The city wants to ‘Uplift’ the Downtown Eastside

But who is it good for?

What’s Happening?

In Fall of 2023, Vancouver City Council unanimously passed a motion called “Uplifting the Downtown Eastside and Building Inclusive Communities that Work for All Residents”, which called for city staff to report back on “opportunities and recommendations to enact… policy directions, in pursuit of a greater supply of high quality social and supportive housing across the City of Vancouver.”

The motion outlines the policy directions, many of which signal that the author, Councillor Rebecca Bligh, has the intent to actually address the needs of low-income people who are unhoused and precariously housed in Vancouver. However, we were concerned that this might be a Trojan horse. Behind the altruistic intent could be a force that breaks the community-won DTES protections from 2014 and opens the gates for big private developers to wipe away people with low-incomes by building housing and businesses that exclude them.

In May of 2025, Vancouver city staff presented their initial proposal. It was a massive sellout to the private market to build up to 32-storey rental towers in the DTES Oppenheimer District (DEOD) and Thornton Park that would only require 4% of the units to rent to people on social assistance. The current requirement is at least 20% of units. Along with Mayor Sim’s pause on net new supportive housing, this plan does nothing for people who are unhoused. It also puts power in the hands of these massive development companies who don’t want to be responsible for low-income housing based on their complaints about the Broadway Plan.

City staff did their community engagement and summarized it saying “Many participants fear that the proposed policy changes will result in gentrification and displacement of current residents.” They’ll present their updated proposal in early November and if council accepts it, they’ll hold a public hearing to rezone the neighbourhood in December or January.

What are the alternatives?

The Carnegie Housing project has been going around to groups in the DTES to ask them what they think would improve the neighbourhood. Here’s a summary of what they said.

What we know is that there are over 3,000 people who receive social assistance in Vancouver and have no-fixed-address (NFA). There are also 6,000 tenanted SRO units that need to be replaced. These people need dignified housing that they can afford. There seems to be nation-wide consensus that we need a major boost to housing supply, but more expensive market-rate rentals won’t trickle down to people who can only afford to pay shelter rate, $500/month.

So, the government needs to directly fund new permanently affordable housing development that rents to people on social assistance. A portion of this new housing would need to come with health and life skills supports for tenants. This will likely need to come from the province and feds because they have the revenue to bankroll it.

They also need to increase social assistance rates so people can afford higher rents.

The city needs to use their policies to limit land value growth to make new housing developments more affordable. There is great data here that shows how successful the DEOD policies were in doing this.

The city also needs to include social assistance shelter rate units as a portion of all new social housing through their upcoming Social Housing Initiative. Currently, the DTES is the only place in the province, and possibly Canada, where the social housing must include units for people on social assistance.

That’s pretty much it! We need the political will to commit to actually addressing homelessness by making sure people have housing.

What can we do about it?

We need city council to vote not to change the DTES zoning, but to work in partnership with the community, housing experts, the province and federal government to commit adequate funding to a direct housing plan that aims to end homelessness.

To do this we’ll need to demonstrate broad public pressure. We can do this by:

  • Signing up to speak at the public hearing this winter. We’ll let everyone know when it’s announced.

  • Writing letters to city councillors or meeting with them directly to urge them to not change the DTES zoning and instead lobby for a direct housing plan. Do this before November 4th.

  • Coming to our town hall at the Japanese Language School on November 6th at 6pm. Here’s the poster!

  • Follow us on Instagram and reshare posts related to this campaign.

  • Reach out to us if you want to coordinate with a group that you belong to!