hostel users today are residents of the local community who need to use the hostel for emergency shelter,” a Cool Aid bulletin noted.[10] The Victoria Cool Aid Society retooled into a social service agency, offering short-term and long-term supported housing for the Capital Region’s homeless population. Today, Cool Aid operates 80 emergency shelter beds, 25 women’s shelter beds, and 257 long-term supported units at nine facilities for the “hardest-to-house” – people managing mental illness and addictions who need help to escape life on the streets.

Case 3: Spring Ridge and the Co-operative Approach

In the 1970s, Canadian housing policy moved in innovative directions. Citizens leveraged funds from the Co-operative Housing Program to fill an essential role in the housing continuum. The co-ops that sprouted across the Capital Region offered a sense of belonging and buffered low-income families from the volatile private real-estate market; they helped ameliorate desperate social conditions that drove many young and old people onto the streets. Today, there are 1,000 co-operative housing units in the Capital Region, including the Spring Ridge Housing Co-op.

Homes slated for demolition are given a fresh lease on life at Fernwood’s Spring Ridge Housing Co-op, 1974. Credit: Spring Ridge Co-operative Housing Association archives.

In 1973, Victoria’s bohemian Fernwood neighbourhood was in a state of flux. A large number of turn-of-the-century wooden homes were in disrepair, providing necessary but substandard housing for seniors, low-income people, and youth. A robust real-estate market was driving up land values, prompting developers to demolish older properties and build high-end housing.

Fernwood was a hotbed of the local counter-culture, which had emerged in the 1960s and combined utopian visions of “flower power” with stronger political tones. Among a motley crew of hippies, yippies, anarchists and kindred rebels and dreamers, Fernwood served as the incubator of a spark that challenged conventional wisdoms and addressed a range of social ills.

One day in 1973, a group of Fernwood activists, with roots in the co-operative food movement, witnessed the demolition of an old home on Pembroke Street near Fernwood Road. Real-estate company Block Brothers had an option to buy the adjacent property, a large overgrown tract of vacant land. The activists mobilized. They pressured the provincial New Democratic party government of Dave Barrett to purchase the land, through its policy of “land-banking.”

Fernwood resident Paul Phillips recalls these heady times: “They got an onslaught of people saying, ‘Buy it! Buy it! Buy it!” In November 1973, these efforts paid off. The Block Brothers option lapsed and the province bought the land for $38,000. “I got a call from a provincial government official saying ‘Your efforts have paid off. So call off your dogs!’”[11]

Concurrently, the province had acquired a block of old homes along the Oak Bay border for seniors housing (the Baptist Housing Society’s Marrion Village on Bee Street). The homes were slated for demolition to make way for the new housing project. Phillips and other Fernwood co-operators intervened. They convinced Fernwood social-welfare officer John Shields (future head of the BC Government Employees’ Union) to provide $100 per month to welfare recipients willing to undertake construction work. Human Resources Minister Norm Levi, a long-haired social worker, approved the plan. Housing Minister Lorne Nicholson granted the hippies one of the Oak Bay homes on the condition that they “demo” the materials in one month. “House Savers” was born.

“We did it in three weeks,” Phillips recalls. The province agreed to sell all 17 Bee Street homes to the “House Savers” for $1 a piece, who commissioned the CMHC-funded Urban Design Centre of Vancouver for expert advice. In the dead of night, activist Nick Orton transported the four sturdiest homes by truck to the Fernwood property. “They were moved without permission of the government of the day,” Phillips recalls. “[Orton and his friends] were playing music on the homes on the truck as they moved through the streets.”

Spring Ridge Housing Co-op rose on the overgrown lot. A dozen former welfare recipients were employed converting the four homes into eight duplex units, aided with a one-year CMHC grant of about $50,000. The remainder of the homes were recycled and sold for building materials. “Talk about community development,” Phillips suggests. “People learned how to put in flooring, which they are still doing today. People learned a lot. Those same people who were on welfare were suddenly faced with having to do everything themselves. They had to learn how to insulate, how to gyp-roc, how to do everything connected with building a house.”

The former welfare recipients became fully participating members of the Spring Ridge Co-operative Housing Association, with stable homes in an inclusive community. When the right-wing Social Credit government defeated Barrett’s NDP in 1975, Spring Ridge co-operators weathered a financial and political storm, successfully buying the Pembroke property from the government. The Social Credit MLA for Victoria had earlier speculated in the legislature about “what will happen when the houses are no longer of any value.”[12] Today, Spring Ridge has expanded to 22 units, housing 36 people who maintain strong ties to a plethora of community projects.

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These tales of three housing models demonstrate the breadth of responses to Greater Victoria’s housing crisis. The challenge we confront today is not how to build homes for all. Rather, the challenge is how to make governments fund social housing again. What strategies and tactics can turn the neoliberal tide and secure land, capital, and regulatory approval to build homes for all?

Faced with a growing problem – which impacts the health and wellbeing of homeless people and also the economy and public finances generally – action cannot be avoided. Homelessness will be eliminated in British Columbia’s Capital Region – and elsewhere – when citizens force governments to act.

Ben Isitt is an assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow of History at the University of Victoria. He can be reached at isitt@uvic.ca. For the longer paper “Housing For All: The Social Economy and Homelessness in British Columbia’s Capital Region,” from which this article is drawn, visit www.bcics.org.