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Yeah, I'm losing my voice from talking too much. So we all were here for the Metro Vancouver point-in-time homeless count just a month ago, which saw a 12% increase in folks... unhoused, unsheltered. 40% of those folks are unsheltered living outdoors. Last term and in the past, we had advocated for tiny rapid shelter solutions as an opportunity. This goes back to my own visit where I actually went to Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon and saw this firsthand. And many of you will have heard this story from me before. But the difference that a locking door and a roof over one's head makes is profound. And when we recognize from our recent homeless count that so many of these folks are ending up homeless, not because of any kind of stigmatizing reasons that folks might think. It's mostly because of economic reasons and housing unaffordability. And we know that these are solutions that can be deployed rapidly. And what we're seeing in Seattle with the pressures they have on unhoused population is that they are deploying hundreds of tiny shelters in an effort to manage their encampment situation, but also to meet their FIFA obligations. And this is a moment in time where we could make a difference. You know, when I first presented this and council in the last term approved this idea, I brought in some speakers from Pallet Shelters out of Everett, Washington, who construct these portable Ikea-style shelters that can be built in about half an hour, cost under $15,000, fiberglass and aluminum, durable. They're a roof over their heads. They've got egress. They've got windows. They've got locking doors. They've got full-down cots. They provide a level of dignity and shelter that... are far superior to SROs. We're living on the streets. And I think that's the intention here.

Thanks, Chair, and thank you to the speakers. I want to just quickly reflect on some of the staff comments, which very explicitly do not recommend this motion, and talk about how we first approved this motion back in 2020. Indeed, in 2020, we approved this as an urgent approach. yet it's 2026, and we're still waiting on a report back for the pilot that we approved back in 2020, six years later. So what's happened between 2020 and now? Well, the unhoused, the homeless count was 2,223 back then. As per our recent update, it's now at 2,715. So that's 500 new homeless Vancouverites, and here we are. And to reiterate, from that point in time, housing analysis or unhoused analysis, those are the majority Vancouverites. These are people who are becoming unhoused in our city. So what else has changed other than this growing unhoused? Well, we have a more fragmented and dysfunctional shelter system. We have the emergence of even worse drugs, more debilitating drugs, more toxic drugs. We have more pressure on unhoused folks. We have a ban on new supportive housing. But you know what else has changed? Just last month, the feds introduced $125 million in new funding through the Unsheltered Homeless and Encampments Initiative. There's money. There's money to do this, folks. It's not just, you know, our money. We could actually do something different here. Now, I recognize that there may be a political imperative at this council to ban new supportive housing. But the good news is this isn't supportive housing. It's a shelter. There's no plumbing. There's no foundation. You can pick it up and go. Other jurisdictions have dropped these tiny shelters and parking lots. So when the earlier caller, the dog crate condo guy, called in and asked where we could put these, let's look. We've got the Hastings Racecourse parking lot. We just approved it this morning. We've got the city-owned easy parking lot at Main and Terminal where the mayor is hoping to build for-profit housing but hasn't broken ground yet. Apparently, there's a lot right next to the Canby Bridge here where the mayor is pitching that we could locate a new Major League Baseball stadium for some future use. Now, none of these spaces have been activated yet, and these are, by definition, temporary uses, these tiny shelter villages. Effie mentioned it, the speaker earlier, locking doors. That's the big difference, folks. A locking door is a game changer for folks. I mean, if anybody here has spent 24 hours on the street unsheltered, there's a reason we call it sleeping rough. It is rough. It is scary. It is no wonder that people turn to drugs for solace and comfort. In fact, our homeless point in time... Analysis showed just that, that people become more addicted when they're unhoused, on the street, vulnerable, unsheltered, living rough, sleeping rough. Yesterday, this council made a big deal about the need for recovery beds. I got to tell you, if we want to talk about recovery, congregate shelters where you got to line up at night to go get a cot and sleep overnight and then they kick you out and you walk around the streets again for the next rest of the day and then you go back to the shelter at night, those congregate shelters aren't going to cut it for sobering up. It's just not going to happen. So this is an opportunity, this is a point in time. This is a point in time where we can put aside some of the political ideology and say, you know what, this is actually something that could work and could be deployed very quickly and could actually achieve some objectives that I think we collectively share. And that is fundamentally keeping people from getting into deeper, deeper crisis while they languish unhoused on the streets of our city in an ever-growing cohort of misery and vulnerability.

Thanks, Councillor Frye. Councillor Orr.

