Finding Home: Affordable Housing Solutions for Greater Vancouver

Transcription

Finding Home:
Affordable Housing Solutions for
Greater Vancouver and B.C.
A Tyee Solutions Series by Jackie Wong and David P. Ball
Finding Home
Produced by Tyee Solutions Society in collaboration with Tides Canada Initiatives Society.
This series was made possible through the support of the Real Estate Foundation, Vancity,
and BC Non-Profit Housing Association.
Introduction: Creating a Public Window to a Critical Year in Affordable Housing i
Five Ideas to Make Vancouver More Affordable
1
Affordable Homes Crunch: Experts See Opportunities
6
Buying Vancouver Space One Cubic Foot at a Time
10
‘Upscaling’ of DTES Eroding Low Income Housing: Report
13
Increasingly, Vancouver’s Pidgin restaurant is focal point for BC social housing push
16
‘Gentrification and the City’ lectures aim to educate and expand horizons
18
Symposium Shares ‘Down-to-Earth’ Fixes to High-Cost Housing
20
Panel debates solutions to BC rental insecurity at housing conference
23
Jackie Wong is interested in the
intersections between journalism,
education, and community
building. She works as a freelance
writer, editor, and writing
instructor. She is the managing
editor of Megaphone magazine,
Vancouver’s street newspaper.
Jackie co-teaches an introductory
journalism class for inner city
residents and teaches new media
studies and journalism through
UBC and SFU.
going deeper: in-depth series on housing hot zones
Vancouver’s ‘Old’ Chinatown: Still Here
26
Old, Alone and Victims of Racism in Downtown Eastside
34
‘A Drop in the Bucket’: Housing for Chinese Speaking Seniors
40
For Chinese Speaking Seniors, Better Service in San Francisco and Toronto
45
One Last Walk with Judy Graves
50
Social housing group left wanting more from both Libs, NDP on ‘urgent’ crisis
55
Vancouver Rent Assembly explores deeper questions around tenant rights, gentrification 58
Housing Justice Project puts affordable lodging and legal advocacy into action
60
Feds have ‘no choice but to listen’ to municipal pressure on affordable housing
63
‘Community Land Trust’: Vancouver’s Affordable Housing Fix?
66
Advocates call for ‘social impact’ assessments of new Downtown Eastside developments 71
David P. Ball is an awardwinning reporter with a passion
for multimedia journalism,
particularly investigative reporting,
photography and documentary
film. His reporting at The Tyee won
a 2013 Jack Webster Foundation
award. He also writes regularly for
24 Hours, Windspeaker and Xtra!,
and has also been published in
National Post, Toronto Star and
Georgia Straight.
Study Details Canada’s ‘Perfect Storm’ Housing Problem
74
Safer from Violence, Still Seeking a Home
78
Bonded by Shared Horrors, Refugees Find Housing Solutions
84
Fleeing Danger, Refugee Shelter-Seekers Find Exploitation
89
A Home for Refugees ‘Caught In-Between’
95
Are Stats Glossing over Vancouver’s Housing Crisis?
100
Generation Rent: Cities of Renters
106
Generation Rent: San Francisco’s Citizen Tenants
110
Generation Rent: Urban Facelifts Serve the Well-Heeled
117
Generation Rent: The Secret to a Great Rental Home
123
Infographic: Cities of Renters, Vancouver vs. San Francisco
129
More Lower Mainland Rental Housing, but For Whom?
132
The Quiet Agony of the Landlord
137
Affordable Housing: Some Parts Just Aren’t City Hall’s Job
141
Latest in Vancouver Density Battle: Demolition at Marine Gardens
146
Retirement Savings Could Jump-start Victoria Affordable Housing
149
Judge Again Orders Abbotsford Homeless Camp Eviction
153
To Help Vulnerable Renters, Boost Housing Literacy
155
Stars Aligned for False Creek South
159
A Hippie-Era-Urban Experiment Hits 40
163
To Help Vulnerable Renters, Boost Second Life for False Creek South?
170
‘Inspiring’ Shipping Container Housing Set to Multiply
176
Intoduction:
Creating a Public
Window to a
Critical Year in
Affordable Housing
by Jackie Wong
“There’s no great mystique to housing people,” Judy Graves
told me one sunny afternoon in March. We were walking through
Stanley Park, and Graves was showing me the places she used to
frequent during overnight walks to learn from people sleeping on
the street.
Those walks, initiated by simple curiosity, became a
symbol of Graves’ unfussy, straightforward approach to
understanding and finding solutions for homelessness, a social
problem that, for many, is mired in endless complexity. But
Graves didn’t see it that way.
“Ending homelessness is probably the easiest problem of
all the problems facing cities to solve,” she said. To her, the
solution is simple housing that affords a person privacy and
dignity. “It’s so straightforward. And it benefits all of us.”
Graves retired from her post as the City of Vancouver’s
advocate for the homeless shortly after we spoke. During her
career, she made massive strides in drawing public attention
to Vancouver’s most visibly vulnerable—people with nowhere
to live but the streets. Her work influenced significant progress
in documenting Vancouver street homelessness and changing
municipal policy to deal with it differently.
Tyee Solutions Society tracked some of that progress.
Former Tyee Solutions housing reporter Monte Paulsen wrote
numerous series exploring solutions to Vancouver’s housing
crisis, a crisis at the time most visible on the city’s streets. The
groundbreaking How to End Homelessness in Vancouver (2008),
the award-winning A Home for All (2009), and the influential
Green and Affordable Homes, Out of the Box (2010) convened the
Finding Home: Affordable Housing Solutions for Greater Vancouver and B.C.
city’s housing experts in putting forward solutions to make
housing more affordable—and, importantly, accessible—to a
wider public.
Four years later, some of Paulsen’s suggestions are bearing
fruit, notably in the form of a seven-storey tower of innovative
shipping-container housing for women in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside, which Tyee Solutions Society reporter
David P. Ball wrote about in January 2014. That project, now
five months old at the time of this writing, came about as a
direct result of Paulsen’s 2010 series about housing made from
shipping containers.
Elsewhere in the city however, a quiet crisis continues to
unfold behind closed doors as public conversations around
housing shift from homelessness to the more nebulous
territory of affordability.
In picking up where Paulsen left off, I found, in 2013,
that Vancouver’s most acute housing problems—where
affordability, livability, and mental health come together—are
playing out in the private rental market. That’s where people
are struggling to hold on to what lodgings they’ve been able
to find, housing that is often precarious and offers no sure
future for its inhabitants. It’s where people end up staying for
years while they wait for their names to inch forward on social
housing lists. And it’s where under-represented citizens—
people whose first language is not English, people who lack
the social and cultural literacies to speak publicly about their
situation or advocate for something better—are facing the
worst outcomes of an unaffordable city.
ii
“I think middle-class Canadians are focused on the idea
that it’s a tough housing market and they have to work hard
to get into it,” urban geographer Dan Hiebert said to me last
February. “That deflects their vision from the precariousness of
people down the socio-economic hierarchy.”
In 2013, David P. Ball and I worked to pull back the curtain
on under-reported housing affordability issues and the people
living at their heart.
We worked from the perspective that housing is about
more than simply putting a roof over a person’s head. Finding
solutions to the affordability concerns, we found, is to think
carefully about what makes a house a home. The intricate,
messy, often beautiful elements of what separates ordinary
life from the experience of truly living go hand in hand with
what distinguishes a house from a home. Our year of reporting
sought to articulate that, and also show the consequences of its
absence.
Jackie Wong
January 2014
Five Ideas to Make
Vancouver More
Affordable
Housing experts weigh in ahead of Buildex keynote
panel on Feb. 14. By Jackie Wong
It’s been a year since Brent Toderian suddenly and
controversially departed his job as the City of Vancouver’s
planning director. He now heads up his own city planning
and urban consultancy firm, Toderian Urbanworks, where
he’s at work, among many other things locally, nationally and
internationally, on two local affordable housing projects and three
job-space projects, as well as a citywide plan for Regina, Canada’s
second fastest growing city. His planning work today echoes what
he previously did with the City of Vancouver. A key difference
between now and then is he can talk about urban issues without
first asking permission from his bosses to discuss them.
“You could never forget that you were speaking on behalf
of the city before. And now I’m simply speaking on behalf
of my opinion on cities. So in that sense, there’s a lot fewer
boundaries,” he tells me. “But the rumours of my fetteredness
were always a bit overstated while I was at City Hall because
I was a pretty outspoken fellow, which is maybe why I’m not
there anymore. And the rumours of my un-fetteredness are
probably a bit overstated now. Life is always a little more
complicated than that.”
Vancouver winter scene by TOTORORO RORO from Your BC: The Tyee’s
Photo Pool.
Toderian will share his perspectives on city-building and
affordable living as part of a keynote panel at the Buildex
Vancouver conference Feb. 14. The two-day conference
and tradeshow will draw over 13,000 expected visitors to
share information about building, managing and designing
real estate. The panel, called “Living Affordably in Greater
Vancouver,” aims to explore solutions to this region’s housing
affordability crisis. Unsurprisingly, Vancouver was recently
ranked the second-most unaffordable city in the world (Hong
Kong was first), according to January 2013 survey findings
published by Demographia, an American urban planning
consultancy.
Idea 1. Public transport creates housing
options.
“We need to change the discussion to one of affordable cities
rather than just affordable housing,” Toderian says. Affordable
cities, he says, must include affordable transportation systems
independent of private cars, plus job spaces that ensure the
people who live here can make a living.
