If you call upon a rational person to accept new risk in exchange for a reward, he will ask two questions: "how much risk?" and "what is the reward?" When evaluating the risk-reward balance regarding the City’s plans for 16th and Dunbar (and several other Vancouver sites), one must separate the theoretical from supportable fact.
Theoretically, the City is offering an improved life for drug addicts and cleaner streets for Vancouver (more particularly, the Downtown Eastside) in exchange for a marginal increase in undesirable activity within the Dunbar and other communities. So ... how well is this theory supported by scientific data? In short, it isn’t. On the reward side, the myth that this facility will have a significant impact on the addicts it is intended to serve is disposed of in other sections of this website. (see Supportive Housing »). This page will deal only with the risk side of the equation.
In order to lay claim that housing for dually-diagnosed drug addicts will be safe in a residential community, the City must be able to achieve two things. First, it requires reliable studies to forecast the increase in crime for such a facility – the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority have neither. Second, it requires effective controls to counteract negative effects when its theories prove to be overly optimistic, as we suspect will happen. As far as we can tell, the City has no contingency plan to address any reality that turns out to be different from its utopian world known in Sam-speak as "the Civil City".
MLA Colin Hansen at the Dunbar Residents' Association Fall 2006 meeting promised that he "would not allow" anything to go in that was unsafe to local residents or their property.
Suzanne Anton said regarding 16th and Dunbar site: any recommendation from staff "will have to be safe to the neighbourhood."
Within the reports generated for and by the City in support of its drug addict supportive housing initiatives, there is reference to only one semi relevant scientific study purporting to comment on the effects of supportive housing on community safety. The study is called "The Impact of Supportive Housing on Neighbourhood Crime Rates", which we refer to as "the Denver report".1
The Denver report looks at 14 supportive housing sites providing services to a variety of groups, including drug addicts. But it is worth noting that none of the sites catered to dually-diagnosed drug addicts, which is the type of resident proposed for 16th and Dunbar. Another distinguishing feature of the Denver report is that it looked at 7 facilities with fewer than 9 residents and 7 facilities with 53 or more residents. None of the facilities had between 8 and 53 residents, whereas 16th and Dunbar is expected to house 30 to 50 residents.
The most surprising aspect of the City's reliance on the Denver report is that the conclusions of the report predict an increase in crime, "... it was the set of 7 large facilities, each housing 53 or more residents that was associated with the negative crime impacts ... Indeed, they suggest that total crime reports near these large supportive housing facilities increased by about 30% of the sample mean each year after opening; the comparable figure for violent crime reports was 40%."1 The study did not find these same effects for sites with 8 or fewer residents, but that is hardly comforting when you consider that the City plans to accommodate 30 to 50 residents at 16th and Dunbar and other neighbourhoods throughout Vancouver.
The City will not keep its promise of assuring neighbourhood safety for the simple reason that it cannot. Instead, it proposes to gamble with the safety of your family and your home to implement a misguided plan that is not likely to provide substantial benefit to the addicts for which it is designed.
Published March 5, 2007.