“project civil city”

Mt. Pleasant acquisition can help achieve Project Civil City objectives

Mayor Sam Sullivan & City Councillors use a custom-built shovel for a groundbreaking for new social housing at 1321 Richards St.

Mayor Sam Sullivan today welcomed a City of Vancouver purchase of land that could result in significant new social housing in Mount Pleasant. This purchase compliments Mayor Sullivan’s participation in a series of important announcements and events today, including:

• more than $14 million in traffic ticket revenue from the Province of BC to support community police services
• over $1.1 million for 2010 Legacies Now to develop an accessible tourism strategy in advance of the Olympics
• groundbreaking ceremony to mark the start of construction of Kindred Place — a new 87 unit social housing development on Richards Street

STEVE MERTL
Canadian Press
VANCOUVER — The B.C. government has quietly bought up more than a dozen fleabag hotels and other properties as part of a plan to curb rising homelessness in Canada’s most expensive real estate market.
Community activists have led a rising clamour that owners of so-called single-room-occupancy hotels want to cash in on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics by converting their buildings to house tourists.
The expected wave of evictions will exacerbate Vancouver’s already serious homelessness problem, critics say.
The Pivot Legal Society estimates hotel conversions have already led to some 700 evictions.

Source: CBC News
Vancouver city council approved in principle a homelessness strategy in which the city would donate a dozen parcels of land worth $50 million for the development of 1,500 low-cost apartments.
The report, co-authored by Ken Dobell, a top aide to Premier Gordon Campbell and a former city manager, calls on the province to spend $48 million a year to build and maintain the small housing units for low-income singles.

In February 2007, the City of Vancouver announced it invested $6.6 million for the purchase of a 36-unit rental apartment building at Kingsway and Dumfries. The City will lease the…

Source: The Globe and Mail
Byline: Mark Hume

The federal government has closed a funding gap that threatened to shut down non-profit aboriginal groups providing 15,000 shelter beds and feeding 2,000 families annually in British Columbia.

“The government has agreed to a six-month extension of existing projects, which was very nice,” Patrick Stewart, chairman of the Aboriginal Homelessness Steering Committee, said yesterday.

“And what that means is it will give us six months of continued existing services while we work out the new terms and conditions and do proposal calls [for a new two-year contract].

“So it looks like we’ll get the seamless transition we were looking for.”