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DTES rallies against mayor’s freeze on new supportive housing

Residents and activists warn the move will deepen homelessness and displacement in the Downtown Eastside

March 13, 2025

Hundreds of Downtown Eastside community members turned out to a Town Hall meeting in late January to fight back against Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim’s plan to freeze new supportive housing in the city.

As it turned out, their concerns would be falling on deaf ears.

Part of Sim’s motion —announced in January and approved Feb. 26 — is to update the Downtown Eastside Area Plan, disrupting what the City of Vancouver is calling “hyper-concentrated” services in the Downtown Eastside (DTES), including supportive housing, shelter services and social services, according to a Jan. 23 press release.

Sim said that Vancouver is home to 77 per cent of the region’s supportive housing, despite having just 25 per cent of the population.

In response, the CarnegieHousing Project (CHP) gathered150 residents and activists for a Town Hall meeting Jan. 30 at the Carnegie Theatre to address Sim’s controversial move. Present for the Town Hall was former city councillor Jean Swanson, Coun. Pete Fry, UBC assistant professor Kuni Kamizaki andChinatown organizer Bev Ho.

Also in the house was the CHP’s very own life size “Trojan Horse” cardboard sculpture.

In her speech read by Devin O’Leary at the meeting, Jean Swanson noted that the city has approximately 4,000 unhoused people and 6,000 people living in single-room occupancy units — the last stop before homelessness — that need replacing or upgrading. Therefore, the city needs funds for about 10,000 units of decent housing to accommodate its unhoused population, Swanson said.

Sim, who recently labelled the community a “poverty industrial complex,” suggested a policy shift to update the DTES Area Plan by encouraging “a mix of housing, businesses and services” to allow the “integration” of the DTES into Vancouver’s broader community— ensuring a more “balanced, supportive environment for residents, businesses and visitors.”

While that may sound reasonable on paper, O’Leary says in practise, it means Vancouver’s most vulnerable residents get left out in the cold.

O’Leary, who is manager of the CHP, describes this as a pattern of service denial that passes the buck: “If you don’t build it, they won’t come. But that doesn’t work.”

Fry, who initially opposed the DTES Area Plan, agrees with O’Leary.

“When we consider that a large portion of the [DTES] population relies on shelter or assistance rates, [Sim’s] plan doesn’t work,” he said, adding that while the DTES Area Plan has suppressed land values, enabling higher levels of government to invest in housing, “it hasn’t been enough.”

Ho shared her concern that many social housing units built around the 1960s and ’70s still accommodate seniors in their 90s and above. Many of these folks depend on the neighbourhood’s walkability and culturally relevant, accessible business services. Their displacement would be catastrophic.“

Aggressive displacement and gentrification in the neighbourhood has lost us a lot of housing and a lot of businesses and spaces that are specifically targeted to low-income folks,” she argued.

Vancouver’s ‘shadow’

On Jan. 29, a day before the Town Hall, six DTES recipients of The Order of Canada, including Swanson, wrote a joint opinion piece in The Tyee that Sim’s proposal would be a “dramatic”shift from the past 10 years.

The DTES Area Plan has been working, they say, as rules insist that developers of private rental housing include social housing in 60 per cent of the building.

“Allowing market towers in the DTES would enrich developers and incentivize single-room occupancy hotel owners to evict thousands of low-income people into homelessness,” they wrote.

During an interview with Megaphone, O’Leary likened Vancouver’s treatment of its unhoused residents to a“shadow”—much like the personal shadows we all carry, shaped by past harm and packed away for survival in this hyper-productive world.

“Our collective shadow stems from a city shaped by colonization and oppression, and it deepens through coping mechanisms like policing, segregation, oppressive laws and evictions,” said O’Leary. “Just like how we must confront our personal shadows by respecting our whole self through love, compassion and healing… I see this as the task for Vancouver and the rest of this country.”

On Feb. 26, as Megaphone magazine was preparing to go to press, Vancouver City Council passed Sim’s motion to pause new supportive housing projects in the city.

Hundreds of people packed the grounds of city hall and council chambers to protest the decision.