The housing minister got his day today, with his Colemanesque gentle ultimatum that, if Vancouver wants to open more shelters than the province currently funds, it should pay half the operating costs.

The question that I can’t help thinking is going to come Mr. Coleman’s way: If his complaint is that the city is “setting its own policy” on how many shelters to have open without wanting to pay the bill, surely some people are going to ask, “Why is it not provincial policy to ensure that there are enough shelters to provide everyone on the streets with a bed?”

I’m sure we’ll get an answer soon.

The question for some is what the long-term consequences of his vision of housing are. You can read my story here.

What’s not clear yet is whether all of the five shelters — First United, the warehouse near Great Northern Way, the two city buildings under the Granville Bridge, and part of a social housing building in Gastown — will stay open.

So far, the shelters have been getting good reviews from the downtown business association and Vancouver police, who are reporting fewer problems with public disorder and fewer calls on mental health issues than the previous January.

Something for Homelessness Minister Rich Coleman to figure out, along with everything else.

I just had a talk with the minister who said he knows that this is going to be a challenge, because of organizations will want to protect their turf, but his new position will give him the mandate to collect the information from everyone involved with those social issues and figure out who is actually producing results.

(From what he said, I gather his team will even be able to see what different services individual people are using.)

This all follows, of course, on the call from Vancouver Police Chief Jim Chu for some kind of integrated accounting system, which echoes what many others have asked for over the years. But what Chief Chu wants, he seems to get.

Holborn put down something in the neighbourhood of $20-30 million for the property when it won the bid to redevelop last year. There were questions about whether Holborn wanted to go forward, given a certain lack of activity over the past few months and then the news last week that Holborn’s Ritz-Carlton project on Georgia would not go ahead.

The Vision mayor and council didn’t criticize the idea at first, but behind the scenes, they were expressing some puzzlement about how anything like that could actually work. The issue with the Downtown Eastside is that there are a huge number of players at work, some funded by the federal government, some funded by the province, some funded by foundations, some funded by Vancouver Coastal Health. The city is also in operation there in various forms (fire, building permit inspectors; homeless outreach workers; planners).

So the question was — how would this czar even operate? To be a czar, you need to have not just a mandate, but people and money. Unless the czar were miraculously given power over city, provincial, Coastal Health and federal agencies working down there, it would be more a job of herding cats.

(By the way, this is the third year in a row they’ve made an announcement like this, as we count down to the Olympics. Brings the total number of units they’ve bought now to something like 2,000.)

Of those, six are Downtown Eastside hotels, including what I gather is the infamous Backpackers, between the North Star and Army & Navy.

What was interesting was how many places the province bought outside Vancouver: a motel in Penticton, another motel in Williams Lake, a mobile-home park in Nanaimo, a hotel in Prince George, a former youth-corrections facility in Logan Lake (near Kamloops), a former seniors’ centre in Mission. It’s a sign of how widespread the province’s homelessness problem is. It’s also a positive move for everyone, so that people wil maybe someday, someday stop saying that all the problems move to the Downtown Eastside because that’s where the services are.

Total bill, by the way, was $34 million, at an average cost of about $130,000 per unit.

Other random pieces of information I picked up during my morning visit:

- Yes, for everyone who has a hard time believing the 12 new social housing sites are going to be built, the tenders are going to go out soon for construction. The Portland Hotel Society’s Main Street site is in line to be the first project to start construction.

- No, no one knows yet how the federal infrastructure dollars might be used for any of this. There’s a bit of a tussle going on because the feds have said there’s money available for reno’ing old housing if provinces match the funds. But here in B.C., the province is saying, If we’re going to match funds, we should get a choice in where that money goes, not just only to projects within your narrow definitions of what’s suitable.

- Housing Minister Rich Coleman told me after the announcement that two of the sites — the one in Logan Lake and the one in Mission — are going to get some intensive extra support services, akin to what they’re doing at the Burnaby centre that I’ve been writing about the last week. So that will give some out-of-town options to those difficult cases, people who have everything working against them.

I still can’t get over the turnaround in this province since the Liberals cancelled hundreds of social-housing units planned for construction when they first came to power in 2001.

You can read my Globe story here but I only had some of the details. More will come out at the news conference, especially about some of the pilot projects the government wants to try with some of these buildings.