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Like Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, The Strip has become a potent symbol of the province’s growing housing inequality, opioid addiction crisis and lack of mental health resources.

Photo by Ben Nelms for National Post

Joe McNeely, an audio-visual technician who lives nearby, was so unnerved by what he was seeing that he decided to post a video of the tent city last month on Facebook.

“It’s brutal. Look at this shit. This is what we do to people that can’t afford shelter — we just stick them in f—ing tents on the side of the road,” he says in the video.

“Why isn’t this in the news every f—ing day?”

McNeely’s video has since been viewed more than 376,000 times, and spurred an outpouring of blankets, gloves and other supplies for tent city occupants.

The city and province say they are working as quickly as they can to finalize plans for 150 modular housing units to ease pressure on The Strip. They had hoped to complete construction by winter, but now the target date is March.

So far the city hasn’t said where these transitional housing units are going to be built. Nor will it say what the process will be for determining who gets housed first. But Terry Waterhouse, the city’s director of public safety strategies, said the units will be complemented by on-site health and social service support.

Photo by Ben Nelms for National Post

“It is much more complicated than just a roof over an individual’s head,” he said. “What has happened in the past is housing efforts were simply that. If the supports weren’t there, the individual would return to the street.”