Letters Not Condos

Please join with us to oppose a significant proposal for condos covering 6 lots at 58 W. Hastings in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. We literally need hundreds of Vancouver residents to write a letter AND sign up to speak at the Development Permit Hearing to make an impact. The hearing is on June 23. It is essential that our letters are in by Friday, May 17 so the Planning Department can reference them in the report that will be submitted to the DP Board who will make the decision. Your letter does not have to be long or profound. A few sentences to object will do just fine. Elaborating is good too. Feel free to use the information below and use the information in CCAP's letter posted at: http://ccapvancouver.wordpress.com.

Background:

The Concord Pacific development at 58 W. Hastings must be stopped. The rapid gentrification of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) is overwhelming the low-income residents of this neighborhood, who make up 75% of its population. The current rate of development, in which new condos outstrip social housing 3 to 1, is a grave threat to the neighborhood. The feverish planning, approval and construction of market condos in the DTES is a destructive force setting off massive shocks in this community. Rising real estate prices are already resulting in increased rents, conversions and closures of residential hotels (SRO’s), creating a constant flow of displacement and evictions of low-income residents, and consequent homelessness. Condo construction will be accompanied by a flood of upscale amenities catering to the new residents of the area, which will further marginalize the low-income residents who have made this neighborhood home for many years.

Unlike people with significant resources, whose lives are marked by independence and mobility, people living in poverty form communities of interdependence, located in a specific geographical area, and embedded in neighborly networks of support and assistance. The community of low-income residents who currently call the DTES home should not be displaced from their neighborhood and relocated somewhere else for the sake of condo development. This is their home, and they should be able to live here. Poverty is not grounds for displacement.

Condo construction in the DTES must be halted until a community vision is formulated, planned and implemented. Like putting up a tent in a windstorm, rooting and securing housing for low-income people in a community experiencing the hurricane of condo development and massive gentrification is impossible. Residents need time to determine their own community vision and they need support for the implementation of that vision, before the green light is
given to condo developers. What is at stake is the existence of a vibrant, amazing community of people.

The cessation of condo development for the sake of this community can begin here and now, with the rejection of a development permit to Concord Pacific for the 58 West Hastings site.

We believe there is an opening at City Hall to support our position. On Thursday, May 1 at the Planning and Environment counil meeting, Cameron Gray, Director of the City's Housing Centre said the surge of condos in the DTES is “like a hurricane and is going twice as fast as predicted…[and] we need to address the rapidity of change in order to stay on track with the Downtown Eastside Housing Plan." He also said that a strong mechanism to control condo development “could signal to the Province that no market housing will be built and landowners/developers may be off to Victoria to get more housing here.” And he said: “its time to do a community visioning because groups are more united and able to do it and because of the rapidity of change.” At the same meeting, Councilor Anton of the NPA stated “we have the horrendous challenge of 4000 more units” in terms of securing replacement housing in the area and that “as long as the SRO’s are in private hands, they are in jeopardy.” Councilor Anton said she was “very encouraged by the [visioning] work in the DTES.”

Please write your letters by Friday, May 17 to:

Alison.higginson@vancouver.ca
The Chair, Development Permit Board
c/o Alison Higginson, Project Facilitator,
Development Services
453 West 12th Avenue
Vancouver BC
V5Y 1V4
Please bcc your email letter to: wpedersen@look.ca or send us a quick note to let us know that you wrote a letter.

To sign up to speak at the hearing on Monday June 23, call:

Lorna Harvey
Assistant to the Development Permit Board
Development Services
604. 873-7469

Sincerely,

Carnegie Community Action Project [CCAP

End Homeless Now - Forum

The number of people experiencing homeless in Vancouver is on the rise

What has happened and what is next?

