In Our View: No Simple Solutions

The difficulty of addressing the homeless crisis in Vancouver — or any other city — can be found in the unworkability of well-intentioned suggestions.

As Columbian reporter Amy Fischer wrote recently, Clark County residents are not lacking for ideas to help mitigate a growing problem in the region: “How about using the Red Lion Hotel at the Quay as a homeless shelter since it’s going to be torn down anyway? Why not open the old, empty barracks buildings at Fort Vancouver for the homeless? Why doesn’t the city just build a homeless shelter? Why not designate a vacant city lot for a homeless camp? Sounds easy enough. Get ’em off the streets. Boom.”

Grand ideas, all. But Fischer then contacted Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt to provide a cold dose of reality. The Red Lion Hotel Vancouver at the Quay, for example, is privately owned; the city has no say over how the property is used. Some of the barracks at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site are federally owned, and those owned by the city are not adequate for housing. And money is not available for the construction and management of a shelter. As for a homeless camp on a vacant lot? Leavitt said: “It certainly is an option that’s on the table. As far as I’m concerned, everything is on the table for consideration … for the community to get to a solution.”

Other cities also are grasping for solutions. Portland Mayor Charlie Hales recently asked the city council to declare a state of emergency over the homeless situation. Tacoma officials in June layered boulders on a grassy parking strip near the city’s downtown library to prevent homeless people from sleeping there. And Seattle’s 10-year plan to end homelessness has brought in roughly $1 billion of public and private spending and built nearly 6,000 units of affordable housing, but provided little in the way of tangible results. “Boy, it would be nice to be able to say there’s one of two main reasons why we’ve not achieved our goal of ending homelessness,” said Vince Matulionis of United Way of King County. “Unfortunately, it’s so much more complicated than that.”

Last week, the Vancouver City Council approved three ordinances designed to address the area’s housing crunch, which is one of the primary factors in homelessness. Those will:

• Increase the vacate notice for evictions from 20 days to 60 days, giving residents more time to secure new housing. With rental vacancies in Clark County estimated at an exceedingly low rate of 2 percent, evictions often amount to little more than an edict for residents to sleep on the streets. It is important to note that the change to the vacate timetable does not apply to residents evicted for cause.

• Prevent landlords from refusing to rent to people based on how they pay for their rent, including Social Security, public assistance, etc. Over the past five years, there has been a decrease in the number of local landlords participating in Section 8, a housing voucher program.

• Give renters an additional 15 days’ notice — to 45 days — if rent is increasing by 10 percent or more. The efficacy of this remains to be seen, as residents likely will be handed a series of 9 percent rent increases.

Those moves are designed to help those who already have housing. And while they will do little to directly help get people off the streets, we’ll rank them as a good start to addressing a widespread problem.