Vancouver council approves addiction treatment centre and rental housing in Grandview Woodlands

Despite those concerns, councillors and Vancouver’s mayor voted unanimously to approve the rezoning for the 10-story building. In statements before the vote, several councillors said the stories they had heard from people who have struggled with addictions were a key factor in their decision to vote yes.

While some neighbourhood residents spoke in opposition, councillors said they also heard from many local residents who supported the project.

Patricia Daly, chief health officer for Vancouver Coastal Health, said it’s important to open an addiction treatment facility outside of the city’s Downtown Eastside, which has a high concentration of addiction and social services. Vancouver currently has the highest death rate due to overdose in British Columbia, Daly told council.

“If you have an overdose outside of the Downtown Eastside, you’re at greater risk of death because we don’t have enough services outside of the Downtown Eastside,” Daly said.

The project will replace an existing detox centre at E. 2nd Ave. and will include a sobering centre, a withdrawal management centre, 51 in-patient beds and 20 transitional beds between treatment and long-term housing.

It would also include 90 units of rental housing, with 45 units affordable to people making $41,000 to $68,000 and 45 units affordable to renters who make between $71,000 and $107,000. Sixteen renters, many of whom pay below-market rents, will have to be relocated to make way for the new building.

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Bonnie Wilson, director of services with Vancouver Coastal Health, said the lack of privacy at the current, crowded detox centre at 377 E. 2nd Ave. sometimes hampers treatment. That centre treats about 800 people a year.

Opponents of the project told council the building was too large, would create traffic problems and would set intoxicated people wandering around the neighbourhood. Some residents told council they didn’t believe a sobering centre and a withdrawal centre should be located together.

“This development will bring in intoxicated people, some against their will by police vehicle, and they’ll be held a minimum of four hours and then released into our community,” said Thomas Ferguson, a Grandview-Woodland resident.

Ian Upton, a Vancouver police inspector, told council that police don’t take violent people to sobering centres and there has “never been an incident” at the current detox centre on 2nd Ave.

“These people pose no risk,” Upton said.

In response to Ferguson’s comments, Wilson of Vancouver Coastal Health said people are not brought against their will to sobering centres. Sobering centres are intending to be a harm-reduction measure, Wilson said, and came out of an inquiry into the death of Frank Paul, an Indigenous man who died of hypothermia in an East Vancouver alley in 1998.

Nick Pogor, the executive director of the Commercial Drive Business Improvement Area, said crime and open drug use are already common in the neighbourhood. He said his members are concerned that when homeless people leave the sobering centre, they will stay in the neighbourhood, adding to those problems.

Like many of the other speakers in opposition, Pogor emphasized that he wasn’t opposed to addiction treatment facilities, just not in the Grandview Woodland neighbourhood.

Todd Kenneth lives just down the street from the proposed site, in a social housing building that received a lot of opposition when it was first proposed in 2012. He told council that he owes his life to a range of addiction treatment services, from sobering centres to transitional housing.

“Those services were very hard to access because they were so spread out,” Kenneth said. “Detox as a route to sobering and then transitional housing is so important.”