HIV, Social Housing, and the Fight for Little Mountain

I live in a beautiful city.  Vancouver is beautiful because of the clean air and close proximity to mountains, ocean, lakes and forests.  It is also beautiful because of its diversity of people and neighbourhoods.  There is a gritty, urban industrial side to this city, but also one that is quaint, clean and picturesque.  What Vancouver is not, is affordable.  When the Economist ranks Vancouver as the world’s most livable city, they ought to include the qualification “if money is no object for you”.  According to Forbes, we also had the 6th most overpriced real estate market in the world in 2007, second only to Los Angeles in North America.  The number of people living on the streets and the lack of affordable housing are overwhelming; we have an increasingly undeniable housing crisis.  Studies are beginning to prove what we have known all along—that housing affects overall health and well-being, and that it is a key factor in determining the health of people living with HIV.

A recent study, conducted by the Ontario HIV Treatment Network (OHTN) and partners, called Positive Spaces, Healthy Places demonstrates not only that housing affects the health of people living with HIV, but that almost half of people living with HIV (in Ontario) experience challenges and anxiety relating to housing.  This is not surprising, since the most-cited factors that put housing at risk were: financial issues, external (often interpersonal) factors, and mental health and addiction.  These are challenges that are not uncommon in the diverse community of people living with HIV, and in particular among women living with HIV.  The study concludes that “when people with HIV have stable housing and feel they belong in their neighbourhoods, they are healthier” and “when their housing is threatened, both their mental and physical health suffers”.

It is frightening for the HIV community, as well as for anti-poverty activists and women’s advocates that the city has no major plans to create new social housing and that projects like Little Mountain are slated for demolition.  I first became aware of the Little Mountain Housing Project while riding the #3 Main St. bus to my former home in South Van.  Little Mountain is BC’s oldest public housing project, with 224 homes on a 15-acre site near Queen Elizabeth Park.  In 1990 the Federal Housing Minister praised it as a model for all of Canada, yet today it lies empty (except for 12 units), boarded up and largely gutted, awaiting development by Holborn Group.  This private developer plans to build a 2000-unit development which will include 224 new social housing units to house the displaced residents.  When this will happen we don’t really know, since Holborn Group has been stalling on other projects in response to the economic recession.  As Community Advocates for Little Mountain (CALM) point out, “it is a scandal to leave homes empty while thousands of people sleep on our streets”.  I agree wholeheartedly and would even extend this observation to include the hundreds of newly build condos sitting unsold and empty in Yaletown and the West End …

Positive Women’s Network and other AIDS Service Organizations are making the issue of adequate and affordable housing a priority.  Janet blogged in the spring about the Housing and HIV/AIDS Research Summit which brought together people from all over North America to discuss strategies for moving forward.  To show your support for social housing, check out the CALM website and join your local activists for tomorrow’s province-wide Stand for Housing.

-Miriam

This blog represents the ideas of individual writers, and does not necessarily reflect any formal stance taken by Positive Women’s Network.

This was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under News . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.

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