Join other citizens and business leaders to discover how we can end homelessness in Vancouver

Free public forum
Thursday May 22
7:00 pm
(Doors open at 6:30)

St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church
Burrard & Nelson
Vancouver
(Free underground parking)

Speakers Include:

Steve Snyder
President & CEO, Translta Corporation
Chair, Alberta Secretariat for Action on Homelessness

Tim Richter
President & CEO, Calgary Homeless Foundation

For more information call: 604-683-4574

www.endhomelessnessnow.ca

Finding a home, a new life

City's Streets to Home wins over critics, gains credibility among homeless by helping more than 1,750 people get a roof over their heads since early 2005
May 07, 2008 04:30 AM
Daniel Girard
Urban Affairs Reporter

When outreach workers began asking homeless people if they could put a roof over their head, the answer was typically: "Yeah, right."

Three years later, the staff at the Streets to Homes program (S2H) are getting a much better reception on Toronto streets – and at city hall. The $8.7 million program is poised for a huge funding boost – $2.5 million more this year, $4.9 million next – opening the door to expanded services to help find jobs and more permanent housing to those who live in shelters or other housing but spend their days panhandling, especially downtown.

The executive committee's call is a ringing endorsement for the program launched by city council in 2005 with the aim of ending street homelessness. While a look down any downtown block confirms that goal has yet to be attained, the fact that it has helped more than 1,750 people find homes – nearly 90 per cent of them still housed – has won over critics.

"Nine out of 10 homeless people want permanent housing," said program manager Iain De Jong, referring to a survey conducted a couple of years ago. "They aren't `hard to house' or `service resistant.' It's that we haven't found the service or the right housing for them."

The program, which works with 29 non-profit groups ranging from street outreach and missions to employment and mental health services, uses a housing-first approach.

Read the rest

City council scraps social housing plan

Businessman balked at '20 per cent' requirement
Mike Howell, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Businessman Toby Barazzuol wants to make it perfectly clear that he is not opposed to more social housing built in the Downtown Eastside.

But Barazzuol, owner of Eclipse Awards International, does not think small businesses such as his should also have to be in the social housing business.

That was the situation he faced four years ago when he wanted to add a second storey to his business at Heatley and Alexander streets. He discovered that a city requirement under the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District plan dictated that 20 per cent of the addition had to be devoted to social housing.

He said the requirement effectively would make him a landlord with tenants. The thought of needing to hire a non-profit to operate the units or managing it himself led him to scrap expansion plans.

Read the rest

Condo towers on the march in Downtown Eastside

TREVOR BODDY
tboddy@globeandmail.com
The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 2, 2008

Accompanying a hundred or so housing protesters marching through the grimmest blocks of East Hastings last week, I found myself thinking of the 1964 movie Cheyenne Autumn. It was director John Ford's last Western, a grand epic of the homeless and destitute Cheyenne as they sought a place, and way, to live after being displaced by white settlements in the 1870s, a cruel tragedy that went unnoticed in polite salons back east.

This is Cheyenne Autumn for affordable housing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In all my years of writing about the cities of the world, I have never seen a neighbourhood so stressed, facing so huge a range of external forces and difficult internal choices as the Downtown Eastside right now.

The rate of change here is cinematic, with every week a hoarding springing up to announce a new private housing project, while down most blocks, we are reminded that our provincial government has bought 650 "single resident occupancy" (SRO) hotel rooms for renewal as housing for the poorest of the poor.

Government press releases for this welcome initiative do not mention that this figure represents barely 15 per cent of the welfare-level accommodation in the neighbourhood, according to Wendy Pederson, one of the organizers of last week's march (which was triggered by a new Concord Pacific plan to build nearly 200 condo units at 58 West Hastings).

Ms. Pedersen says 250 SRO rooms closed permanently last year, and 900 more have been priced out of reach, because the area is now attracting students, seniors and so-called cultural creatives, without low-cost housing options elsewhere in the city.

Thus it is not only condo purchasers but also low-income Vancouverites who are now competing with the homeless for housing in this single, 20-block area. The bottom line, according to the Carnegie Centre Community Action Project, is that 1,300 out of 2,900 rooms in the Downtown Eastside will soon be "inaccessible to people on welfare."

