Vancouver pilot project to promote street safety, homelessness decriminalization

The City of Vancouver is trying to respond to community safety concerns without criminalizing people living on the street.

In the new two-year pilot project, “Better Together,” the city hopes to improve safety, access to support services, communication, and maintaining cleanliness.

“I’m interested in seeing people get the help they need where they are,” said Neil Wyles, executive director of the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association.

The project will launch in the Olympic village, downtown south, and Mount Pleasant areas.

“Our homeless services outreach team will have staff in those neighbourhoods, connecting people with income, housing, and other supports we’ll have peers in the neighbourhood doing outreach to business and we’ll also be doing some training. Everything from understanding the causes and solutions to homelessness and how to deescalate a situation perhaps with a customer or a neighbour,” said Celine Maubaules, managing director of the city’s Housing and Homelessness Services.

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According to the city, many resident have brought forward concerns surrounding people experiencing homelessness due to a lack of safety and cleanliness.

But Wyles says he hasn’t heard of any major incidents in his neighbourhood, and has mostly seen respectful interactions.

“I don’t need to see how many needles, or how much garbage or anything like that… they’re not as important as the human factor, and how we’re helping these people where they are.”

Wyles says he believes people living unsheltered deserve compassion and it is important to work as a community to come to a mutual understanding.

“Sometimes it’s just people looking for a place to lay their head and keep dry. I just think that people need to recognize that we’re all here together, and we need to move through this world together.”

Christine Boyle, a Vancouver city councillor says she hopes the pilot will work to better the community for all residents.

“Right now, people call 9-1-1 for a whole range of issues, where police are not necessarily the best equipped or most appropriate response. So this pilot provides other options to meet the specific needs that people are seeing in their neighbourhoods.”

The city recognizes that the root causes of homelessness – like a lack of affordable housing, poverty, mental health and addiction – are out of the scope of the project, and need senior government support.

The Province announced on Wednesday it’s developing a strategy to reduce homelessness in B.C. – and that plan will be released this year.

“There are solutions that we as a city can’t do alone. But this pilot project starts to look at a different, non-criminalizing approach to meeting the needs that we’re hearing very clearly from residents across our neighbourhoods,” said Boyle.