Written for Daily Hive Urbanized by Adam Zivo, who is an international journalist and LGBTQ2S+ activist. He is best known for his weekly National Post column, his on-the-ground coverage of the war in Ukraine, and for founding the LoveisLoveisLove campaign. Zivo’s work has also appeared in the Washington Examiner, Xtra Magazine, and Ottawa Citizen, among other publications.
Corruption and inefficiency are undermining Vancouver’s anti-poverty initiatives to everyone’s detriment. It’s vital that more attention be given to this problem, sometimes called the “homeless industrial complex,” even if some recent attempts to tackle it have been woefully unproductive.
The homeless industrial complex refers to the ecosystem of special interests (e.g. nonprofits, bureaucrats, and professional activists) that claim to improve social outcomes, but, in reality, profit off the perpetuation of homelessness, addiction, and poverty.
Concerns about this kind of profiteering have been raised in major West Coast cities (e.g. San Fransisco, Los Angeles, Seattle) where homelessness is ballooning and public safety is rapidly deteriorating, despite substantial anti-poverty investments. In Los Angeles, for example, the municipal government has been criticized for spending mysteriously exorbitant sums of money on modest housing solutions — such as $8 million to set up a temporary 154-bed homeless shelter built from tents and rudimentary plumbing.
Increased scrutiny of social spending in Vancouver only follows this trend — and with good reason, too.
Over the past 18 months, The Tyee has published a series of reports investigating the seemingly corrupt operations of Atira Property Management Inc, a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Atira Women’s Resources Society.
Atira operates 18 Vancouver SRO locations and is alleged to have provided shockingly substandard services that jeopardized the health and safety of both residents and staff. Residents claim that Atira’s SROs are often severely infested with pests and vermin, and that basic amenities, such as showers, sinks, and windows, have been left broken for months, if not years, as maintenance requests have been ignored.
To some extent, the SRO residents themselves can be blamed for these conditions, as they have been known to vandalize their accommodations. However, this vandalism explains neither the appalling lack of building maintenance nor the fact that Atira seems to neglect its buildings more so than other SRO operators.
It’s reasonable to ask whether Atira has been fleecing taxpayers while offering substandard services to the vulnerable.
Worse yet, it seems that Atira’s provincial funding was secured via nepotism.
Atira Women’s Resource Society has been run for 30 years by Janice Abbott, who happens to be the wife of Shayne Ramsay. Ramsay was CEO of BC Housing for 22 years before resigning last August after a damning Ernst & Young review found that millions of dollars in contracts had been awarded without clear documentation of decision-making processes.
Both Ramsay and Atira have denied any impropriety in their relationship, with Ramsay arguing that BC Housing had implemented robust protocols to prevent conflicts of interest.
However, several anonymous employees of BC Housing allege that Ramsay repeatedly broke these protocols and pressured senior staff to approve funding for Atira. These allegations appear to have been substantiated by Ramsay’s leaked text messages and emails.
The employees said that they didn’t report their concerns earlier out of fear of losing their jobs. Considering the circumstances, their fears were understandable.
In 2018, accounting firm BDO was hired to conduct a review of the relationship between BC Housing and Atira, as reported by Daily Hive Urbanized last month. After BC Housing’s executive team received a draft copy of the report, which recommended that funding for Atira be paused, the board chairs of both organizations met and, subsequently, the review was suspended before a final draft could be published. BC Housing ignored the recommendation to stop funding Atira.
When Ramsay resigned as BC Housing’s CEO in August, he made no mention of the corruption allegations against him. He instead claimed that rising public anger towards homeless encampments and street crime, coupled with threats against his personal safety, had robbed him of the confidence to do his job. The deflection was as shameless as it was transparent. Meanwhile, the provincial government fired over half of BC Housing’s board.
The recent detailed attention into SROs and provincial corruption has been invaluable, but there may be more to this. Former mayor Kennedy Stewart could also be implicated, as he is married to Jeanette Ashe, who previously sat on Atira’s board during her husband’s mayoral tenure. Ashe is not an apolitical figure, as she unsuccessfully ran for Vancouver City Council this year as a candidate for her husband’s party, Forward Together.
Given that Stewart’s approach to homelessness was heavily focussed on SROs, even at the expense of investment into modular housing, his relationship with Ashe deserves scrutiny. Did he, like Ramsay, allow nepotism to cloud his judgement and funnel opportunities to an underperforming organization? Vancouverites deserve to know.
The unfolding, and ongoing, scandals at Atira are a poignant case study of corporate profiteering — but they aren’t the only bad actors here.
Last month, it was reported that the activist organization Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) had mishandled a $320,000 Block Stewardship contract so egregiously that the municipal government was forced to terminate its agreement and withhold untransferred funds.
The City of Vancouver controversially awarded VANDU the contract in June, with the goal of funding a community-based street cleaning program in the DTES. DTES residents were to be paid up to $20 per hour to sweep up the block, providing them with employment and direct financial support while creating a more hygienic and dignified public realm for Vancouver’s most vulnerable residents.
Suspicions soon rose that VANDU was misusing the funds, as there seemed to be scant evidence that the program was being implemented.
When the City terminated its contract with VANDU in mid-November, it stated, “After an interim assessment of the program, it is evident that VANDU placed emphasis on community development and individual empowerment rather than street cleaning.”
VANDU and its allies have claimed that the organization did nothing wrong and that it was impossible to make a discernible impact on the street’s cleanliness. However, VANDU representative Vincent Tao inadvertently exposed how the money was misappropriated when, in an interview with Global News, he said that the grant had funded “staffing costs for essentially doubling, tripling our capacity here at VANDU.”
