[1] Evans established the Portland Hotel Society in August 1993 in Vancouver, Canada, to provide shelter to people living in the city's Downtown Eastside who were addicted to drugs or who struggled with disruptive mental-health issues.
Evans refused to evict "hard-to-house" tenants, many of whom openly used injection drugs or otherwise exhibited difficult behaviors as a result of an untreated mental illness.
To accommodate these individuals, Evans developed a practice which would later come to be known as housing first, a collection of social policies that prioritize shelter before requiring a tenant to stop using illegal drugs or stabilizing their mental-health condition.
[5] At the time, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside was experiencing a sharp increase in drug-overdose deaths, and Evans and Townsend opened Insite as part of the solution.
The two groups argued for the Canadian government to allow supervised injection by granting the building an exemption from the country's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, which it eventually did in 2003.