Thank you. Thanks for that update on what's been happening since and the lack of report back. I will note, however, I disagree with Councillor Fry. This council did unanimously agree to recognize housing with supports in an amendment to their homelessness count. um which is great so good to be on the same page there but like you said 2700 2715 people the highest number ever recorded uh 40 of them sleeping outside right now tonight you you did say if you've ever mentioned if you've ever slept uh on the streets or ever Spent a night on the streets. I have. It's not fun. And I've been saying for a long time that the status quo isn't neutral. Leaving people unsheltered isn't a passive choice. It's an active one. And it comes with costs. Human costs that don't show up in a budget line will compound every single night someone spends outside. the health deterioration, the trauma, the lack of sleep, the narrowing of what's possible for that person, and financial costs too. Sanitation, emergency response, park remediation, policing. We are spending money on the consequences of homelessness while chronically underfunding the solutions. Dignity Village in Portland has been running since 2000. Duncan did it. Kelowna did it. And their mayor just told us 83% of residents moved on to better outcomes. Victoria did it. These aren't experiments anymore. We know this works. We know tiny shelter villages have higher utilization rates than congregate shelters, better exits to permanent housing, lower costs per successful outcome. The data is not ambiguous. What's been ambiguous is our willingness to move fast enough for it to matter. Our own tiny shelter pilot took years to open. Years. and that's the part that has to change. The motion asks us to streamline, to identify sites, to stop treating every development like it needs to be solved from scratch. There's new federal money, as Councillor Fry said, on the table right now. BC Housing has programs we haven't fully tapped. Seattle is moving faster than us, and they're doing it because FIFA gave them a deadline. We shouldn't need a soccer tournament to act with urgency on this. A locked door and a bed, that's what we're talking about. I'm supporting this motion, and I ask every councillor at this table to do the same. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks very much. Appreciate the discussion. And I'm going to approach this from a human perspective, not a political or an ideologically driven perspective, but I think a human one and a practical one. As was noted, we considered a motion very substantively similar, I believe, from Councillor Fry last term in 2020. Staff did a lot of work on it. I think that the current conditions are deplorable and I think council's job is to push for better because people deserve more and that means yes saying no more SROs. That means yes saying we want truly supportive housing with quality supports and I think that means that yet pushing for funding that actually maximizes the constrained amount of sites that the city of Vancouver has to deliver as many homes as possible on these and getting people into quality homes that they can stabilize in and stay longer term. The pilot that has happening on Terminal Avenue with the 10 units, I think we've all toured them and looked at them and been inside them, was very difficult to... actually land into sight for a number of reasons because when staff went through looking at options, all of the considerations with respects to things like security for individuals that are there, et cetera, the cost of operating things like plumbing, running water, access to bathrooms and or kitchen space, meals, et cetera, that one was only enabled because of the adjacent nonprofit operator in the temporary housing. and it was very challenging and difficult to find a site. And at the end of the day, I think that we, I've often talked a lot about this in terms of how long do we tie sites up for with temporary housing for 10, 20 years of what we're being asked to do. For example, even when we did TMH, which has been successful in providing better quality housing, but if you do that on a site for 20 years, say for 20 people, You could house so many more people if we just actually put all of our effort into getting a building built that could house dozens or potentially hundreds of people and get that moving. There's limited access to funding across the country and with the province, and what I want to do is get people into better quality housing. I think that a lot of these examples, we had a very fulsome debate, if I recall, the last time that council did this go around. A lot of individuals come that spoke to some of the examples that were raised, like Dignity Village in Portland, and provided a very different picture that things were not rosy there at all in terms of the success. And the other challenge, too, it's not just that you build it and you leave it. It requires pretty significant ongoing operating support. which typically comes from province BC housing other folks who have really and they're having their own tough times and again if we're gonna get I don't say blood all the proverbial stone but you know perhaps pick a nicer analogy I want to get it to get people into really good quality housing that they actually deserve I don't think that this is the best and the highest use of housing that we can be advocating for or the best and highest use of our land Some of the speakers mentioned things like shelters, et cetera. I agree. I don't think that's something we want to be pushing. What we want to be pushing is getting people actually into homes that they can stay in. Thank you.