The April 22 protesters convened at the premises of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, where boxes of bananas were being given out to hungry addicts, streetwalkers, unemployed teenagers and indigent seniors. Watching the demonstrators brought home to me another reminder of Cheyenne Autumn: how the ratio of aboriginal and Métis people among Downtown Eastside residents increases yearly.

The concentration of poverty in the Downtown Eastside is the result of more than a century of established public policy. For example, from 1900 through 1975, it was virtually the only area of the city where bar, tavern and beer parlour licences were issued. Injured and laid-off workers from the natural resources industry were parked there to drink away their lives, thanks to multiple bylaws passed by multiple city councils.

Vancouverites now have the temerity to feign surprise about "problems getting out of hand down there," and prescribe condos-as-cure. There is nothing like the Downtown Eastside anywhere else on this continent for a simple reason: it is an artificial slum - the direct result of failed public policy united with a long-standing civic tradition of hiding our problems, rather than confronting them.

Rage about all this was in the air during the April 22 march, amid fear from residents and activists that their concerns about the Concord Pacific development plan would not be heard.

Area planner Rick Michaels and Vancouver director of planning Brent Toderian offered soothing words, but Mr. Toderian says he is nonetheless "inclined to support" the Concord Pacific application when it returns to the Development Permit Board in several weeks.

Mr. Toderian offered his assurances on responsible Downtown Eastside development in a recent interview. "We do not practice 'form follows finance' in my department," he told me.

The Concord Pacific project is mid-rise, and sympathetic to the late 19th-century heritage district context.

But a few blocks away on Pender Street, developer Rob Macdonald is pushing for the first high-rise condo tower in the Downtown Eastside, 90 or perhaps 120 metres high, according to some media reports.

Mr. Toderian says that, in his view, "the door is still open" for condo tower applications in the heart of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. I think this a huge mistake, and our chief planner concedes that this openness has created a rush of developers and real estate agents expecting permission for the tower format to march eastward.

It is City Council, not planners, who will determine the fate of towers amid the city's largest concentration of heritage buildings.

According to Mr. Toderian, "If developers have paid too much for land here, that's their problem."

And his, especially in an election year.

Like the Cheyenne in the John Ford movie, a line in the sand has been set by community and heritage advocates. Stay tuned.

Solutions for homelessness offered to City

Three young authors had plenty of advice to offer the City of Vancouver on how to address the growing issues of a lack of affordable housing and a growing homelessness crisis yesterday.

The authors were winners of an essay contest held by Pivot Legal Society that challenged entrants to think outside the box on how to solve one of the most pressing issues facing the City of Vancouver: the future of housing in the Downtown Eastside.

“These essays represent real and pragmatic solutions to homelessness and the future of the Downtown Eastside,” said David Eby, who heads Pivot Legal Society’s Housing Campaign. “But more importantly they represent the possibility that creative thinking and collaboration could help Vancouver solve some pretty challenging problems.”

A panel of high-profile judges, including Cameron Gray of the City of Vancouver Housing Department, Nick Blomley, Professor of Urban Geography at SFU, and developer Robert Brown, evaluated the entries for creative thinking, the practicality of the recommendations, and whether or not the proposals drew from successful models in other jurisdictions.Key proposals from the essays included:

• A “master lease” program, modeled on a program in San Francisco, where the city pays the capital cost for half of a new build of social housing units, and leases the remaining units from a developer funded by private capital, capital secured by the half of the units paid for by the city. In the alternative, the City could lease existing operating SRO buildings from operators to ensure continued access to those most vulnerable to homelessness. Rents could help offset City costs.

• A “homeless connect” program, modeled on another San Francisco program, where government and non-government organizations gather in a single location to help homeless people get basic services like replacement identification, eyeglasses and medical care.

• Employing the recently homeless in building social housing to help build skills and self-esteem.

