The Downtown Eastside needs more housing, but where’s the money coming from?

The Downtown Eastside (DTES) needs better housing, and more of it. Among the seemingly endless reports, plans, policies, and committees, it’s a premise that’s widely agreed on. The Canadian government has recognized that housing is a human right, and the City of Vancouver recently called on the province to do the same.  

While there’s a shared understanding in principle, progress has been painfully slow. Only a handful of new subsidized housing developments have been built in the DTES over the past ten years, while the number of people without a home is growing. 

Vancouver’s annual homeless count showed a 16 per cent increase between 2020 and 2023, and approximately 4,000 people in Vancouver don’t have housing, according to estimates by the Carnegie Housing Project. 

There’s an “urgent need for housing and subsidized housing in our city, and particularly in the Downtown Eastside… there's just not been enough investment,” Councillor Rebecca Bligh told Vancity Lookout. 

“I think what's been a failure of the [2014] Downtown Eastside [Area] Plan, [which was] well-intentioned but didn't work, is the high dependency on senior government funding,” Bligh said.

However, the actual results of housing construction under the area’s current requirements are mixed. With government and non-profit partners, the city was successful in creating 1,800 social and supportive housing units – 400 more than the 10-year target set out in 2014. Where the plan failed was in delivering market ownership and rental units, which the city set higher targets for and didn’t even reach 50 per cent of their goal by 2024, according to the Vancouver Sun.

The city is now looking to dramatically weaken its social housing requirements in favour of market housing in the DTES, in an attempt to incentivize development projects to proceed. It’s a proposal that’s caused major concern from neighbourhood residents, advocates, and non-profits.

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