Recently, I visited a BIA member who is dealing with a problem that has become all too familiar in Chinatown.
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Recently, I visited a BIA member who is dealing with a problem that has become all too familiar in Chinatown.
Her property houses a medical clinic serving Vietnamese and Chinese patients, newcomers and neighbourhood residents. Almost every day, people enter the alley and parking lot behind the building without permission. They use and inject drugs, leave graffiti and sometimes use the parking lot as a toilet.
Staff arrive in the morning not knowing what they will find. The property owner is now considering spending more than $20,000 to install a security gate simply to keep people out.
For a small business or property owner, $20,000 is not a minor expense. And this is only one example.
Restaurant owners have dealt with drug use in their washrooms. Grocery stores face repeated theft. Employees clean up needles and human waste before opening. Businesses spend money on cameras, gates and private security. These are costs that have nothing to do with serving customers or growing a business, but increasingly they are treated as part of the price of operating in parts of downtown Ottawa.
They should not be.
The City of Ottawa collects property taxes from these businesses and property owners, who in return have a reasonable expectation that basic public order will be maintained.
A nurse should not have to step over discarded needles on the way to work. A restaurant employee should not be responsible for dealing with someone using drugs in a washroom. A shopkeeper should not have to decide whether stopping a theft is worth the risk of being assaulted.
Yet these are no longer unusual situations in Chinatown.
There is also a problem with the way we talk about vulnerability. People living with homelessness, addiction or serious mental illness are vulnerable. They deserve compassion and help. But vulnerability does not belong to only one group. I once watched a small, elderly shop owner confront several much larger men who were crowding her store and taking items without paying. She became frightened and started to cry. Who was vulnerable in that moment?
What about the restaurant workers picking up needles? The schoolchildren walking past open drug use? The seniors who no longer feel comfortable walking down the street? The pharmacist or nurse arriving at work to find someone using drugs behind the building? They deserve compassion too.
This is why I am concerned when homelessness is discussed primarily as a housing problem.
Ottawa needs more housing. There is no serious argument against that. But housing alone cannot solve a crisis in which homelessness, severe addiction and mental illness often overlap.
Federal Point-in-Time Count data from 2020–2022 found that 61 per cent of respondents experiencing homelessness reported substance-use issues and 60 per cent reported mental-health issues. Earlier federal research also found that more than one in four respondents identified addiction or substance use as a reason for their most recent housing loss.
Those numbers should change how we approach the problem.
For someone who lost housing because rent became unaffordable, housing may indeed be the central solution. But someone living with severe addiction, repeated overdoses or serious untreated mental illness may need much more.
And in the most serious cases, where a person repeatedly poses a danger to themselves or others and is incapable of making safe decisions, we should be willing to have a serious discussion about carefully regulated involuntary treatment. It is a difficult issue, but avoiding difficult questions has not made the crisis disappear.
Ottawa also needs to start measuring the costs that current policies impose on the surrounding community.
How much are businesses spending on private security? How often are employees dealing with needles, human waste or property damage? How many businesses have closed, relocated or decided not to invest because of persistent disorder? Are residents actually feeling safer? Are more people entering treatment and achieving stable recovery?
Those should be measures of success alongside the number of housing units created. Small businesses cannot become the last line of defence for problems that belong to our health, social-service and public-safety systems.
As Ottawa approaches another municipal election, candidates will offer plans for housing, homelessness and public safety. They should be asked not only how much they intend to spend, but what results they expect to achieve.
For Chinatown businesses, workers and residents, the question is no longer theoretical. They are already paying the price.
Yukang Li is the executive director of the Ottawa Chinatown BIA and interim chair of the National Chinatowns Council of Canada.