• Incorporating economic rights, like a right to housing and a living wage, into our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

• Considering the issuing of a special development bond by the City for the benefit of the DTES, where individuals could invest in ensuring socially sustainable and mixed income construction, instead of forcing the City to rely on private investment and developers for revitalization of the area.

Click here to download the report

Big win in TO with panhandler plan

Toronto City Council's powerful Executive Committee has unanimously adopted a detailed panhandling strategy that bucks the terrible trend throughout North America to criminalize activities associated with homelessness, housing insecurity and poverty. The plan recognizes that there are socio-economic and health issues that drive people to beg for change on the city's streets and, therefore, the best response is not to arrest and ticket panhandlers, but to ensure that they have access to housing, supports and income.

It was particularly heartening to see representatives from Toronto's business, tourism and entertainment all stand in support of this plan - along with the Wellesley Institute. Even Toronto Police Services spoke against criminalizing panhandling and in favour of the approach that tackles the fundamental concerns. Just one year ago, many business groups and others were clamouring for a police-led crackdown on panhandling.

The TO plan, which still needs the approval of City Council later this month, calls for a "housing first" approach to dealing with panhandling. It recognizes that growing poverty and housing insecurity are driving most people to beg on the streets, and that a significant number also suffer from physical and mental health concerns, including substance use. But instead of condemning the poor for being poor, the Toronto plan commits about $5 million to help panhandlers find affordable homes, an adequate income and the supports that they need.

The Wellesley Institute, in our submission to the committee, noted that the Statistics Canada data released last Thursday confirms the dire trend in growing income inequality in Toronto. We also pointed out that many cities - including New York City - have tried to criminalize activities associated with homelessness (including panhandling), only to find that this costs more and doesn't actually reduce the number of homeless people. And we called on the city to re-double its efforts to ensure that there is adequate housing and services for those who need it.

We've noted in our municipal budget submission that Toronto needs to ramp up its spending on housing and services, needs to re-double its efforts to convince senior levels of government to renew critical investments in housing and other social infrastructure and, until a comprehensive housing and anti-poverty strategy is adopted and funded by senior levels of government, needs to ensure that the city's emergency relief system - including homeless shelters - are properly funded.

One key factor that swayed many councillors was a simple message: The cost of doing nothing far outweights the cost of an effective and practical solution. That's the core message from the Wellesley Institute's Blueprint to End Homelessness, which was released in 2006, and city councillors and city officials quoted our Blueprint in support of sensible and humane plan to address the real needs of panhandlers.

* * *

Michael Shapcott
Director of Community Engagement
The Wellesley Institute

We all benefit by tackling homelessness

New research shows kindness can also cut taxpayer burden
Brian Lewis, The Province
Published: Tuesday, April 29, 2008

The results of a comprehensive study released yesterday in Abbotsford clearly show that homelessness is not just a big-city problem in B.C.

In fact, despite increased social programs, the number of homeless people in the Upper Fraser Valley during a recent 24-hour snapshot count increased by 13 per cent over a count in 2004.

Read the rest here

THIS WEEKEND: STANDs Go Province-Wide

Eighty “STANDs for Housing” slated for Saturday; Homelessness demos will span Province

Vancouver, BC. -- Eighty street-corner “STANDs for Housing” will be held in about thirty towns and cities across British Columbia this Saturday, May 3rd from 1-2pm.

The colourful blue-themed demonstrations have grown since February this year from a single Stand in Vancouver’s residential Little Mountain neighbourhood. By March there were fifteen Stands across the city, each coordinated by neighbourhood advocates.

Now, after only ten weeks, the blue banners and scarves of “STAND for Housing” will appear in most parts of BC – from Prince Rupert in the north to Sooke on the Island, to Kimberley in the southeast.

The approximate regional breakdown as of April 27th is:
Vancouver Island, 18
Lower Mainland, 40
Interior & North, 24

The spread of “STANDs for Housing” around the province reflects similar growth in the twin crises of homelessness and an affordable-housing shortage. The two issues are directly related and no longer limited to big cities, or to neighbourhoods of the poor and addicted.

