BC Attorney General David Eby has had housing added to his portfolio and says he is ready for the challenge.
“First of all, I came into politics because of housing. I was working in the downtown east side of Vancouver and concern about the city of Vancouver policies at the time was my first run in 2008 which I promptly lost. But that’s why I threw my hat in the ring for politics in the first place.”
“I was the opposition spokesperson on housing for a number of years as well and really enjoyed doing that work. So, it feels like a bit of a homecoming for me.”
When it comes to the affects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on housing in BC, Eby says it has had an interesting set of impacts including the the collapse of the Airbnb tourist traffic that took up a lot of rental housing in major centres across BC which is providing insights into the impact of short term rental on the housing market.
“Another example of an impact is a number of shelters either having to close entirely or significantly reduce services to do social distancing and maintain safety for people who use those shelters which meant that we lost a significant number of shelter beds and services to support people, either in housing or in shelters, and the impact of that can be readily seen in communities even though we’ve got 3,000 hotels and temporary shelter units to respond to that we can still see encampments across the province.”
“COVID had a huge impact on people at risk of homelessness and who are currently homeless in terms of the services they can access and on communities that now have encampments when previously they didn’t. So that’s a huge priority for me is to support the people who are in the encampments and the communities that are affected by them.”