“There’s a mythology that’s been spread across North
America that industry is out of date, and we should convert
all these [industrial] lands to mixed-use, hip, high-density
communities. Vancouver has actually been one of the models
for that. There are some places where you can actually do that
successfully and other places where you shouldn’t,” Toderian
says. “And what kind of job space do we have in this city? Is
it the kind of job space that only facilitates trendy restaurants
and service-sector jobs, or is it about higher-paid jobs, creative
jobs, manufacturing jobs that require specialized lands and
buildings? That’s as much a part of the affordability picture as
affordable housing is.”
Solutions for homelessness and vulnerable housing rely
as much on inclusive employment training as it does on the
provision of affordable and supportive housing, he adds.
“Skills-training and inclusive job-training initiatives, where
2
you actually take folks out of poverty cycle situations to give
folks the training they need to change their economic profile,
is an important issue relative to homelessness and supportive
housing,” he says. “It’s not just about giving an affordable
home, although that’s critically important.”
Idea 2. Make policies to support options
other than ownership.
Both Toderian and fellow Buildex panelist Sean McEwen
are calling for a re-consideration of how our society values and
privileges home ownership over other forms of housing.
“The idea of ownership as an indication of success is a
uniquely North American thing, and it’s increasingly less
applicable to expensive cities,” Toderian says. “This is true
of every global expensive city; ownership isn’t the automatic
assumption, but there are people that live successful and
fulfilling lives all over the world and never own a home, and
don’t think anything less of themselves in the doing.”
McEwen, who has worked as the sole practitioner for his
firm, S.R. McEwen Architect, for just over 20 years, suggests
cities have been planned — and even governments have been
organized — around deep-seated cultural biases towards home
ownership.
“There’s kind of a core belief that home ownership is
better, that it essentially helps to create a more stable society, a
society where people express pride of ownership and maintain
their place in society,” McEwen says. “There’ve been studies
that have shown that renters demand more policing than
homeowners do. There are kind of these core social biases that
tend to define what’s of value in society and what isn’t.”
Special federal measures, like homeowner grants, are not
afforded to renters, McEwen adds. Such measures work to both
defend home ownership and enhance its status. A longtime
social housing advocate who has worked with numerous
neighbourhood groups to advance tenant rights and housing
for low-income citizens, McEwen remembers housing-related
discussions from the 1970s that are eerily prescient today.
“People used to warn us 40 years ago about Vancouver
becoming an executive city. It was gentrifying like mad. And
it’s come to pass,” he says. “It’s the planning culture and the
development culture that we’ve had that have allowed it to
come to pass. Their efforts at social engineering have really
succeeded.”
Idea 3. Change the thrust of ‘conditional
use’ permits.
McEwen chooses an independent architectural practice
because he wants to maintain his freedom to express his
views frankly. “If I was part of a firm and trying to market our
skills and we were making these sort of what we call sociallyprogressive notions, you might not get hired by developers in
the local context,” he says. A Vancouver urban planning trend
that worries him these days is prioritizing the visual impact of
a new development over its contributions to civil society.
3
“In the culture of planning that we have, planners construct
these beautiful, artistic pieces of urban design, but we’ve gotten
farther away from looking at things that I think are important,
like social mix,” he says.
McEwen would like to see a return to some of the original
purposes of the conditional land use permit. Conditional land
use allows the property owner — in many local cases, the
City of Vancouver — to use land in a way that lies outside the
zoning law, usually with conditions based on recommendations
from local area advisory groups, nearby property owners, and
other advisory bodies.
“What I would say is we go back to some original ideas of
using the conditional use tool to look at housing goals and
wider affordability goals,” McKewan says. “If there was a use
important to the community, then you could use conditional
use as an inducement to keep incorporating those kinds of uses
into projects.” So, for example, if it’s found that low-income
seniors housing is needed in a community, a conditional land
use permit could provide the bonus density needed to achieve
that in a standard market residential development.
This was done before, he says, but now it seems to be a thing
of the past. “The way that it’s evolved in Vancouver is that
everything’s entirely visual,” he says. But high aesthetic impact
doesn’t necessarily need to sacrifice contributing to the social
good.
“If you reward good design with higher densities for
conditional use, it’s one tool the planners have to improve the
quality of urban developments. In years gone by, it looked at
social issues as well. That’s been forgotten.”
Idea 4. Foster a European solution:
Co-housing.
Even though the City of
Vancouver’s Urban Design
Panel rejected a rezoning and
development application for
a co-housing development in
Kensington-Cedar Cottage last
month, Dane Jansen remains
optimistic about the potential
for this European housing type
to successfully establish itself
Windsong in Langley is B.C.’s
in Vancouver. The principal of
first and oldest co-housing
project. Buildesx panelist Dane
Vancouver’s dys architecture
Jansen worked on project in the
joins Toderian and McEwen on
mid-’90s. Photo dys projects.
Thursday’s Buildex panel, along
with Urban Fabric Group principal Heather Tremain.
“It’s hitting some of the critical criteria in terms of producing
affordable housing,” Jansen says of co-housing, which is
characterized by its non-hierarchical, member-driven decisionmaking structure and private homes supplemented by common
facilities. While Jansen is not part of the current Cedar Cottage
co-housing proposal, he and dys architecture previously
4
worked on a co-housing development in Langley called the
Windsong, which welcomed its first residents in 1996.
“[Co-housing is] one of the ways we can improve
affordability that’s self-initiated,” he continues. “Part of being
in co-housing is to reduce some of the lifestyle and budget
issues. You’re not always having to go looking for a babysitter
because there’s somebody there to deal with your kids if
you’re running late coming home one night. People are coming
together to be mutually supportive, which should suggest you
can reduce some of your other costs in your life and draw that
down.”
He also praises co-housing for its development cost savings.
“If you’re doing the development yourself, you’re removing
one of the soft costs, which is developer profit, and hopefully
turning that back into development or making more affordable
units.”
Idea 5. Go small intelligently.
Jansen’s other work in designing social housing units
has, like co-housing, drawn on European inspiration. He has
designed 220- to 325-square foot apartments several supportive
housing facilities in Vancouver, and was one of the first
architects to pioneer small suites for such purposes in the late
1990s.
“There was quite an outcry. ‘How dare people live in
something that’s the size of a parking space?’ ” he remembers.
“For me, I knew that other people living in the rest of the world
had been living that way.”
But current economic circumstances are seeing governments
less involved with housing than they have been in the past,
Jansen says. “I think we had that paradigm where we’ve just
trusted there would be the involvement of government to carry
forward with that agenda. And they had a strong agenda,
right up until 2007, 2008, as evidenced with the Provincial
Homelessness Initiative,” he says.
“Now, the provincial government is in a bit of a tough
situation. So while they’re still continuing to do work and we’re
fortunate to do work with it, there are not as many programs
today as there were a few years ago. It tells us that we can’t
always trust that there will be that level of funding from the
provincial government. And it means you’ve got to look at
things more creatively.”
5
Affordable Homes
Crunch: Experts
See Opportunities
Lower Mainland could be lab for innovative
financing, planning, say Buildex panelists.
By Jackie Wong
The words “affordable home ownership” and “Vancouver”
aren’t frequently uttered in the same breath, but some innovative
local projects suggest the tides are turning — slowly. The
discussions emerging from the Feb. 14 BuildEX Vancouver panel
on living affordably in Greater Vancouver reflected what it is
to live in this region; it’s a place of infinite, Russian doll-style
contradictions underscored by a widely felt, sometimes cloudily
articulated notion that somehow things can be better.
The panelists disagreed with one another at times, but Brent
Toderian, Sean McEwen, Dane Jansen, and Heather Tremain
put forward a host of ideas on how to improve housing
affordability, based on their extensive and varied experiences
with building, planning, and designing housing in all forms.
The many specific ideas cited by the four experts fall under
three headings of “opportunities” the building, design and
policy making community should seize, according to the
panelists.
Opportunity 1: Creative affordable
ownership initiatives
The Verdant town homes on Simon Fraser University’s
Burnaby campus are proof that a special alchemy of
community-minded partnerships and creativity can create
affordability when there may otherwise be none to be found.
Windsong in Langley: Cited as one promising affordable housing prototype by
Dane Jansen of dys architects, who helped design it.
Heather Tremain, principal of Urban Fabric Group, was
involved with Verdant, a 60-unit wood frame development
completed in 2007. She says it’s a model for affordable home
ownership that can and should be applied elsewhere. The units
were designed primarily for families, a demographic often
priced out of Vancouver’s real estate market.
Verdant’s smallest unit, at 518 square feet, sold for $129,000.
Its largest, three-bedroom units, at 1,247 square feet, sold
for $311,000. SFU Community Trust provided the lower-cost
land, and Vancity Enterprises Ltd. handled the development
instead of a standard high-profit developer. As well, the project
eschewed traditional marketing strategies like expensive
newspaper advertising campaigns, which can cost tens of
thousands of dollars. Instead, marketers focused on more
modest door-to-door campaigns, and achieved the same goals
at a much lower cost.
“The objective of the work was to create family-focused,
multi-unit residential building that would provide an
affordable option in the university community,” Tremain said.
creates a co-op, the co-op buys land, and then Options works
for the co-op, alongside related professionals such as architects
and planners. Homeownership Alternatives, a separate entity,
finances the co-op. Homeownership Alternatives operates on
the proceeds from previous Options projects.
“The market might deliver it at $290,000 a unit. They can
deliver it at $190,000,” Tremain said of Options for Homes
projects. “One of the interesting things about them is they buy
land in areas that are kind of the ‘next’ area. They wouldn’t buy
on Main Street right now in Vancouver. They’d buy on Fraser
Street, they’d buy on Victoria Drive. So they get a benefit for
being the new group into the market.”
A no-frills approach to building and marketing the units also
keeps costs down, she added.
SFU purchased some units to hold as rental stock, but most
were sold to families. It was both an environmentally- and
economically-sustainable project. While the objective was to
create community and affordability, it was never treated like a
charity.