Thanks. Yeah, I will be supporting this. I know that this council unanimously declared housing to be a human right. I think the situation is desperate. I also prefer temporary modular housing to the idea of tiny homes, but I think we've got to use every tool in our toolkit to deal with this situation. And, you know, I appreciated... or talking about some of the consequences of homelessness. And recently Councillor Klassen and I went to visit Fire Hall No. 2 and, you know, we often talk about how much we appreciate our frontline workers, but the people that work in Fire Hall No. 2 and in the ambulance service are being pushed to their limits by the results, the damage that's caused by escalating homelessness crisis. You know, one of the things that people talk about with temporary modular housing is that there are self-contained units so residents can lock their door and they don't need to share bathrooms, which is safer for residents not to have to leave their unit to use a shared bathroom. But a locked door is, as we've heard, critical no matter what. You know, I think ideally we would have, of course, a lot more shelter rate housing and supportive housing being built to house all the SRO residents and all the homeless folks. But that's $7, $8, $10 billion. And so I think that it's important that we try and keep people alive long enough that those longer-term solutions are possible for them. So, yeah, I'll be supporting this because we should be doing everything possible.

Yeah, thanks very much. I am listening to this debate and...

I'm struggling to understand the difference between sort of stable housing that people can live in. That was described by a fellow counselor here in support of housing. I cannot for the life of me figure out what the difference is in that version of rationale. And I think that's what I continue to believe, housing with supports. we should be prioritizing on city-owned land.

We have sites available. We don't have the political will currently. My concern, and I look at the Heart and Hearth program that is currently funding new temporary modular housing in Squamish and in Whistler, creating housing that is, for folks, about this number, 40 to 65. My concern is, If we go down this path, we're going to not deliver the scale that we need. 15 units, 20 units will take up a lot of land that could have two stories of temporary modular housing and have 40 to 65 units on it. And I do think that the operating that goes with tiny villages, however we want to frame it, is... is not the best use of our funding. But what I have heard in this debate, which confuses me, is a desire for something more substantive than tiny villages, but yet still those same folks vote against supportive housing. And... in which case homelessness gets worse. So I really feel frustrated, I think, at this point with this particular council on this debate that we're, it's like a race to the bottom, that we're not going to build the housing that we really need. So now we're going to do a stopgap of 20, and I get it, locked doors. We have SROs. under our standards of maintenance bylaws now that do not have locked doors in buildings, and we do nothing to enforce them. There are buildings that have 100 units. There's one building that has 108 units, and 52 of those doors don't lock right now today, and we do nothing to enforce it. So I actually agree. Dignity is a locked door. But we're not even doing that as a city for folks that we would consider housed now, but they don't have a locked door. So I struggle with this because probably because in eight years, I've been through also three encampments that have caused enormous... strain and pain on people as well as systems, and we haven't gotten any further ahead. And so I'm starting to lose faith that it's the right thing to do. I think what the right thing is to do is to build housing at the scale of the crisis we face. And that's what we should be focused on. That's what the money is there for provincially. That's what the money is there for federally. We should be getting more temporary modular housing at the scale that a city like Vancouver with homelessness surpassing 2,000 people sleeping outdoors every single night requires. So I'm going to abstain. I can't even remember the last time I abstained, if ever. I am going to abstain on this because I'm not comfortable voting against it, but I want to make it very clear that what I support is actual proper housing with supports, with dignified self-contained units, and we should stay focused to deliver that and not spend money on things that will not provide that long-term stable housing for people.

Councillor Frye. Yeah, just given some of the conversation around housing, I just want to be clear why this motion was entitled small rapid shelter systems. It's not housing, folks. It's not housing. It doesn't have a kitchen. It doesn't have a toilet. It doesn't have plumbing. It doesn't have running water. It's a shelter system that has a locking door and windows and looks like a little house. It's built with self-leveling feet. You can pick it up and you can move it. You can put it in a parking lot. They are designed to be temporary. This is exactly what Victoria did with theirs. This is what Duncan has done. This is what New Westminster is in the process of doing. These are temporary shelters in nature. It is not a replacement for... temporary modular housing or supportive housing. These are all laudable goals that we would love to see senior levels of government step up and fund. But folks, I'm here to say it's not happening. It's not happening at the scale or the pace that we need to see it. And in the meantime, folks are living rough. Folks are struggling on our streets. And frankly, folks are turning for the worse. We know, we see it. And we know that this is an intervention that actually... can and does make a difference. I've been to Dignity Village, and I appreciate that Councillor Kirby-Young may have spoken to somebody who was there, but I've been there, I've talked to the residents, I've visited the physical place, and I know that that has been a success, and it's been a success that's been replicated around North America, up and down the coast, for that very reason.

Look at that, five minutes exactly.