Opinion: Housing and climate are inextricably linked. We must see action on both this election

As we go to the ballot boxes in October, two anniversaries are worth remembering.

Fifty years ago, delegates from 130 countries including Canada gathered in Vancouver to create the Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements. This UN declaration enshrined shelter as a basic human right, recognizing that habitability is directly linked to health and well-being.

Yet, 45 years later, an unprecedented heat dome killed more than 600 people in B.C. homes, starkly demonstrating a lack of progress in realizing the UN commitment. It also laid bare that “adequate housing” in a time of rapidly worsening climate change has been anything but.

It is time to renew the demand for habitable and affordable housing. Climate and housing must be addressed as an intertwined problem that voters face in their daily lives.

What does the relationship between climate and housing look like? An apartment exploding with black mould because the mechanical ventilation doesn’t work, triggering asthma attacks. Bedrooms that stay above 30 C at night, where even a healthy person struggles to breathe. Buying fewer groceries in order to run the air conditioner for a few hours. Not raising issues about the safety of your housing because it is tied to your employment as a migrant worker. At its worst, it looks like people dying in their homes, as happened to hundreds during the heat dome of 2021.

In Vancouver, climate and housing policy have been set back by the ABC-dominated city council, led by Mayor Ken Sim. Many of Vancouver’s globally celebrated green building requirements, including keeping natural gas out of new builds, have been dismantled. ABC ended a cooling kit program that distributed water bottles and cooling towels to Downtown Eastside residents, and all but eliminated staff support on climate. Vancouver still has no regulated upper limit for indoor temperatures, putting our city well behind other municipalities such as New Westminster, which passed a bylaw requiring that tenants have at least one room where temperatures are kept below 26 C.

When he voted earlier this year to repeal a series of climate adaptation measures, Sim stated, “Vancouver is a climate leader, but Vancouver needs to be an affordability leader,” effectively positioning climate adaptation and affordability as two competing goals, with climate the loser.

Vancouverites, especially tenants, are afraid and angry. We hear it in our research and we hear it in our communities. These people are devastated that their governments have pursued policies that make housing habitability and affordability mutually exclusive options in a changing climate.

Mountains of evidence show that heat risk is not simply tied to how hot it gets, but how people experience rising temperatures. Whether heat becomes dangerous depends on exposure (encountering heat), susceptibility (the degree to which someone is affected, shaped by biological, social, and environmental factors), and adaptive capacity (someone’s ability to respond to and recover from heat-related impacts). All three manifest acutely in our homes.

People experience the crisis of climate change and the crisis of inadequate, unsafe housing simultaneously. While important public resources like cooling centres, public alerts and temporary supports are offered by many municipalities, they are insufficient and cannot substitute for safe, affordable housing — especially when they are underfunded and undervalued.