VANCOUVER—For the fourth year in a row, the number of homeless people in Vancouver has climbed despite an increase in temporary housing that advocates say has saved lives.

During two days in March 2019, volunteers and the city’s homeless outreach team counted 2,223 homeless people — 614 living on the street and 1,609 sleeping in homeless shelters or transition houses.

The homeless number is up two per cent compared to 2018 and 20 per cent compared to 2016.

The number increased despite a boom in social and supportive housing as well as temporary modular housing, an quick and inexpensive solution adopted by the city and then the province in 2017 to house people in need.

Between February 2018 and March 2019, 600 units of temporary modular housing were built across the city with a combination of municipal and provincial funding. About 500 units went to the homeless, while the remaining 100 went to people transferred from other low-income housing.

Mayor Kennedy Stewart was disappointed to see homelessness rise in this year’s count despite the unprecedented pace of new housing. But without temporary modular housing, he said the number would have been much higher.

“If I was going to do the math, we’d need about 1,000 new units a year just to keep this stable,” Stewart said.

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Jeremy Hunka, communications director with Union Gospel Mission, said that despite the higher homeless count in Vancouver, temporary modular housing made a noticeable difference.

In the winter of 2017-2018, its Downtown Eastside homeless shelter had to turn away 540 people. In 2018-2019, that number dropped to 160, which Hunka attributes to the 600 units of modular housing that became available.

“When homelessness increases, likely homeless deaths increase as well — so (temporary modular housing) is absolutely saving lives,” he said. “People need to be crystal clear on that.”

Coun. Jean Swanson, who has advocated for Vancouver’s poor for decades, called the uptick in the homeless count a “humanitarian crisis” and linked it to the recently released report on murdered and missing Indigenous women.

The 2019 count showed Indigenous people continue to be vastly overrepresented among Vancouver’s homeless: Thirty-nine per cent of homeless people surveyed for the count said they were Indigenous, while Indigenous people account for two per cent of B.C.’s population.

And though previous counts have shown men are more likely to be homeless than women, 53 per cent of Indigenous homeless people who participated in the 2019 count were women.

The 2019 homeless count report showed the stark reality of disappearing affordable housing in Vancouver: There is currently a zero per cent vacancy rate for apartments that rent for less than $750.

When it comes to finding the funding to build more housing for people who make less than $30,000 a year, Stewart said the provincial NDP government is doing a good job. He called on the federal government to match big promises on housing with actual dollars, which Stewart said have yet to materialize.

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Among other big cities in Canada, Vancouver has the highest per-capita homeless population: In Vancouver, 35 out of every 10,000 residents are homeless compared to 32 out of every 10,000 residents in Toronto, which has the next highest homeless population in Canada.

In 2010, Vancouver’s homeless population began to decline, dropping from 1,715 in 2010 to 1,581. But the numbers started to rise again in 2016, the same year home prices and rental rates spiked in response to a speculative rise in real-estate prices. Between 2016 and 2017, the number of homeless people in Vancouver rose by 16 per cent.

A 2017 regional homeless count that included suburban municipalities showed the same upward trend, with a 30 per cent increase since 2014.

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