Opportunity 2: Growing the non-market
sector
Tremain also points to Toronto’s Options for Homes as
a model for affordable ownership that could take shape in
Greater Vancouver. The non-profit facilitates development
and has since helped build more than 3,000 units of affordable
real estate in the Greater Toronto area. How it works: Options
“It’s something we used to do much better 30 or 25 years
ago. But we’ve forgotten how to do that, and it hasn’t been a
priority in society,” he said.
“Everybody got paid,” Tremain said. “We didn’t squeeze the
architects or whomever. It was a market project.”
7
Sean McEwen, a longtime community housing activist
and Vancouver architect with an independent practice, called
for architects and developers to re-prioritize the non-market
housing sector.
“It’s created a system where we told certain groups that
you will have some difficulties, but maybe you’ll have to move
somewhere else,” McEwen continued. “Rather than consider
ourselves as closed systems, closed neighbourhoods where we
want to protect what we have, we have to think of integrating
the needs of others in society, especially the less fortunate.”
McEwen was critical of the Vancouver Mayor’s Task Force
on Housing Affordability, which did not articulate many
opportunities for non-market housing. To grow non-market
housing in the current political and economic climate, he
suggested using the conditional use zoning bylaw to leverage
affordable housing opportunities; taking housing units
as exaction for rezoning benefits rather than ‘pay in lieu’
scenarios; and finally, ensuring the voices of local groups are
heard at city hall.
“We have too much of a top-down process in terms of
planning our communities,” he said.
Opportunity 3: Evolving more ways to share
space, cost, amenities
Reducing the cost of living in areas like transportation and
food is key to tackling the affordable housing conundrum.
“We have a double whammy here in Metro Vancouver,”
panelist Brent Toderian said. “We have the highest housing
costs and below average national incomes.”
To Toderian, affordable living means affordable food access,
land that supports high-paying jobs, and strong purpose-built
rental stocks. He suggests strategically mixing purpose-built
8
rental housing into mixed employment areas close to transit
hubs.
“There’s nothing incompatible with rental housing and office
space,” he says. He noted, however, that Vancouver’s supply of
live-work spaces leaves much to be desired.
Car sharing has seen great success in the city of Vancouver,
but it’s enjoyed less traction in outlying areas. Dane Jansen,
principal of dys architects, suggests Vancouver suburbs adopt
peer-to-peer car sharing initiatives in which car owners rent
their cars to neighbours. He points to Getaround, a peer-to-peer
car rental program in San Francisco, California, in which users
rent each others’ cars for an average of $8 an hour.
For architects, Jansen says, “Building [housing complexes]
with co-op cars in mind reduces the cost of the built form and
reduces costs for residents.”
A single stall of parking is about $35,000, and one carsharing spot can save four to five stalls in a new development.
Jansen also supports alternative ownership and tenancy
models, such as co-housing, joint-purchasing, and joint
tenancy. To co-own living spaces like living rooms and kitchens
can reduce the cost of buying a home. Tremain said such
arrangements may gain ground among younger adults in their
20s and 30s.
“Maybe these new housing forms could start to solve
a couple of our issues,” Tremain said, referring to a 2011
Vancouver Foundation survey that found the top concern
among interviewees was a growing sense of isolation.
Shared tenancy, shared ownership, co-housing, and
car sharing could present solutions to some foundational
ingredients for living well: living in community, and living
within one’s means.
9
Buying Vancouver
Space One Cubic
Foot at a Time
With a wink, Cube Living promises hyperdense real estate ownership for all.
By Jackie Wong
“Science tells us that physical space is infinitely divisible. This
means that real estate density is theoretically unlimited, resulting in the
potential for infinite capital gain!” — CubeLiving.ca
In the back production area of Vancouver’s 221A Artist Run
Centre, Alex Grunenfelder is selling real estate, and it’s going
fast. His Cube Living: Buy Small installation project has been
open for just an hour when Tyee Solutions Society stops by
on Tuesday afternoon, but he’s already pre-sold many units,
each one cubic foot in size. We are Grunenfelder’s first walkin customers, and we’ve purchased two units for $3. We feel
lucky to have invested at such a good time.
“You got your first one for $1. They’re going to be selling
at $3 each after your two are gone,” Grunenfelder tells us. He
finishes assembling the six-sided cardboard cube containing
our purchased space in about three minutes.
“This is a construction process that would normally take at
least two years. And that’s why they can be so cheap because
the efficiencies are unbelievable,” he says. This is what
Grunenfelder refers to as real estate 3.0, or the micro-realestate revolution.
“This seems like a logical conclusion,” he says, “following
the neoliberal market logic of allowing speculative capital to
determine how space gets created and used in the city.”
Designer Alex Grunenfelder with stacked boxes each containing one cubic foot
of Vancouver space, now being marketed to general public. Photo: D. Beers.
Grunenfelder works as a graphic designer and has lived
in Vancouver for 13 years. His says the Cube Living project
was inspired by what he observes as the surreal activities of
the local real estate industry and related urban densification
initiatives.
11
As we chat, a woman who works at a restaurant a few doors
down on East Georgia Street walks in and asks whether this is
yet another condo sale underway.
She’s not shopping for a home, but she’s interested in
what’s happening to the neighbourhood and is drawn in by
the familiar trappings of real estate sales, like the life-sized cut
out figure of a woman smiling in front of a photo of the city’s
skyline, holding in her hand… well, this is different: A one
cubic foot box made of transparent plastic.
After asking a few questions, the visitor is relieved to find
out the storefront is just part of an art installation making
comment on the source of her anxiety.
Grunenfelder pre-sold a large number of cubes before marketing them to the
general public. Price is rising. Photo: D. Beers.
“I’m not necessarily advocating living in smaller spaces,” he
says of Cube Living. “It’s about looking at the discussions that
are happening around all of this, and maybe looking at things
from a different point of view, and also trying to project, where
is this going? Where is this process of urban densification
going to end up?”
Cube Living is about the relationship between property
owners, developers, and purchasers. “It’s a way to investigate
and directly interact with those relationships and bring them
all together in one time and place,” he says, “Instead of
over the course of years it would normally take for a spatial
property to be developed.”
After Grunenfelder finishes putting together our cube,
we sign our agreement for transfer of ownership. The terms
of use permit us to use the space for art gallery, retail store,
office, art studio, workshop, or storage purposes. But the
weight of the contents in the cube must not exceed 40 pounds.
The cardboard container that
houses the space is provided to
us by the manufacturer on loan,
free of charge and in perpetuity.
We decide to leave the
container at 221A until the
end of the month, after which
we may either choose to take
possession of the space and
After making a sale, Grunenfelder
assembles the packaging for the space
he is selling. Photo: D. Beers.
relocate it, or enter a management contract ($2/month per
unit) with 221A.
As we get ready to leave, more customers are arriving to
make an investment on yet more units. Here in Vancouver, it’s
the only real estate many of us can afford.
12
‘Upscaling’ of DTES
Eroding Low Income
Housing: Report
Carnegie Community Action Project's
conclusions disputed by Vision councillor Jang.
By David P. Ball
Vancouver’s housing crisis worsened in the Downtown
Eastside in the past year, according to a report released
yesterday by an activist housing group, with fewer and fewer
Single Resident Occupancy (SRO) rentals within reach of many
residents’ budgets.
The survey comes in the wake of media attention paid to
daily picket line facing clients and staff of yet another upscale
restaurant opening in the neighbourhood. Looking out over
Pigeon Park, a longtime gathering place of low income people,
activists believe that the arrival of ‘Pidgin’ and businesses like
it have bumped property values beyond the reach of some
residents, a process known as gentrification.
At a chilly street-corner press conference yesterday
morning, members of the Carnegie Community Action Project
(CCAP) unfurled a large map of the neighbourhood, with
rental building icons colour-coded by price to prove their
point. They also renewed their demand for the city to purchase
and dedicate 10 buildings a year for affordable social housing.
“We want the city to take immediate action to stop
renovictions and the upscaling of hotels — the invisible and
covered-up losses of affordable housing stock for low-income
people,” said Ivan Drury, an organizer with CCAP who coauthored the 2012 Hotel Survey report with Jean Swanson.
Jean Swanson, with the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP), explains
a colour-coded map illustrating rent increases in the Downtown Eastside.
Photo by David P. Ball.
“The biggest problem with gentrification — which is a
combination of cultural gentrification that happens with highend restaurants and boutiques, and condos being built — is
that the price of land goes up. It makes it an impossible place
for low-income people to remain.”
‘Who’s being displaced?’: Councillor Jang
The report, titled “We’re Trying to Get Rid of the Welfare
People” (a quote CCAP attributes to a hotel clerk during their
research), found that 426 rooms in the area shifted “from
being affordable to being unaffordable to people on welfare,
disability and basic pension,” based on social assistance rates
of $375 for lodging.
But the report’s findings were questioned by City
Councillor Kerry Jang, Vision Vancouver’s point person on
housing issues.
“Who’s been displaced?” Jang asked, when approached for
comment on the survey. “Any new development being built
is in buildings that were warehouses or empty to start with.
Where’s the displacement?
“I just don’t buy that. It’s a very extreme, one-sided
perspective of [CCAP], for 100 per cent social housing only. It
makes no sense; 100 per cent of any type of housing doesn’t
work, either rich or poor.”
Jang said that the City has, in fact, purchased several
buildings — as well as requiring developers to include
affordable units in their plans — and he argued that the
conditions of SROs are improving as the province buys
and renovates buildings. He added that an inventory of
housing conducted by the City disputes CCAP’s claims of
displacement.