Vancouver housing advocates point out that only one Vancouver Stand occurs in the Downtown Eastside. They say half the STANDs are in upscale residential neighbourhoods on the west side of the city, where the rattle of shopping carts is now heard with increasing frequency.

Background
The first Stand began last year in response to the BC government’s decision to sell Vancouver’s 15-acre Little Mountain social housing site to a private developer. Two hundred twenty-four social housing apartments are to be demolished and replaced with up to 2,000 luxury condos. The BC government says the developer will be required to promise replacement of all 224 social housing apartments. Completion of the sale has been delayed, though negotiations continue.

Advocates want city and senior governments to work together to resume construction of non-profit and co-op housing for low and moderate income singles and families. For decades, all governments cooperated to build tens of thousands of such homes every year.

The BC and federal governments cancelled those programs, 1993 to 2001. The resulting cascade of low-income people seeking down-market housing results in poorer people becoming homeless.

Permanent social housing is also what’s needed by graduates of ‘transitional’ and ‘supportive’ housing programs, who presently leave those programs only to face near-zero vacancy rates for affordable rental housing. Permanent non-profit and co-op housing would dramatically slow the increase in homelessness by freeing up low-income rentals.

Apart from pressuring politicians, Provincial STANDers will also be paying respects to hundreds of dead and dying homeless women, men, and children— victims of legislated poverty and punitive welfare rules. They wander our streets and lanes, huddle in parks and encampments, burn to death in service alcoves, are crushed in laneway garbage bins.
Homelessness cannot be solved without using the surplus billions in federal and provincial economies to build non-profit and co-op housing for a range of incomes.

For Stand materials: CALMhousing@hotmail.com
List of Stands: http://www.my-calm.info/

See also Housing vigils grow across the province, From the Vancouver Sun

Long line waiting for housing in Toronto

Social welfare, housing advocates meet to discuss how best to provide affordable homes in the city
Apr 27, 2008 04:30 AM
Francine Kopun
Toronto Star

If Toronto is serious about fighting homelessness, it must make saying "Not In My BackYard" a taboo, a housing forum has been told.

"The city has to take a strong enough stand against NIMBYs that they realize it's not okay to speak that way," Angie Hains, executive director of Ecuhome Corporation, said yesterday during a meeting to discuss how to get people off the streets and into their own homes.

And for any assistance program to work, those people who move into new housing will need to get ongoing help from social agencies and the community as they adjust to their new lives.

"Supports are the foundation of houses," said Cynthia Kiy, manager of support services for Covenant House. "Without them, the houses are as flimsy as tents in the park. That's how I feel."

Hains was one of about 200 housing and social welfare advocates to attend the meeting to discuss Toronto's 10-year, $469-million-a year Housing Opportunities Toronto (HOT) – An Affordable Housing Framework 2008-2018.

Read the rest here

A family problem

Blood relations or not, we all share responsibility for our brothers and sisters on the street
Rick Ouston, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, April 25, 2008

We apply many labels to people living on the street. The homeless. Unemployable. Binners. Bag ladies.

But when Christina Windsor Reid of Vancouver saw her brother Rick Windsor being interviewed on a Global television newscast after getting his only possessions in a pair of shopping buggies crushed by a city garbage crew (see story below), she knew what Rick said was true.

He was homeless, looking for affordable housing -- he often does -- and now he owned nothing.

Read the rest here.

Follow-up story here.

