Cheers: To new homes for the new year. A first-year report from the Kiggins Village Safe Stay shelter on Vancouver’s upper Main Street showed 17 residents found permanent housing, with four more on the way. Two other residents have moved into treatment for substance-abuse disorder, and other residents have celebrated smaller successes. For a 20-bed shelter, that’s a strong series of victories.
“Without this place, my only outcomes were drugs, prison or death. This place allowed me to get my life back. It saved my life,” one resident told The Columbian’s Mia Ryder-Marks. The shelter, which is managed by Portland nonprofit Do Good Portland, reports no one has gone back to homelessness in the last five months, there have been no drug overdoses on site, and staff retention level has been unusually good. The report offers more evidence that, although expensive to build and run, the city’s four Safe Stay villages are effective.
Jeers: To electric street sweepers. Several years ago the Vancouver City Council set a laudable goal of trying to reduce the city’s carbon emissions footprint. As part of that, public works managers identified replacing the city’s fleet of four diesel-powered street sweepers with electric models. The idea is a good one, but appears to be premature. A few sweepers are becoming available, but they can cost $700,000 or more, which is at least double the price of a conventional model.
Furthermore, electric sweepers aren’t as durable. “To date, we have yet to demo an all-electric sweeper that meets our need for 16 hours of runtime within a 24-hour period,” says the city’s operations superintendent, Brian Potter. So far Vancouver hasn’t bought an electric sweeper, and it seems like it might be wise to wait until the technology matures.