It’s hard to imagine how VANDU could justify its expenditures. For one thing, why does an organization need to invest in major staffing upgrades to manage a program that appears to have been barely functioning? The only explanations are gross dishonesty or gross incompetence — it’s hard to decide which is worse.
But let’s say VANDU used the funding to expand its general operations. Would that have been more beneficial to DTES residents than employment? It would be hard to argue so. People generally benefit more from having money in their pockets than having that money taken away from them and given to activists for vague “community building” initiatives.
Apparently, the activists at VANDU robbed DTES residents of the salaries that were owed them, and then used that money to pay themselves and their friends. It’s parasitic — but pretending to address homelessness is good business.
It’s often been argued that many of the non-profits that service the DTES are similarly corrupt — or, at the very least, incompetent and ineffective. According to a Vancouver Sun analysis from 2014, even back then about $1 million flowed into the DTES every day. Where does it all go? Why has the DTES been allowed to burn so much money with so little to show for it?
Perhaps the problem is more structural.
Generally speaking, non-profits become less effective when they can’t measure their own impact. If you can’t measure your impact, you can’t be held accountable for underperformance.
Andrew Hening, a consultant who specializes in community foundations, argues that not only is homelessness a problem that’s inherently hard to measure, organizations servicing this area often lack the resources and expertise to quantify their own success. This is exacerbated by the sectoral tendency to engage in poor data collection. Ultimately, organizations resort to simply self-reporting their successes using anecdotal evidence.
While anecdotal evidence certainly has its place in the world, it’s generally too flimsy and manipulable to, by itself, credibly measure an organization’s successes. An organization that solely relies on anecdotal evidence is not one that can clearly prove whether it is actually helping the world.
Hening notes that anti-poverty service providers tend to be highly siloed – everyone tackles their own niche without much greater coordination. Organizations waste time on redundant labour and clients get dejected by a labyrinth of overlapping services. It’s grossly inefficient.
This seems to aptly describe the broken mosaic of the DTES.
Exacerbating these problems, funders often blindly reward non-profits for “innovation,” which incentivizes them to push out a stream of atomized “pilot projects” that are “innovative” on the surface, but which are, in reality, inefficient and unscalable.
Innovation always involves risk, so suboptimal results aren’t necessarily bad. Some failures are tolerable if it means discovering new ways to succeed. However, when you don’t have concrete measures of success, it’s near-impossible to discern good pilot projects from bad ones.
But pilot projects are routinely deemed successful simply by virtue of it being novel and therefore “innovative.” Funders are distracted with tasty, but insubstantial, anecdotes about how impactful a pilot is, which then unlocks more funding, perpetuating a cycle of borderline useless initiatives.
Meanwhile, the non-profit, obligated to continually prove how innovative it is, must quickly move on to the next pilot. The old project, which likely had bad fundamentals to begin with, ultimately withers on the vine, a victim of neglect, murdered by the hyperactive search for more grant-securing baubles. It’s a system that assumes all of the costs of experimentation with few of the benefits.
So while it seems true, to some extent, that non-profit corruption is a problem in Vancouver (with VANDU’s misuse of public funding as the latest example), the financial black hole in the DTES shouldn’t be seen only through that lens. Structural problems pressure well-intentioned people into providing wasteful programming while disguising, to both themselves and others, how little is actually being done.
A common-sense solution would be to increase coordination in the DTES while imposing better measurements of success and data collection practices. This would improve social services on the whole, while reducing profiteering.
The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) suggested just that in a new report they commissioned this year, titled “Igniting Transformational Systems Change Through Policing.” However, while that particular recommendation made sense, the report, as a whole was marred with so many methodological flaws that it was rightfully dismissed by most people, including Mayor Ken Sim, as useless.
The report attempted to tackle Vancouver’s poverty industrial complex by quantifying wasteful social spending. By extension, the report argued that money spent on policing was relatively modest.
The firm which produced the report, HelpSeeker, claimed that Vancouver annually spends $5 billion dollars on social services — a shocking amount. Critics quickly pointed out that the figure included $2 billion in direct federal transfers to local citizens, such as old age security and employment insurance, which obviously shouldn’t be misconstrued as bloated anti-poverty spending.
HelpSeeker also attempted to measure how much money was being spent in the DTES by tallying the budgets of non-profits operating in the neighbourhood. This crude method scooped up charities that were only incidentally based in the DTES, and which provided services that were either unrelated to homelessness and addiction, or which served areas far beyond Vancouver.
The report’s ineptitude artificially inflated the scope of Vancouver’s poverty industrial complex and, rather than help citizens understand the issue, eroded public trust in the VPD. Ironically, the police’s bumbling attempts to tackle corruption may make it more difficult to discuss how constructive reforms can be implemented to reduce wasteful social spending.
However, the report’s blunt criticism of service fragmentation was one of the few things that was done right. Mayor Sim, for example, said that with respect to collaboration and accountability, the report “prompts great questions.” The VPD’s call for more centralized coordination of services seems to have resonated with some politicians.
Shortly after the report was published, Premier David Eby announced a new approach to the DTES, wherein the provincial government will coordinate services and measure success. This is an overdue productive development, given that profiteering relies on an opaque and fragmented service ecosystem.
Hopefully, more provincial oversight and coordination will shine some sterilizing light on the DTES and evict some of the poverty pimps who siphon funds without delivering results. However, the province can’t be trusted to take care of everything. The more power provincial stakeholders have, the more opportunities there are for higher-level corruption, as the Atira scandal starkly illustrates.
The public should more aggressively criticize Vancouver’s poverty industrial complex, applying political pressure for further reforms that can reign in bad actors and make structural improvements.