“There has been no loss in housing in the Downtown
Eastside,” he said. “In fact, it’s increased, and there are several
14
hundred units on the way, of both social and supportive
housing.
“I disagree with [CCAP] on so many levels… The Carnegie
[Community Action Project] has always been very strident
against anybody living in the Downtown Eastside unless they
are poor. They’ve made it clear to me they want a 100 per
cent low-income neighbourhood that is subsidized forever.
But mixed communities work best — mixed buildings, mixed
communities, mixed neighbourhoods. We’re beginning to see
that change in the Downtown Eastside… There’s no longer
this class warfare that’s gone on too long — and ghettoized the
neighbourhood.”
‘Housing is key’: DTES resident
For long-time Downtown Eastside resident Sandra
Czechacze, who several years ago moved from a hotel SRO
into subsidized Native Housing, the claims of displacement
and increasingly unaffordable establishments are spot-on. She
said that her own move was the “best thing that’s happened”
for her, and added that safe, affordable housing should be a
right for everyone — but too often unattainable.
“Housing is a very, very big thing,” Czechaczek said.
“When you can wake up in the morning and you’re happy to
be where you are, it’s connected to your health, and to your
whole life.
“At the end of the day, you have to go to your house. If you
live where there are rats this big, cockroaches and bedbugs, do
you really want to go home to that? So housing is key.”
Czechaczek said she is not opposed to rich and poor living
and working side-by-side. But with the number of higherend businesses like Pidgin and Cartems Donuterie — which
sells premium, handmade, locally sourced donuts — moving
into the Downtown Eastside, she hopes there can be a balance
between their needs and interests.
“Slowly, low-cost stores are going out the window,” she
said. “Who can afford a $3 donut? That’s crazy! Not the people
who live here. What about us?
“The way I see it, the rich people are just pushing us out. I
feel like we’re losing our dignity because we can’t afford these
places. You can’t even go into some of these stores because
they’re watching, just because of the way I’m dressed. If I was
wearing a three-piece suit right now, and high heels and a big
hairstyle, they’d be just catering to me.”
Dollars and donuts
While he disputes the argument that poor people are being
pushed out of the Downtown Eastside, Jang admits that
Pidgin’s $5 pickles and Cartem’s $3 donuts may not be within
the reach of many.
“Quite frankly,” he chuckled, “there (are) restaurants in this
town that even I can’t afford to eat at.
15
“It’s always about providing a range — that’s what we’re
aiming for, not only in the Downtown Eastside but through the
entire city. When you have all one thing, either all-poor or allrich, it creates microcosms of despair or callousness. You can
have $3 donuts and $0.90 donuts. I don’t buy $3 donuts, quite
frankly. I can buy them for $0.60, or wait ’til 5 to buy a dozen
for $3.”
Increasingly,
Vancouver’s Pidgin
restaurant is focal
point for BC social
housing push
By Jackie Wong
A province-wide campaign pressing for more social housing
has fastened on a contentious corner of Vancouver and a new
eatery there.
It’s been a month since Pidgin restaurant opened at the
corner of Carrall and Hastings in Vancouver’s Downtown
Eastside, its row of front window seats framed in a large
picture window that looks across the street at Pigeon Park, a
well-known and widely-used public gathering space in the
neighbourhood.
To highlight the troubling disparity they see between
the Japanese and Korean-inspired cuisine inside, and the
undeniable urban poverty outside, housing activists —
including members of the Social Housing Coalition of
BC campaign, have picketed the restaurant for weeks. They
want to draw attention to what they see as the damaging
effects of upmarket development in the neighbourhood.
The protests spurred extensive mainstream media
coverage, derision, and public explanations from the
restaurant.
“Pidgin is by definition a bridging of language and culture
and our location is not haphazard,” reads a Valentine’s Day
statement on the Pidgin website, which was later printed and
taped to the front windows.
“Despite the fact that the protestors have chosen to confront
this business, we all agree, there absolutely needs to be more
dignified housing and services for low income residents of the
DTES, our inability to help those most in need in our society
is a horrid reflection of the lack of progress by all levels of
government. Rather than us being divided in our fight to help
those in need, we welcome a dialogue with them and other
community leaders to focus our collective strength on the real
problems facing the DTES, not on a small business trying to be
socially responsible.”
This week, the Mainlander news site published a financial
and business profile of the people behind the restaurant.
Today, housing activists affiliated with the Pidgin pickets
released more information about the building that now houses
Pidgin on the ground floor and 21 market condominiums on
the upper floors. From 1983 to 2008, the building was the site
of 30 rental apartments. Studios rented for $440 a month, and
two-bedroom units rented for $674. All tenants were evicted in
2008.
Meanwhile on the Mainlander site, a friend has come to
Pidgin co-owner Brandon Grossutti’s defense, stating his
friend has been unfairly demonized when Grossutti himself
faced economic barriers as a young person. The argument
echoes restaurant critic and Pidgin supporter Andrew
Morrison’s public pronouncements that many restaurateurs
who operate businesses in the Downtown Eastside and
Gastown are “scratching to make a living just the same as
everyone else.”
“To many, a good restaurant on the Downtown Eastside
equals gentrification,” Morrison told Pecha Kucha audience
members in spring 2012. “But the gentrifiers here are mostly
young people who have grown up in the restaurant business,
17
former bus boys and dishwashers who have clawed their way
up. It’s a shame that that truth is seldom recognized.
“No matter how many SROs there are, you can’t legislate
against a good wine list,” he said in his talk. “People want to
have a good dining experience if they can afford it.”
The activists behind the Pidgin protests say there is not
enough social housing available for the people who need it,
especially in the Downtown Eastside. Those who belong to
the Social Housing Coalition of BC campaign, which launched
in early February, have demanded the provincial government
to build 10,000 units of social housing per year and strengthen
the Residential Tenancy Act so it better protects vulnerable
renters. The campaign aims to make social housing a key issue
in the 2013 provincial election.
Social Housing Now is staging regular Saturday
demonstrations throughout the city. A rally and march
downtown takes place Saturday, March 2, starting at 12 p.m. at
the Vancouver Art Gallery.
‘Gentrification and
the City’ lectures
aim to educate and
expand horizons
By Jackie Wong
Gentrification, the process of urban redevelopment that can
carry the consequence of displacing lower-income residents,
takes many forms. And it’s happening in many more places
than the inner-city neighbourhoods that tend to draw the most
public attention, says Peter Hall, a professor in Simon Fraser
University’s Urban Studies department.
Last week, Tyee Solutions Society reported on the
controversy around Pidgin, an upscale restaurant in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood that’s
become a focal point for a social housing push in the
province, in particular by the Social Housing Coalition of BC
campaign which aims to make housing a key issue in the 2013
provincial election.
While Hall acknowledges that current local
discussions about gentrification in Vancouver tend to zero in
on the Downtown Eastside, he says such focus can limit public
understanding about the complex social and economic forces
that spur urban change.
As part of efforts to broaden discussion and understanding
of the causes and consequences of gentrification, Hall and
his colleagues are launching a year-long lecture series,
“Gentrification and the City,” that will explore gentrification
through the perspectives of international experts in human
geography, urban planning, and housing.
The intersection of Main and Keefer streets in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
Hall says he hopes the series will help people get beyond
what in some ways is a very narrow discussion about
gentrification in Vancouver.
“People obviously get impassioned about the issues
confronting them here and now and today, but we can take a
step back and say, there’s a longer cycle of urban change this
form’s part of. Whatever we see today has a history. And there
are lessons to be learned from other places.”
Hall says there’s a tendency to look at the City of
Vancouver as a closed system. “But if you take a more regional
perspective, then in many ways, what’s going on elsewhere
in the region is a kind of fallout from what’s happened in
central Vancouver,” he says. “The focus on displacement in
the Downtown Eastside tends to ignore the concentration
processes that brought people to the Downtown Eastside in
the first place… of course there are people in the Downtown
Eastside who were displaced from somewhere else.”
The Gentrification and the City series begins Thursday,
March 7 with a public lecture about gentrification and the
arts from Norma Rantisi, a Concordia University geography
professor. Other lectures this spring will examine gentrification
in the suburbs and the role of gentrification in social inclusion
and exclusion.
Gentrification and the City convenors are also planning a
set of three additional public lectures in fall 2013, which will
feature a housing expert, a talk about waterfront gentrification,
and the legacy of the late cities-for-people advocate Jane
Jacobs.
19
Symposium Shares
‘Down-to-Earth’ Fixes
to High-Cost Housing
Vancouver event unites advocates, developers,
architects, politicians and more.
By David P. Ball
Vancouver will host affordable-housing thinkers, designers
and decision-makers from across B.C. this week for the Housing
Affordability Symposium (HAS), held March 14 and 15.
The two-day annual event has become known for offering
a raft of creative solutions to the high costs of housing, which
in Vancouver are among the world’s highest and across the
province create challenges for many communities.
The conference this year comes in the wake of a new Metro
Vancouver Housing Committee report that reveals the average
rent in the city has climbed by nearly 17 per cent in the last
five years alone.
Could new ideas help? Ideas like buying and selling walkout basement suites. Tweaking zoning rules to reduce parking
and pass on the savings. Imaginatively sharing communal
space. Offering the homeless lodging in movable modular
units — or in scattered apartments where they can finally have
an address.
Bringing together everyone from architects to politicians
and advocates to developers, this year’s HAS continues
the focus on what outspoken architect and keynote speaker
Michael Geller calls “down-to-earth” affordable-housing
solutions.
Could laneway houses brighten the affordable housing landscape? Module
photo courtesy: Michael Geller’s blog.
“One of the best parts is the presentation of on-the-ground
case studies and demonstration projects,” he explains. “I often
think that the best way to convince people an idea is practical
is to show it being done.
