The City of Nanaimo announced that a year-round drop-in centre for people experiencing homelessness will open on Jan. 2, 2025 at 55 Victoria Rd., with an entrance off Nicol Street.
The new drop-in centre will operate seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and is funded for one year. It will include warming and cooling spaces, access to sandwiches and other food prepared by Island Crisis Care Society and will help connect people to supports such as emergency shelters, housing, health care and mental health services.
Violet Hayes, executive director for the Island Crisis Care Society, said the need for a drop-in centre that operates all year came directly from speaking with people who are unhoused in downtown Nanaimo in a meeting by the Nanaimo Community Advisory Board two years ago.
“They all said that they would want a resource centre somewhere where they can come and receive support year round, not just in the winter,” she said.
Finding rental space for drop-in centre in Nanaimo a challenge
The drop-in will be run by the Island Crisis Care Society and the Nanaimo Family Life Association, both of whom were vetted through an application process by United Way British Columbia. They were determined to be the best organizations to provide the service after residents complained about the impact of Risebridge Society’s city-funded warming centre on the neighborhood last winter.
One requirement in the new service contract for the drop-in is that RCMP and city community safety officers must be allowed to enter.
The drop-in will also have four staff while operating who will help keep an eye on things outside the building and security will be hired at night to help mitigate the impact on the neighbourhood according to Christy Wood, manager of social planning at the City of Nanaimo, who spoke at the city’s public safety committee meeting on Wednesday.
This plan for the drop-in has been in the works since the summer, but the lease was only signed on Wednesday. City councillors and staff told The Discourse that one major obstacle to opening it was finding a landlord willing to rent their property to a service for people who are unhoused.
Acknowledging that residents have legitimate concerns of disruption to the neighbourhoods when services for people experiencing homelessness are located in them, Nanaimo city councillor Ben Geselbracht said that translates into a limited number of locations that are available for the city to rent.
“There’s growing community opposition to this and how that shows up is that there’s just less landowners willing to lease property,” Geselbracht said.
Councillor Hiliary Eastmure agrees that the lack of landlords being willing to rent space to house these services is an issue.
“To find a building with a landlord that’s willing to rent a space for this use, in a suitable location that works for warming, is not an easy task by any means,” she said.
Geselbracht said that in the long-term, what he would like to see is a permanent purpose-built building in Nanaimo that has showers, laundry, a space for health-care providers and housing support workers.
“It may have to be a city-owned property initially to just get it up and going, because if we wait for the province, it could take years,” he said. “But ultimately, I think the province should be responsible for it, but I don’t think that we have the luxury to wait to sort it out. We need a use-specific built facility that can provide services to folks living with homelessness and connect them into services in the community.”
Lessons from other communities
Wood spent some time this summer looking at drop-in centres on the mainland for models of what works best.
She told The Discourse that a shining example is the Evelyn Saller Centre in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside that is a collaboration between the City of Vancouver, BC Housing and Vancouver Coastal Health.
“It has supportive housing on the top and on the bottom. They have a drop-in centre where folks can go have showers and do laundry,” Wood said. “They get three meals a day. At night time it turns into [an] overnight program for folks who may not have access to any kind of housing.”
However, the barrier to establishing a similar purpose-built service in Nanaimo boils down to a lack of funding.
Wood said that her big takeaway from visiting drop-in centres in other communities this year was that “none of this would happen without the multi-government and multi-funder collaboration amongst many different organizations.”
The new drop-in hub is only funded for one year of operation with $584,257 from the City of Nanaimo, with the Nanaimo Community Advisory Board providing $500,000 from the federal Reaching Home fund.
“The situation that we’re in is from an historic amount of underfunding … in health care, education and affordable housing,” Geselbracht said. “You do that for 20 to 30 years and you create the storm that we’re in today.”
Minister of housing says city needs to come forward with locations for more services
Councillor Eastmure said that she was able to speak with the province’s Minister of Housing Ravi Kahlon at the Union of BC Municipalities meeting this year about the need to address homelessness in Nanaimo. But she said she isn’t seeing the province act on it with the level of urgency that is required.
Kahlon told The Discourse that he would love to see the city come to him with a proposed location for more housing, but in the past the city has been slow to identify locations where supportive housing in Nanaimo could be built.
“We went almost seven or eight months with council not being able to agree on any sites, so you can’t have a request for urgency [and] at the same time not approve sites,” he said. “In the end, it still requires local government to say, ‘Yes, this is where we want this housing for this vulnerable population.’”
Councillor Geselbracht said Kahlon was referring to the 60-unit supportive housing building that is planned to be built at 1030 Old Victoria Rd.
Geselbracht said the minister’s claim that it took seven months to find a site for the project was “a bit of revisionist history” and that conversations were like a “frustrating” game of broken telephone between the city, BC Housing and the ministry.
“[BC Housing was] very difficult to deal with in that particular situation and the narrative they were giving the minister was not exactly what was going on and we were definitely being portrayed as the delay,” Geselbracht said.
It wasn’t until the city committed $750,000 towards the project on city-owned land that the province came to the table, he said.
However, Geselbracht said that is all in the past and he isn’t interested in “playing the blame game.” He said the City of Nanaimo, BC Housing and the province have improved communication since then and “are getting better at delivering housing works for the community to address the housing crisis.”
Kahlon said that if city council is able to identify a location where it could be built he’s open to conversations with the city about the possibility of a permanent purpose-built facility in the city.
“We’ve had a good working relationship with the mayor and council,” Kahlon said. “We haven’t always agreed, but we agree that we need to get people indoors and get some support and if they have sites, let’s have that conversation.”
A historic number of housing projects underway in Nanaimo says minister
Pointing to previous experience with building supportive housing projects in Nanaimo, Kahlon said 238 new supportive housing spaces either opened this year or are planned to open in 2025.
“I would say that’s the largest investment in supporting vulnerable populations in the history of Nanaimo in one year,” the minister said.
Kahlon said that the 50 units of temporary housing being built at 1300 Island Hwy. and 10th St. that were announced in January is expected to open by early spring and that the project is on time, despite routine challenges in the construction such as permitting, soil issues or getting modular units to the site from the companies that are building them.
BC Housing is also working on opening 78 units of housing at the former Traveller’s Lodge care facility located at 1298 Nelson St. for people experiencing homelessness.
Asked if provincial funding for the drop-in centre was a possibility, Kahlon said BC Housing is working to provide funding for 20 temporary overnight shelter spaces this winter at the location but was “not sure to be honest” if the provincial government would step in with operational funding for the drop-in outside of that program.
“If there are opportunities to do more, I am certainly happy to look at it, but I haven’t seen any requests yet,” he said.
Geselbracht said he “appreciates Kahlon’s remarks about being open to supporting a purpose built drop-in centre. We can work with that and find a location that works and hold him to providing the resourcing.”
