Keeping a homeless encampment off Pandora Avenue appears to be a surprisingly costly burden for the City of Victoria.
In July, when the Victoria Police Department initiated the beginning stages of a strategy to clear out Pandora Avenue’s unhoused population, City Council instructed their staff to report back with a plan detailing the costs to continue the enforcement. This would prohibit daytime sheltering in Victoria’s parks, streets, sidewalks and boulevards.
In early December the City of Victoria released a statement indicating that the proposed enforcement plan would cost $4.7 million, which could see a three per cent addition to the city’s 2025 property tax increase.
To maintain enforcement on Pandora Avenue, the city would have to more than double their frontline bylaw officer staffing and support, reads the statement.
The VicPD Safety Plan was instigated after a paramedic was attacked while responding to an emergency on the 900-block of Pandora Avenue in July. Since the enforcement throughout the summer, those who previously sheltered on Pandora have dispersed to other areas of the city. Currently fences installed by the city line the street to prevent the encampment from returning, but despite these prohibitive actions from the municipality, some tents have been reported in the area this winter.
Frontline workers in the area have reported an increase in fatal overdoses among those who previously resided on Pandora. The overdose deaths are now over a dozen lives lost.
“While enforcement is a necessary part of an overall strategy to end sheltering, and the only role for the city to play, it does not address the underlying causes of homelessness that result in sheltering,” reads a statement from the City of Victoria.
“Without significant intervention and coordination of the provincial ministries of health, mental health and addictions, housing and poverty reduction, to address addiction, mental health, trauma, systemic racism, and systemic issues in the criminal justice system, the issue of sheltering will not be solved by enforcement alone,” the statement continued.
Ron Rice is the executive director of the Victoria Native Friendship Center (VFNC). He would like to see more collaboration across ministries and agencies, looking at broader solutions that include culture, family reunification, health, and employment moving forward.
“It's not just a door to lock behind you, you need all of the tools to create a life for yourself,” said Rice.
Though VNFC’s shelter is currently filled with primarily Indigenous and non-Indigenous elders and does not typically service those who resided on Pandora, Rice has noticed those who previously lived on the downtown street are now in parks nearby - areas that are not visible from the road.
“By taking people off of that strip of land, it is not solving the problem, it is just dealing with one of the symptoms,” said Rice. “There needs to be solutions from the ground up.”
“It's like trying to put out a forest fire and only paying attention to the tops of the trees,” he added. “Telling someone, ‘You can't be homeless here, go be homeless over there,’ is not a solution.”
Victoria’s 2023 point-in-time survey indicates that there are over 1,665 unhoused people in the city. This includes those living unsheltered, in emergency shelters, couch surfing, as well as in transitional homes and in public systems such as hospitals, treatment centers and correctional halfway houses.
At the time of the survey, a total of 524 people were unsheltered or in an emergency shelter.
But according to BC Housing, Victoria has 409 shelter spaces.
“We are continuing to work with local governments to bring additional shelter and housing options to Greater Victoria and will share more details as we can,” reads an email from BC Housing.
Since the spring of 2024, the province funded a total of 132 additional shelter spaces in Victoria, including bringing 72 more beds as the VicPD safety plan was being enforced.
When asked about some of the challenges faced when establishing sheltering options, BC Housing wrote that availability and high cost of land, finding suitable locations, and non-profit operator capacity are all contributing barriers.
“In response to these challenges, BC Housing works in partnership with municipalities, landowners, and non-profits, to identify opportunities and find solutions,” the email reads.
One of the challenges with Pandora, shared Rice, stems from the seasonal shelter process.
“A lot of the seasonal shelters close on April 1, and then there's sort of this scatter that happens, and then people start to settle into a bit of a routine, finding a place where they are able to set up camp and a place to come back to at various parts of the day,” he said.
“It [has] taken many, many decades for us to get to this point, and it’s going to take us a long time to solve this problem,” said Rice. “We are going to have to solve it, one person at a time.”
“There's going to be a different solution for every person who is sleeping on the streets right now, whether that's the addition of employment, or reconnection with family, or culture, or healthcare, or education,” he said.