“There are very good, practical, down-to-earth examples of
housing innovation that are resulting in greater affordability…
It’s not just talking about it. We’re looking at drawings,
actually seeing pictures of completed projects and having the
people (responsible) in attendance to answer questions.”
But for symposium organizer Auli Parviainen, this year’s
conference isn’t simply about “actionable solutions” to
numerous problems — from homelessness to home ownership
— and the need for more rental units.
“We’re also looking at the changes that are going to need
to be addressed with cultural and demographic shifts that are
occurring,” she says. “There are a variety of needs that must be
met — expectations for housing are changing.
“What solutions will allow market affordability to occur,
and how do we do that? That’s the question, always, for us.”
Even those who can aren’t buying
This year’s new demographic focus will incorporate the
voices of social demographers, urban planners, and regular
residents grouped in three categories — the so-called under-30
“millennial” generation, families and seniors.
Each of the groups, researchers are discovering, has
changing needs that must be addressed as markets shift. The
symposium will devote panels to each demographic group,
identifying both struggles and solutions.
One of those speaking as a “millennial” is Alicia Medina
Laddaga, one of the young architects behind Vancouver’s
Laboratory of Housing Alternatives (LOHA). She tells The
21
Tyee that HAS is an important forum to connect with likeminded thinkers and policy-makers.
“We want to gather people with ideas together, and
translate them into solutions,” she says. “That’s what we’re
working towards.
“A lot of young, creative professionals are leaving the city,
saying, ‘I’m not giving up my art discipline in order to keep
living here.’ But how would Vancouver look without arts and
culture? It would be a very sad and not-fun city.”
Among LOHA’s ideas are proposals for homes that offer
both individual and communal space. For instance, shared
artists studios incorporated into their lodgings shared
workshops, common areas and bike parking.
“People are not only only looking for individual spaces, but
to create community around them,” she says. “There’s a lot
of talk about shared or co-ownership, and community-based
development.
“Now the market’s changing. Even people who can afford
to aren’t buying — at least, not in the neighbourhoods where
they want to live. Opening up this conversation is exciting.”
Chaired by Bob Deeks, whose firm RDC Fine Homes boasts
“affordable, high performance, sustainable housing,” the
symposium also features presentations by ground-breaking
Okanagan migrant housing geographer Carlos Teixeira and an
opening keynote by Chris Turner, author of The Geography of
Hope: A Tour of the World We Need.
Geller himself is offering the closing keynote speech and
said his aim this year is to encourage participants to get to
work putting ideas into practice.
“My keynote is going to be, out of all the ideas that are
coming up this year … (let’s) try to figure out which of the
ones have the greatest likelihood of succeeding in the shortterm,” Geller says. “How do you actually create a work plan to
make sure they are followed up on?
“Unfortunately, I have drawers and drawers full of
affordable housing reports. Many of the ideas we’re talking
about now have been discussed for decades — some go back
30 years.”
‘Absolutely crazy’
While many conference speakers are addressing issues
around both home ownership and rentals, the issue of
homelessness (and finding long-term resolution) is also on the
agenda. And while advocates like Geller support emergency
shelters, in the long-term it’s an expensive and inadequate
solution. One costs $24,000 per resident a year, he adds.
“It’s crazy, absolutely crazy,” Geller exclaims. “I’ve
advocated that it’s better to simply rent apartments around
the city and put people in those apartments and provide
them with services, which in turn would allow them to have
an address. One of the problems with a shelter is you don’t
have an address, which makes it harder to get work. Some say
22
they’re never going to work, but well, it sure is harder to go to
work without an address.”
Some of Geller’s other suggestions for reducing housing
costs include bylaws allowing duplex owners to rent out
basement suites or allowing walkout basement suites to be
sold like condos or under shared ownership agreements.
Reducing minimum parking requirements for new buildings
and encouraging people to use car shares, co-ops, and public
transit could shave $50,000 off condo prices.
But with the average Vancouverite’s rent climbing steeply
over the last five years — from $898 in 2007 to $1,047 last year,
according to a new Metro Vancouver Housing Committee
report — the affordable landscape seems bleak.
“In the very near future, that landscape is changing,”
Parviainen says. “Can we start creating housing forms that are
appropriate?
“Anecdotally, I do know that a lot of concepts introduced at
the symposium are already fully-executed solutions. They’re
inspiration for people looking at a number of ways to use
those solutions in their own communities.”
Panel debates
solutions to BC
rental insecurity at
housing conference
By Jackie Wong
While the rain poured outside today, planners, developers,
municipal politicians, and academics from across B.C. gathered
in Richmond for the third-annual Housing Affordability
Symposium, a two-day conference co-presented by BC Housing,
the Canadian Home Builders’ Association, and the Province of
B.C.
With an election just two months away, no B.C. provincial
leaders or election hopefuls were in attendance, though
housing matters related to provincial jurisdiction, such as
rental housing, were widely discussed.
In an afternoon panel on housing affordability for
families, Lisa Moffatt relayed her experiences struggling to
find affordable, appropriate rental housing for her and her
daughter after moving to Vancouver for grad school in the
early 2000s.
She and her daughter moved multiple times and weathered
virtually every renter’s conundrum. They competed against
equally-deserving families and couples for rental units by
presenting landlords with carefully curated resumes, life
histories, and charisma; faced the scrutiny of several landlords
unwilling to rent to a single-parent family; lived with a
rotating cast of roommates to offset housing costs; weathered
the storm of two employment lay-offs, and, most recently, were
evicted early this year by a landlord who wanted to move into
their suite.
Moffatt, who now works as a planner for the Township
of Langley, has since found a new rental home in the same
catchment area of her daughter’s school. She’s moving there
with her new partner, her roommate, and her daughter at the
end of the month.
She’s glad to have found a new place to live, but like many
renters who experience the shaky murk of Vancouver’s rental
market, all she wants now is to stay put. “We’re tired of
moving around,” Moffatt told the symposium audience today.
“I guess what I really want is security.”
While many of the solutions presented at the Housing
Affordability Symposium so far suggest increasing the rental
housing stock and accepting renting as a long-term, rather
than transitional, mode of housing, the success of renting longterm in B.C. relies largely on the security of tenure that many
renters don’t have, and which people like Moffatt certainly
have not experienced.
“One of the problems is when you tinker with rentals to
make them more secure for tenants, it makes developers less
likely to want to build rentals,” Nathanael Lauster told Tyee
Solutions Society. “The more the province limits what they can
do with rental suites, the less likely market actors are going to
really want to build them.”
The assistant professor in UBC’s sociology department
presented at the symposium alongside Moffatt. He conducted
a 2011 study on discrimination against single-parent families
and same-sex couples in the Metro Vancouver rental market.
He found that same-sex male couples and single-parent
families faced significant discrimination when it came to
finding a place to rent compared to straight couples.
24
Lauster would like to see more intensive exploration of nonmarket housing options suitable for families. “I think co-ops
are this fascinating thing that have just dropped,” he said.
In Lauster’s panel presentation at the housing symposium,
he questioned the popular notion that families need single
detached homes to thrive. His research findings suggest that
more than half of Vancouver families are already living in
urban alternatives to the house, including row houses, lowrises, and duplexes.
Lauster’s suggestions for leveraging density for
affordability include building up the rental housing stock,
building cooperative housing stock, and building social
housing stock.
“Do families actually need houses? Over time, this has
moved from a sales pitch to becoming a living standard,”
Lauster told the audience. Finally, pressing for more
progressive income distribution, he said, is key to addressing
the affordability crisis. “The more we rely just on housing
policies,” he said, “The more we’re going to be missing that
big picture.”
Alone, Elderly, and
Isolated by Language
in Vancouver’s
Chinatown
Vancouver’s Chinatown has been home to generations of
immigrants since 1858. Today, the neighbourhood is changing
as new businesses and residents move in next to decades-old
grocery stores, butchers, and restaurants. But amidst this influx
of new life, an unknown number of seniors who speak only
Cantonese or Mandarin face discrimination, marginalization,
and a lack of affordable, culturally- and linguisticallyappropriate housing. Research suggests the problem will
worsen as these vulnerable seniors, already living in poverty
and isolation, age.
In this special series, Tyee Solutions Society housing reporter
Jackie Wong pulls back the curtain on the widely felt, seldomdiscussed discrimination that Chinese seniors face every
day. She also looks to Toronto and San Francisco, home to
innovative housing solutions for non-English speaking seniors.
.
Vancouver’s ‘Old’
Chinatown: Still Here
As the city's neighbourhood 'revitalizes,' its
Chinese-speaking seniors struggle for resources.
By Jackie Wong
Editor's note: The greatest need for supportive seniors'
housing among Vancouver's language minorities is for
uncounted hundreds – or thousands – of women and men
who speak only Cantonese or Mandarin. Many end up in the
single-room occupancy hotels of old Chinatown.
It’s a Wednesday morning in March, and Chinatown’s May
Wah Hotel is a hive of activity. Up a narrow flight of stairs from
the hotel’s easy-to-miss street door, Vancouver Second Mile
Society outreach worker Cindy Pang is surrounded by a circle
of urgent seniors. They press pill bottles into her hands, their
English labels and instructions unreadable. She translates into
Cantonese, answering what questions she can. Everybody, it
seems, knows her, likes her, and is keen for individual attention.
They treat her fondly, like a family member.
Outside on East Pender Street, people duck out of the rain
under storefront awnings crowded with boxes of gai lan and
bok choy. Few spare a moment for the sturdy old four-storey
brick building above them, much less the simple gold-painted
block letters that identify it as the May Wah Hotel. Entering
feels like going back in time. Strains of Chinese opera can be
heard behind doors thickly layered in deep red paint. The
walls in the spare, neat first floor lounge display compulsory
“No Smoking” signs, but there are ashtrays on the tables and
people exhale carefully out over Pender Street through an
open window.
