BURST
With the World Cup a few months away, Vancouver and Seattle are preparing for a surge of international visitors — but the host cities are taking very different approaches to homelessness.
In Seattle, officials are fast-tracking efforts to bring unhoused residents indoors as part of their broader tournament planning. Vancouver, however, says it has no plans to expand shelter space ahead of the major sporting event.
“We acknowledge that some would like the FIFA World Cup 2026 to be leveraged as a catalyst for new and ongoing investments in housing, shelter and social supports,” a City of Vancouver spokesperson said in a statement. “While the city agrees these are urgent issues that require significant investment from senior government and partnership with the city, ongoing solutions … extend beyond the scope of hosting these seven matches and beyond what municipalities alone have the resources or jurisdiction to solve.”
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson unveiled accelerated plans this week to expand shelter capacity, aiming to open 500 interim beds with round-the-clock social supports before the first of six matches at the city’s Lumen Field on June 15. Many of these spaces would be in newly constructed micro-shelters in tiny-house villages.
“We know that there are too many people in Seattle who are sleeping outside,” Kate Brunette Kreuzer, Wilson’s chief of staff, said Monday at a city council meeting.
Roughly 4,500 people were experiencing homelessness in Seattle as of 2024, Kreuzer said. The push is part of a broader effort to move unhoused residents indoors ahead of the tournament, with a separate goal of adding 1,000 shelter spaces citywide by the end of the year.
The population of Seattle and surrounding regions is expected to swell by as many as half-a-million people during the Cup, according to Kreuzer.
FIFA requires each city’s plan to outline steps to “prevent and mitigate the displacement of unsheltered populations” in connection with hosting the Cup.
But Vancouver, despite calls from more than 20 groups representing community members and legal advocates in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside — two of the city’s lowest-income neighbourhoods — is keeping the status quo when it comes to sheltering residents who sleep outdoors.
“The city will continue to provide homelessness services and programs throughout the period of FIFA World Cup 2026 and will work with community organizations and agencies towards ensuring people experiencing homelessness continue to have access,” the city said in a statement.
The latest count shows 2,715 people experiencing homelessness in Vancouver in 2025, the highest number since the tally began in 2005 and a 12 per cent increase since 2023.
The city said it continues to explore opportunities to create additional housing and shelter, but made no firm commitment that any would be in place before the Cup.
Under Mayor Ken Sim, Vancouver has stepped up policing and enforcement in the DTES, including a large-scale clearing of an East Hastings Street camp in April 2023 aimed at improving safety and reducing fire risks associated with tents.
Enforcement has continued throughout the neighbourhood, with makeshift tents and structures often popping up during the day only to be collapsed by nightfall under city bylaws that prohibit overnight sheltering in public parks.
“There are pockets of people sheltering everywhere,” DTES housing advocate Fiona York told Postmedia News on Friday.
Laura Macintyre, a lawyer with the Pivot Legal Society, is calling upon Vancouver to provide at least temporary daytime drop-in centres for unhoused residents during the Cup. She warned that without designated spaces, people experiencing homelessness could be disproportionately affected by municipal efforts to manage public areas.
Residents in the DTES previously told Postmedia that they fear a repeat of the 2010 Winter Olympics, when unhoused people say they were pushed out of key areas by bylaw officers and police, who ordered them to move along in the name of safety and security.
During that same time, the city funded HomeGround in Oppenheimer Park, offering shelter, food, entertainment and other free services to unhoused residents during the 2010 Games. The initiative was run by community organizations and continued for several years after the Olympics.
It’s a model that long-term housing advocates like York and Jean Swanson, a former Vancouver city councillor, want to see repeated for the Cup.
Vancouver’s homeless population has surged by 25 per cent since the Olympics, when 1,715 people were recorded as experiencing homelessness.
The city said that it currently has a stock of more than 1,400 year-round shelter beds and about 8,000 supportive housing units.