Community housing needed

VERONIKA STEWART

For low-income families looking for affordable housing in the internationally dubbed "best city in the world to live," the wait is a long one. On the bright side, however, there are those looking to help.

The Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA) has recently started the Community Affordable Rental Program (CARP). The program asks "community-minded" property owners with residential rental units to offer one or more units below the regular market price.

Andrea Gillman, housing co-ordinator at the JFSA, said property owners are contacted on an individual basis.

"It's slow to start," Gillman said. She said some of the property owners she's spoken to have wanted to help. Others already contribute to the organization in other ways.

So far, the program has located affordable housing for one family, a single father and his son. Gillman said single-parent families make up the majority of people seeking affordable housing. She described the average family seeking help from the JFSA as, "A single, female parent paying $750 in rent, making her living expenses around $820, including utilities." This makes her cost of living higher than the amount she gets from income assistance, according to Gillman.

Gillman's statements are an echo of the 2001 Report on Jewish Poverty, which cited a 34 per cent rate of poverty among single mothers and a 14 per cent rate among single fathers, compared to a 9.2 per cent rate of poverty among two-parent families.

Gillman said single-parent families are a group that has been largely overlooked in the community when it comes to housing.

"What's out there is almost solely for seniors," Gillman said. "There is no community family housing at the moment."

Gillman attributed the trouble families have finding affordable housing partially to rising housing costs, as well as a variety of other factors.

"Rents aren't getting any cheaper," Gillman said. "Technically, you should pay no more than 30 per cent of your income towards housing." Gillman added that most clients pay well over that, some as much as 50 per cent.

Mark Weintraub, chair of Canadian Jewish Congress, Pacific Region, agreed about the importance of funding housing for the community.

"We think it's a very significant problem for the city as a whole and specifically for the Jewish community," Weintraub said. "There are a significant number of Jewish families waiting for affordable housing and, as a human rights organization, Congress is of the view that the dignity of each citizen must be enhanced and that has to start with proper accommodation."

Weintraub said that although it may seem as if the lack of affordable housing is worsening, there is no way to tell for sure because the plight of those with lower incomes has always been largely ignored.

"It would appear that in light of the attractiveness of Vancouver and the escalating real estate costs that the problem is intensifying, but the concerns of people in the lower socioeconomic levels have never really been of paramount concern," Weintraub said. "So it's hard to know how grave the problem is, compared to past years."

Weintraub said in order to keep a thriving Jewish population in Vancouver, there needs to be housing to accommodate them.

"One of the reasons that the Jewish community was advocating for the housing policy in Southeast False Creek was that it would permit the Jewish community to continue to see Vancouver as a central focus," Weintraub said, "and we consider that while there's a vibrant Jewish community in the Lower Mainland, we must continue to support a powerful Jewish presence in Vancouver proper."

Weintraub praised the JFSA's work in remedying the problem, despite a lack of resources.

"Anything that assists in this problem is of great utility," Weintraub said. "If it even assists one or two families, this is a mitzvah of the highest order."

One in seven people within the Jewish community lives in poverty, according to the JFSA. And more than 1,000 individuals and families are known to the JFSA to be without affordable housing.

Vancouver's CARP is based on a pilot project out of Toronto that's been up and running for a year now, with a total of 32 units provided to the Jewish community. According to Gillman, who worked on that project, residents of the units have reportedly felt less stress due to better housing conditions and reduced housing costs. Gillman said many have also become more involved in their communities, due to the fact that they were given an opportunity to live closer to synagogues, Jewish day schools and community centres.

In Vancouver, there are more than 10,000 households on the waiting list for the 47,000 social housing spots in the Lower Mainland, most of which are provided by the provincial government's housing program. More than half of them are families with children, according to Verna Semoltuk, senior regional planner at the Greater Vancouver Regional District policy and planning department. Additionally, there are close to 1,300 homeless people in the city of Vancouver alone, with another 55,000 families at risk of homelessness, according to 2001 data.

"There are actually a lot of consequences to paying that much, if you're a renter or a homeowner," Semoltuk said. "If you're paying more than 50 per cent of your income for rent, we know that you're taking away from your food and transportation money in order to pay for your rent, which obviously has social consequences."

Veronika Stewart is a Vancouver freelance writer.

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