“I’m happy and I’m healthy,” Rosesari Rosesari says. She is 92 years old and
lives in the May Wah Hotel in Vancouver’s Chinatown.
In a shiny rainbow necklace over a black and white zebraprint shirt, Rosesari Rosesari stands out from her neighbours’
hallway chatter. Ninety-two, Rosesari pays $320 a month for
her room here. She makes a point of telling me she receives no
government assistance to pay for housing. Ethnically Chinese,
Rosesari doesn’t recall exactly when she moved to the May
Wah, or even the precise year she came to Canada from Bali,
Indonesia. One son lives in Richmond, she tells me; her other
children half a world away in Indonesia.
But she is quick to express pride in the home she has created
here for herself. Every space in the tiny but bright room has
a use. The ceiling has hooks to hang her coats. A daikon
radish and green beans sit on a tall plastic bucket by the sink,
near a rice cooker and toaster oven. The room is decorated
with butterfly trinkets, youthful knick-knacks, and colourful
origami.
“I’m happy and I’m healthy,” Pang translates Rosesari’s
Cantonese for me. “I look old, but my heart is still young.”
While much is made about the seemingly flamboyant
wealth of some Chinese immigrants to Canada, those who live
at the May Wah and other privately owned SROs in the old
Chinatown area share a very different experience. For them,
this country has ultimately delivered poverty, discrimination,
and a marginalization that leaves them in the shadow of a
media spotlight often trained on the Downtown Eastside
neighbourhood’s troubled English-speakers, many of whom
struggle with addictions, mental illness and abusive histories
in residential school or foster care.
Like other SROs, the approximately 40-room May Wah is
home to a mix of long-time residents and people in transition.
Some regard it as a temporary stay while their names inch
forward on a waiting list for social housing. But for the seniors
who speak only Chinese, living in Chinatown is a crucial
27
connection to the only community where they feel fully at
home. Many speak no other language than Chinese, and have
lived at the hotel for years.
The May Wah is one of 10 buildings Pang visits weekly,
helping hundreds of Chinese seniors like Rosesari connect
with public and social agencies that provide housing, health,
and social support. Her work has a lot to do with Rosesari’s
youthful satisfaction with life.
But Pang is paid to work only 28 hours a week. A colleague
works even fewer hours. A separate organization, the
Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, employs another person
for 30 hours a week of bilingual Chinese seniors outreach.
Together, the three overtaxed staff are the only service
providers dedicated to alleviating the isolation of the city’s
thousands of solitary Chinese seniors.
A hidden, growing crisis
Rosesari pays $320 a month for her room, and shares
kitchen and bathroom facilities with her neighbours. Others
on the same floor pay $200 to $290 for similar rooms. Ninetythree-year-old Gai Li Lin has lived down the hall for eight
years. After more than 20 years in Canada, Lin says that her
life’s work consisted of taking care of children. Her adult
children live in the Lower Mainland.
Confucian tradition obliges adult children to take care of
their aging parents. But “most have the same story,” Pang says
of the seniors she works with. “Kids get them here, they take
care of the grandkids. And when they get old, they stay here,”
she adds, matter-of-factly indicating our surroundings.
Modest as those are, Lin and Rosesari can feel relatively
fortunate among Chinese seniors. They live in a building that
is well maintained, not currently under threat of eviction, and
unlike other area SROs, affordable to people with low incomes.
Though Vancouver’s Chinatown has been home to
generations of immigrants since 1858, reliable information
about how many elderly live alone there today is remarkably
hard to come by. Statistics Canada offers — for a fee — to
tabulate the number of inner-city Chinese seniors who
responded to the most recent census survey in 2011. But with
less than one per cent of such seniors believed to speak any
English, and many unable to read or write in their mother
tongue, let alone English, knowledgeable observers believe it
would yield an unreliable undercount.
What we do know is that 30 per cent of the City of
Vancouver’s population and closer to half — 41 per cent —
of people who reside in Chinatown’s 10-block area, identify
themselves as Chinese. And as recently as 2011, UBC’s Centre
for Urban Economics and Real Estate contended that the
shortfall of social housing is greatest among Chinese seniors of
all elderly ethnic immigrant groups in Vancouver.
The UBC Centre estimated that over 3,300 Chinese-speaking
seniors lack the wealth to be homeowners and would benefit
from affordable, culturally and linguistically specific assisted
living facilities. The next largest language community of ethnic
28
seniors who could benefit from such support is 560 Tagalogspeaking seniors, followed by 340 Punjabi speakers.
Also true is that social housing is in short supply for all
Vancouver’s seniors. Metro Vancouver can provide housing
for one of every seven seniors living in the region. The City
of Vancouver has 11,000 social units available for its 81,930
seniors.
Unsurprisingly, waiting lists are long: the 4,549 names on
the list of people hoping for seniors’ social housing in Metro
Vancouver has gone up by nearly 45 per cent in just the last
four years, according to a March report by the United Way
Lower Mainland and the Social Planning & Research Council
of BC (SPARC BC).
And the need is growing. Metro Vancouver’s senior
population is predicted to more than double by 2031.
“Although most seniors do not live in social housing, with
other factors remaining equal, the greater the number of
seniors, the more seniors’ social housing is needed,” the
SPARC report notes.
Shelter isn’t enough
If more shelter is needed for Chinese seniors, so is more
personal support.
Three blocks from the May Wah Hotel, the Downtown
Eastside Seniors Centre operated by the Vancouver Second
Mile Society at Hastings and Jackson is a boisterous place
at midday. People are eating lunch, reading the newspaper,
playing table tennis and Mah Jong. Two thirds of the 500
members are Chinese.
When executive director Steve Chan asks them to register,
many sign their names with the letter ‘X.’ They are unable to
write or read. “If they’re from a village in China, they may not
even have elementary school,” says Chan, who’s worked here
for 13 years and is its first Cantonese-capable director.
“We don’t have many statistics on literacy levels for the
seniors we reach out to,” he acknowledges. “But just take my
mom, for example. She’s 78. [As a child she] went through
the Second World War. At that time in China, in Hong Kong,
they had to run, to flee from the Japanese. They didn’t have a
chance to go to school. My mom didn’t go to school until she
was in her teenage years. She went to primary-school-level
classes for a few years, night school. She had to work during
the day and she paid tuition to go there herself. My dad was in
the same boat.”
The Seniors Centre’s clients are mostly women, who tend to
live longer than men. Now in their 80s or more, they are even
less likely to have literacy skills than their male counterparts.
Their generation emerged from a cultural tradition that barred
women from education, observes Alice Choi, a registered
nurse and executive director of health services for the United
Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society, better
known as S.U.C.C.E.S.S.
“There is a saying in Chinese that it’s a virtue when the
females don’t know anything,” Choi says. “If you’re not smart
and you don’t know anything, it’s the role of the wife, of the
29
female, to reproduce and to take care of the household stuff.
All the business, all the education, goes to the sons.”
Many of Second Mile outreach worker Pang’s clients arrived
in Canada later in life, coming to help adult children take care
of grandchildren in the Lower Mainland. They “relied on their
husbands and their children, and they can’t even read a very
simple letter,” Pang says. “Now, they’re on their own.”
Outside the May Wah building in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Photo by Jackie
Wong.
Virtually none of Vancouver’s inner city Chinese seniors (a
barely-there 0.1 per cent) speak English well, according to a
2007 survey (available in hard copy only), of Chinese seniors
and services in the old Chinatown and surrounding areas.
Hardly more (0.3 per cent) speak even limited English. Eightyeight per cent spoke Cantonese; 12 per cent Mandarin.
The 2007 survey — conducted by Dr. Sing Mei Chan of the
UBC School of Social Work, for the City of Vancouver, found
that language barriers, discrimination, racism, and a lack
of information, education, and advocacy all create pressing
service gaps for Chinese seniors. The findings echoed earlier
research indicating that fewer than a quarter of Asian
American seniors in another historic magnet for immigrants
— New York City — spoke English. Poverty, loneliness and
anxiety were their three most pressing issues.
For the lucky few in Vancouver, the bilingual outreach
workers who visit the SROs are rare conduits to social agency
support. But the task is overwhelming. Pang, one co-worker at
the Second Mile Society, and Deanna Wong of the Downtown
Eastside Women’s Centre, are shouldering it alone.
Translating forms and talking seniors individually through
English-language housing applications, tax returns and other
requirements, is emotionally and physically taxing. It’s a high
turnover job, and more than one former outreach worker with
the Second Mile Society is on long-term disability as a result of
the stress.
‘Revitalizing,’ but leaving seniors behind
Last July, Vancouver city council unanimously approved
a three-year Chinatown Neighbourhood Plan and Economic
Revitalization Strategy. More than a decade in the making,
the plan focused on economic revitalization, after two-thirds
of businesses surveyed in Vancouver’s original Chinatown
30
reported declining revenues between 2008 and 2011 — blamed
mainly on losses to newer Chinese-language communities in
suburbs like Richmond.
The revitalization plan envisions new residential
development, “to connect with younger generations and
reach out to people of all backgrounds to ensure Chinatown
is increasingly relevant to a more multi-cultural Vancouver.”
At the same time, it acknowledged that in a neighborhood
where 67 per cent of households are low-income — more than
twice the City of Vancouver average — such redevelopment
“can displace low-income residents.” What is good for old
Chinatown’s businesses, in short, may be less so for its poor
and isolated elderly.