New Housing Reports

Several new housing reports are now available on the sidebar under the heading Housing, as well as below:

United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing,
Miloon Kothari
Mission to Canada
9– 22 October 2007

Disappearing Homes: The Loss of Affordable Housing in the DTES
(Carnegie community Action Project, April 2008)

Homelessness and Affordable Low Income Housing Backgrounder
(Downtown Eastside Community Land Use Principles Project, September 2007)

The State of Non-Market Housing in the Downtown Eastside
(Downtown Eastside Community Land Use Principles Project, September 2007)

THE SELLING OF NATIONAL INSECURITIES

Under the rhetoric of "protecting citizens"; governments, international bodies, and the corporate sector are rapidly intensifying security, surveillance and anti-terror regimes at the national and global levels.

In light of the next SPP Summit in New Orleans in April 2008, join us for a free public forum including SHORT FILMS and SPEAKERS to find out about these developments and what you can do to challenge this expanding industrial-complex.

+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
Sunday April 27
Films and Speakers from 6-7:30 pm
Followed by Discussion 7:30-8:30 pm
YWCA (733 Beatty Street, corner W. Georgia)
1 block from Stadium Skyrain Station
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+

SHORT FILMS...
"From Evacuation to Eviction" on the neoliberal agenda post-Katrina and "Blackwater: Private Mercaneries from Iraq to New Orleans" on security profiteering.

SPEAKERS...

• Introduction by Cynthia Oka: Cynthia is an anti-colonial no-border activist and a Political Science student.

• Jon Elmer on "Global integration of national security and military policies". Jon is a researcher, writer, and photojournalist specializing in the Middle East, including Palestine, Lebanon, and Afghanistan.

• Hari Sharma on "The War on Terror Security Industrial Complex: Imperial Crusading, Criminalization, and Profiteering". Hari is Professor Emeritus of Sociology of SFU and President of South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy.

• Harsha Walia: "North American consequences of a post 9/11 Security agenda leading to 2010". Harsha Walia is a local organizer, writer, and researcher.
  

AND SOME GREAT SPOKEN WORD by Hari Alluri: anti racist spoken word artist and activist.


Did you know that:

- In Canada, over $25 billion has been spent on security measures since 9/11?

- There are currently over 50 US employees and agents including from Homeland Security and FBI stationed in Vancouver?

- As part of the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, a series of joint military exercises will be held in advance of the 2010 Olympics?

- A future world wide "Smart Cards" system is being tested on the Mohawk and Cree communities?

- A $ 3.2 million maximum security prison "Guantanamo North" was built in Ontario to detain Muslim detainees on secret evidence?

- Canada and Israel recently signed a pact to coordinate security and anti-terror activities?

- There is a well-coordinated and growing network of global surveillance that has become one of the most lucrative global markets?

Sometimes hard work is still not enough

A renter for almost 25 years faces almost overwhelming obstacles finding a new place to live
Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, April 24, 2008

Dorothy Kerr has always worked hard, paid her bills and her rent on time and saved what little she could from her paycheque. It was never enough for a down payment on a home of her own.

Kerr has lived in Vancouver for nearly 25 years and most of that time she's worked in temporary clerical positions for the City of Vancouver. In December, the 49-year-old Kerr was 13 days away from being homeless.

"I absolutely never believed this could have happened to me," she said. "I'm a homebody. I'm house-proud and I just kept thinking, how can this be happening to me? I actually thought that I was going to end up outside United We Can [in the Downtown Eastside] selling my Swarovski crystal on the street. Why can't somebody like me get a clean, decent place to live?"

Read the rest here

Condo project targeted by activists

Concord Pacific building at Hastings and Carrall stalled by Carnegie Community Action Project
Frances Bula, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, April 24, 2008

VANCOUVER - A Concord Pacific project in the booming Downtown Eastside has become the first to be targeted by local activists who are gearing for an anti-condo war.

The 154-unit Greenwich condo project -- which is being built near Hastings and Carrall in the middle of what has been the city's drug market, scavenging centre and residential-hotel enclave -- has found itself temporarily stalled as area advocates protest a technical glitch in the approval process.

But those advocates say they're willing to try to make a test case out of the project to highlight concerns about the onslaught of condos in a neighbourhood that has been traditionally the home for the region's poorest.

Read the rest here