VANCOUVER -- A longtime social housing provider is calling out the City of Vancouver for refusing to consider redeveloping a Gastown parkade into affordable housing for women and children.
"I think that women and children need housing more than cars need parking spots," Janice Abbott, the CEO of Atira Women's Resource Society, told CTV News.
"If we're working towards being a greener city, maintaining what is really expensive houses for cars makes no sense."
Atira rents a small office space at the six-storey parkade at 101 Cordova Street. For about four years, Abbott has been meeting with the city to discuss redeveloping the site into more than 100 units of housing for women and children, an expanded space for the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, and a daycare.
The city owns the building, so the first step in redevelopment is to get the city to agree to the plan, Abbott said.
After hearing at each meeting that the plan won't work because of the parking spots that would be lost, Atira staff decided to make a public statement by putting up large window decals at the building.
The decals read "Housing for women and children, not cars – a home changes everything."
City staff confirmed that the loss of parking is a roadblock to developing the site into housing, because any redevelopment would require replacement parking to be built elsewhere in the neighbourhood.
"This site is a neighbourhood public parking facility in an area of multiple heritage buildings that were originally built without parking, and buildings in the immediate area rely on these spaces," city communications staff wrote in an email.
"There are other locations in the city that make more sense for this type of housing, and more housing could be developed on empty land i.e. without the costs of having to demolish the existing parkade and also replace the parking spaces."
101 Cordova Street in Gastown is currently a city-owned parkade, but Janice Abbott of Atira Women's Resource Society would like to see the site redeveloped into housing. (Google Streetview)
But Abbott questions whether the downtown neighbourhood actually needs the parkade, especially when compared to the dire need for social housing for women and their children. She argues the area is located in a transit hub, well-serviced by buses that travel to both the east and west sides of the city, as well as nearby SkyTrain stations. Protected bike lanes also criss-cross the neighbourhood.
In contrast, it's extremely difficult to find housing for women with children, Abbott said.
When women leave abusive relationships, they often stay in transition housing with their children, Abbott explained. But that housing has an expiry date, usually around two years. And finding permanent housing that's big enough for families, and affordable for low-income women, is next to impossible in Vancouver.
"We just have nowhere to move those women," Abbott said. The extreme need is leading to situations such as "a woman with four kids living in a two-bedroom – you can make that work when your kids are all under five, but there comes a point as your kids grow that you need a bigger place."
Abbott said women are left living in places they can't really afford, that are too small for their families, "and waiting and hoping they'll get into some kind of affordable housing."
Having stable housing can also help women keep their children out of government care, or can help them get their kids back out of the care of the Ministry of Children and Families, Abbott said.
While the province and the city have been building more social housing, Abbott said there has been a move away from building family-sized housing in the city, and especially in the Gastown, Downtown Eastside and Strathcona neighbourhoods.
She said the 101 Cordova Street site is ideal for a family-focused building because women have been accessing services for over a decade on that block from Atira, and across the street at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre and Crabtree Corner.
"We work with a lot of women with connections to this neighbourhood, there are support networks, the services they access are here," Abbott said.
