Fed up with being unable to find a home, this B.C. man built a houseboat from recycling bins and road signs
CBC
After eight years of living in tents, a car, and homemade structures in B.C. and Alberta — and over a year on the B.C. Housing waiting list for shelter — Philip Hathaway and his wife took to the sea.
"I said, you know what? They don't want us in the parks, we have nowhere to live ... I'm building a boat," Hathaway said.
Since June 2021, the couple has lived on a boat constructed by Hathaway, with a base of blue recycling bins bolted together and filled with plastic bottles to keep it afloat, covered with a layer of old highway signs.
He first set up a two-person tent on top of the structure for him and his wife Sonja to live in, but has since replaced it with a more durable plywood A-frame hut.
He built the boat, which he named The Blue Dream, in Goldstream Provincial Park near Langford, B.C., a suburb of Victoria. He then floated it down the Goldstream River to the Saanich Inlet and from there piloted the boat up Vancouver Island's east coast to Campbell River — a journey of around 250 kilometres — with a five-horsepower engine.
The boat came as a last resort for the Hathaways, who felt they had exhausted all legal options to find shelter.
Hathaway says he filled out an emergency housing application in April 2020, but was told months later that he had to apply again as the paperwork had been lost.
He says he and his wife spent the next year living in their car. Their car ended up being impounded seven times, after which point they gave up trying to reclaim it and lived instead in a tent on the shore of James Bay in Victoria.
All that time, they waited for a call telling them a shelter spot had opened up — but Hathaway says it never came.
Sonja is now pregnant, making their search for permanent housing more urgent.
The couple are not alone in their struggle to find affordable housing on Vancouver Island.
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reported in February that Greater Victoria's vacancy rate is one per cent, down from 2.2 per cent in 2020. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Greater Victoria was $2,098 last month, according to a report by rentals.ca.
"Housing demand far exceeds availability across the province, including in the Greater Victoria area," B.C. Housing said in a statement to CBC News.
The provincial housing agency says their records for Hathaway's application begin in March 2022, adding that his earlier request might have been directly to a Victoria nonprofit housing provider.