S.U.C.C.E.S.S., Vancouver’s primary provider of culturallyand linguistically-supportive housing and services for
Chinese seniors, is providing a partial answer. It operates a
single multi-level care facility in old Chinatown for people
with cognitive impairments or who require round-the-clock
nursing. But its 103 beds, soon to be 113, are about one-tenth of
what the UBC Centre for Urban Economics anticipates will be
needed over the next 15 years to house Chinese seniors.
Meanwhile, the support it offers seem a world away from
Rosesari and her neighbours living in privately operated
SROs like the May Wah Hotel. Yet the women are spirited
and resilient. “I’m happy and I’m healthy,” Rosesari told me
through Pang’s interpretation. Both she and Lin say they
like living in Chinatown. They feel at home here, where the
language spoken is the one they know.
They are also in their 90s. As time goes on, they and others
may no longer be able to manage the May Wah’s staircases, its
lack of mobility aids, and its communal bathing facilities. The
alternatives available to them then are in terribly short supply.
31
32
The front door of the May Wah is easy to miss,
squeezed between a travel agency and a vacant
store on East Pender Street.
Many of the May Wah's residents have lived there
for years. Others are waiting to move up the
waiting list for social housing.
Gai Li Lin is 93. She's lived in the May Wah for
eight years after a life time spent caring for
children, first her own, later her grandkids.
Gai Li Lin’s room is crowded but bright. Like most
of the hotel’s residents, Gai Li Lin speaks only
Chinese.
Residents of the May Wah have access to their
floor’s communal kitchen.
At 92, Rosesari Rosesari can’t recall the year
she moved to Canada from Bali, or exactly
when she came to the May Wah. One son lives in
Richmond; her other children are in Indonesia.
Rosesari Rosesari’s room overlooks Pender Street.
The convenience of Chinese-speaking merchants
helps make her feel at home here.
Like most residents of the May Wah, Rosesari
Rosesari cooks many of her meals in her room on
small appliances.
The affordable rooms at the May Wah mean that
everyone shares a communal bathroom down the
hall.
The residents’ lounge at the May Wah. Only three
Chinese-speaking outreach workers provide
residents of the Downtown Eastside’s SROs with
assistance in their own language.
33
A string of paper cranes decorates Gai Li
Lin’s room at the May Wah Hotel.
Old, Alone and
Victims of Racism in
Downtown Eastside
Service providers call for more culturally specific
services. By Jackie Wong
It’s lunchtime at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre
(DEWC). Women of all ages move quickly through a short line
near the kitchen, filling plates with salad, thick open-faced
sandwiches, and a mug of soup. There are about 75 people seated
in the dining area, eating lunch and socializing. There are no
snaking lineups out the door and around the block here, unlike
other agencies that serve free meals to low-income people. And
though the place is busy there’s room around the centre’s many
circular tables for anyone who wants to sit down. A group of
Chinese senior women share one table with younger, Englishspeaking DEWC members; the two groups communicate by
sharing food, gestures, and jokes.
Sadly, however, this scene of cheerful harmony between
Chinese and English speakers is an exception in the
Downtown Eastside. When the 15 Chinese seniors gather in a
basement common room to chat with me after lunch, they tell
me, unanimously, that discrimination is the biggest issue they
face.
“Other people are giving out food to any other race, but
when they look at you, they say, ‘Oh, you’re Chinese. You’re
from China. Go back to China,’” says 82-year-old Jay Gnun
Foon. “They will deny a piece of bread that everybody else is
getting. That makes me feel the worst.”
Jay Gnun Foon, left, and Sum Chew Gnun, right, chat at the Downtown
Eastside Women’s Centre in Vancouver. Photo by Jackie Wong.
But Foon and her 14 friends are strapped for cash after
paying for housing, just like others in the area who stand in
food lineups. They tell me that that while they don’t always
feel welcome in the Downtown Eastside, they deserve to be
there as much as anybody else.
Foon has lived in Canada for about 20 years. Her daughter
asked her to come to help take care of her children, while she
and her husband worked for minimum wage. Now Foon lives
alone in old Chinatown, paying $400 a month in rent. She
regularly comes to the DEWC to enjoy the company of friends.
Foon and the 14 other women I meet today speak a country
dialect of Cantonese that 25-year-old Deanna Wong, the
DEWC’s one bilingual Chinese seniors outreach coordinator,
translates for me. Wong tells me that most of the women here
are from Guangdong Province in China, once farmland but
now an industrial region.
“A lot of them come from rural China, and they’ve been
farming their entire lives,” she says. When they were coming
of age back in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, China, as Wong
describes it, was “a culture that didn’t support women.
Women were treated like objects in Asia, like furniture. Your
ownership [went] from your father to your husband.” Many
continued to work as farm labourers after coming to the Lower
Mainland.
Their health, Wong says, is generally better than that of the
roughly 200 other Chinese senior women she works with in
the Downtown Eastside. Instead, their most troubling issues
are poverty, racism and age discrimination that sometimes
find expression in verbal and physical abuse, financial
mistreatment, and conflicts and miscommunication arising
from language barriers.
Wong tells me about Chinese seniors who arrive at the
women’s centre with black eyes hidden under sunglasses.
35
Yet few complain, or approach her for help. “They’ll force a
smile to cover the pain, and overcompensate for it, to reassure
me that things are fine when I know they’re not,” Wong says.
“They have my contact information but a lot of times they
won’t want to trouble me for it. They’ll try to get it done
themselves.”
Wong also makes regular visits to three Downtown Eastside
SROs and social housing facilities, where Chinese seniors live
among a predominantly English-speaking population. She
finds isolation and depression widespread among her contacts.
Her mandate is to connect Chinese seniors with each other
and with community supports. Part of her job is to arrange
outings for the seniors, designed both for entertainment and
the less obvious goal of providing informal opportunities for
the women to speak candidly, amongst themselves and with
her. She has seen, firsthand, the difference such connections
can make in the life of an isolated senior.
“The ones that are healthiest come in the biggest groups,”
she says, describing the seniors who regularly show up at the
DEWC with their friends. “They don’t have any education.
They can’t read. They can’t write. But the way they’re happy,
the way they survive, and part of why they’re healthy, is
because they have each other.”
Life is much harder for people who have lost touch with
their friends.
“The ones most isolated are actually the ones who are
educated and who are very independent and live alone,” Wong
says. “They see all their friends pass away. They become more
and more isolated, and they have fewer and fewer activities.”
‘We get sworn at for no reason at all’
The close bonds among today’s group of 15 are evident in
the way the women laugh together, leaning in to each other’s
shoulders. When I first arrive, they are gracious and polite,
but reserved. As the afternoon wears on they relax into a funloving rapport. By the end of my visit, So Gee Quan, one of
the youngest of the group at 65, has the others in stitches,
swearing like a sailor to imitate the people who yell at her as
she walks the streets of the Downtown Eastside.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she yells. “We get sworn at for no reason
at all. Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Painful as it is, her friends nod their
heads and laugh. This is something they’ve experienced, too.
Quan has lived in Canada for 11 years. She worked on a
farm in Surrey until the last year, when she could not work
anymore. She rents her home in Vancouver’s Hastings Sunrise
neighbourhood, paying $700 a month that she splits with her
daughter.
“They make it so that it’s not welcoming.” Quan says, with
understatement. “It’s very frustrating. They’re bigger than
you. Verbal is fine, but sometimes it’s physical. And they can
get really aggressive. So you can’t do anything back to them.
The only thing you can do is yell back, but that’s about it.
“My family paid head taxes and we worked until there
were holes in our shoes,” she adds. “And we kept working.
36
A lot of my family has been here for generations. And they’re
Canadian. And they still face so much discrimination. It’s not
fair.”
Quan’s experience validates the findings of a 2007 report to
the City of Vancouver by the UBC School of Social Work, that
found discrimination and racism, alongside language barriers,
were the top concerns among Chinese seniors and service
providers in the inner city.
The tension is felt most acutely among the Chinese seniors
who must line up with English speakers, similarly struggling
to make ends meet, for food and services.
‘You’re set up to hate them’
Jason Nepinak has lived in the Downtown Eastside since
1994, homeless for the last 15 of those years. He’s a familiar
face at the PHS Drug Users Resource Centre — better known
as the Lifeskills Centre — across the street from Oppenheimer
Park, where he has volunteered since the centre opened in
2002.
On this rainy morning in February, he’s working the front
desk, welcoming people coming in to do laundry, take a
shower, get toothbrushes, and eat a meal. According to the
tally sheets he and other workers maintain, approximately
130 people show up for breakfast here every day. For lunch,
it’s closer to 150. The Drug Users Resource Centre is just one
of many sources for meals in the neighbourhood. Outside its
front doors in Oppenheimer Park, unaffiliated volunteers are
off-loading boxes of sandwiches from an unmarked sports
utility vehicle. There is already a long line that winds along
Powell Street and around the corner to Dunlevy. Most in the
line are Chinese seniors.
“You know, it’s a horrible thing to say, but everybody treats
‘em terrible, just terrible,” Nepinak says of elderly Chinese
waiting in line. “They say bad things to them. They mock their
accents. And it’s just horrible. I hear it a lot, the racial slurs. ”
Nepinak, a First Nations Man, says he tries to put a stop
to any racist activity he sees. “Everybody in the centre knows
me,” he says. “They know I don’t put up with violence or
racial threats, slurs or anything.”
Some of the hostility, he says, is motivated by faulty
assumptions — chiefly that the Chinese seniors are wealthy,
and don’t need the food or services as badly as others. But
Nepinak’s of a mind that they should be welcome: “Everybody
downtown has hard times,” he says.
Coco Culbertson is director of programs with the PHS
Community Services Society that runs the Resources Centre.
She has lived in Strathcona for 17 years and was the Centre’s
first director. She’s seen the number of Chinese seniors who
frequent the centre grow in the last 11 years. Now, 15 to 20
Chinese seniors walk through the doors every day. They’re not
part of the drug-using population the centre was built to serve.
But with few other places to turn, they need the free food and
toothbrushes it gives away.
“The programming is targeted to engage active drug users
and illicit alcohol drinkers,” Culbertson says. “It is funded
37
to provide resources to those suffering with homelessness,
drug addiction and alcohol misuse. We have on occasion had
Cantonese-speaking volunteers there, but the language barrier,
compounded with the population we serve, makes it difficult
for us to fully support the seniors coming in.”
Despite their years in the community, neither Culbertson
nor Nepinak could think of resources more suited for Chinese
seniors that they could refer people to. Culbertson suggested
the Carnegie Community Centre, “but I’m not familiar with
what they offer,” she said.
Neither could Gail Harmer, a former social worker, longtime
seniors advocate and board member of the 411 Seniors Centre
who facilitates seniors wellness workshops with the Council
of Senior Citizens’ Organizations of B.C. (COSCO). She could
only name the DEWC as the one place where culturally specific
programming is available to Chinese seniors.
The Women’s Centre is only a few blocks away from the
Drug Users Resource Centre. As is often the case in this
neighbourhood, it serves two distinct populations: Chinesespeaking seniors and English-speaking Downtown Eastsiders.
Generally both are experiencing poverty, and both are
competing for the same limited services.
“When you see those lineups, there’s a limited amount of
food,” the DEWC’s Deanna Wong says. “And then when you
see a whole group of seniors lined up in the front, you’re set
up to hate them because now it’s like they’re taking your food
away; this is your means of survival.”
Culbertson agrees. “Everyone feels pressured. And living
day-to-day, not knowing if you’ll have food and shelter,
doesn’t generally bring out patience for those who are
different. The tension is down to poverty.”
Ending indignities
What might be accomplished when people are no longer
forced to compete against each other is visible every Thursday
morning at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House
community kitchen.
Taking inspiration from the right to food, the
Neighbourhood House designs its activities intentionally to
eliminate the stigma and indignities of lining up for a charity
meal. It prides itself on offering fresh, culturally diverse food
choices and welcomes people to join in the preparation in its
open kitchen. The Thursday morning community kitchen,
designed specifically for Chinese elders, has the effect of
breaking down barriers between different language speakers.
“One of the things that we try to do here at the
Neighbourhood House is have a range of food so that people
from different communities and different cultural groups will
see themselves reflected in our menu,” says executive director
Irene Jaakson. “That’s one of the ways we’ve been able to chip
away at some of those barriers. I don’t know that we’ve been
100 per cent successful. But I can tell you that we serve more
members of the Chinese community than is typical.”
38
The DEWC’s Wong shares the view that food brings people
together. She has been observing more connection between
English- and Chinese-speakers during mealtimes at the
Women’s Centre lately.
“I’ve noticed at lunchtime, now, the Chinese women will
pile together all the bread and salad and leave a [loaded]
plate on the centre of the table. They’ll actively seek out other
non-Chinese women to take the food,” she says. “I’ve noticed
there are a couple of [non-Chinese] women deliberately sitting
at those tables, actively trying to get to know them. And it’s
really great to see things like that. But that’s only when you
can give people food. When you have all those basic needs
met.”
It’s a different story when people’s needs are not met.
“When you take those away, and people compete for those
basic needs, it’s no wonder discrimination happens,” Wong
says. “When they look different, you can’t understand them,
you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see that you come from
so many similar struggles.”
She would like to see more recognition that the two
populations in the Downtown Eastside are alike in their
vulnerability and their poverty. “Housing is something I see
that both populations are in dire, dire need of,” she says.
However, she also thinks separate, linguistically appropriate
services would particularly benefit Chinese seniors.
In the DEWC basement, the Chinese seniors are packing up
to leave, to pick up grandchildren from school or prepare an
evening meal for their families. They don’t speak English, but
they understand the assumptions some English speakers make
about them.
“When people look at us, they think that we look healthy
or that we’re well-kept and that we’re not deserving,” says So
Gee Quan.
Only in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighbourhoods
could an absence of obvious signs of poverty be mistaken
for an absence of need—rather than a rare, if fragile, sign of
dignity and hope preserved.
39
‘A Drop in the
Bucket’: Housing
for Chinese
Speaking Seniors
As Vancouver's Chinatown transforms, need
grows for projects like the Simon K.Y. Lee Home
for the elderly. By Jackie Wong
Over the last five years new cocktail lounges, cafes, and art
spaces have cropped up in steady succession in Vancouver’s old
Chinatown, on Pender, Keefer and East Georgia Streets between
Carrall to the west and Gore to the east. Amidst the young people
toting Americanos to their art studios however, elements of an
earlier time remain: tall, brightly painted buildings built by clan
or benevolent associations a century ago.
The buildings are testaments to an era when legal
discrimination and social exclusion forced British Columbia’s
earliest settlers from China to band together for mutual support.
Early in the 20th century, benevolent associations provided
housing and what today we’d call social services. The benevolent
associations provided needed services to a community turned
away from even the limited support available back then from
private groups or government to Euro-Canadians.
While much has changed for the better, previous reports
in this series have documented an undiminished need for
supportive housing in this fast-gentrifying neighbourhood, as
benevolent associations have largely withdrawn from the field.
At least 10 more supportive care homes like S.U.C.C.E.S.S.’s Simon K.Y.
Lee Home will be needed over the next decade to shelter Chinese-language
seniors. Photo: S.U.C.C.E.S.S
The first such association was created in 1896 by six
prominent Chinese merchants to serve a growing population
of mostly men sent abroad to make money for their families
back in China. Other groups followed, creating supportive
expatriate communities around clan associations bearing a
common family name. By 1911, and despite layers of official
discrimination, the neighborhood’s 3,559 Chinese residents
constituted, according to the Canada census, the largest
such community in the country. By then the original Chinese
Benevolent Association had expanded to the point that it
41
had constructed its own Chinatown hospital. But housing
remained a central service.
housing among its Chinese-speaking residents — many of
them now advanced in age — may be greater than ever.
“The lower floor rented to commercial [tenants], and the
upper floors had partitions and accommodated the single
men to live there. In the old days, the associations played
an important function of providing welfare to the so-called
‘bachelor Chinese,’ and to provide comfort.
Many of those in need of affordable housing and suitable
social support are from the generation that experienced official
discrimination. That is gone, but barriers of language and
education continue to exclude many from programs available
to other seniors. And the decline of benevolent associations
has left the task of providing them with “shelter and comfort”
to a shockingly small number of agencies.
“Before the [Second World] war, most associations had
rental buildings,” says David Lai, now 75, who before his
retirement dedicated his career as a professor of geography
and Asian studies at the University of Victoria to studying
Chinese-Canadian history and the development of
Chinatowns.
Reunited families ended the ‘benevolent
association’
The role changed after the Second World War, Lai says.
When Canada belatedly permitted Chinese women and
children to immigrate, many of Vancouver’s Chinese
“bachelors” were reunited with their families. “They moved
out of Chinatown and lived in the suburbs.”
“The major function [of the benevolent associations] was to
provide welfare for a large number of bachelors. But after the
war, they lose a lot of their function.” Without that role to fill,
Lai explains, many traditional associations “are dying down.”
But while lonely bachelors may be fewer in Chinatown, the
need for culturally appropriate social support and affordable
According to a 2011 UBC discussion paper, more than
1,000 aging Chinese Canadians will be in need of shelter and
some level of assistance over the next decade. The need is
particularly acute in the City of Vancouver, where nearly a
third of us identify as ethnically Chinese — nearly twice the
figure of 18 per cent across all of Metro Vancouver.
Largest is the non-profit United Chinese Community
Enrichment Services Society, better known as S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Its
executive director for health services is Alice Choi, a registered
nurse.
Marginalized, old, and poor
A popular notion exists, Choi observes, that the Lower
Mainland’s Chinese community has largely migrated to
Richmond, leaving old Chinatown ripe for new business.
“No, no, no, no,” she says. “They’re still here. Vancouver’s
east side is a big problem. They are being forgotten. They
are marginalized. They’re old. They’re poor. No education,
sometimes no family support. And then what do you do?”
One answer can be found at the intersection of Keefer and
Carrall Streets, in sight of the pagoda-roofed pavilions peeking
out over the high walls of the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical
Chinese Garden. A more subtle grey building, the Simon K.Y.
Lee Seniors Care Home opened in 2001, providing 103 assisted
care beds and an adult day centre for seniors. S.U.C.C.E.S.S.’s
largest facility specifically designed and managed to serve
Chinese seniors will soon add 10 more beds.
“We are funded by the government, and our space in the
adult day centre is only 20,” Choi says. “I have a three-year
waiting list.” The number of people waiting for beds in the
care home is a figure held only by Vancouver Coastal Health,
which manages admissions. Vancouver Coastal Health did not
respond to the Tyee Solution Society’s request for information.
Chinese community advocates created S.U.C.C.E.S.S. 40
years ago as a storefront social services organization for
Chinese immigrants. Since 1973, it has expanded its housing
and settlement services, language and employment training,
and counseling services, to other language communities and
groups. Its website now aspires to a “World of Multicultural
Harmony.”
And despite its long roots in Chinatown, S.U.C.C.E.S.S.
has a relatively short history with Chinese seniors’ housing
and healthcare services. A S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Multi-Level
[health] Care Society has operated since 1995. And since
2008 the organization has managed two Downtown Eastside
42
social housing projects, Orange Hall and Solheim Place, for
individuals and families who are at risk of homelessness or
who have low incomes. But while those shelter some residents
who are ethnically Chinese, neither is targeted specifically to
the Chinese community.
Two years ago S.U.C.C.E.S.S. incorporated a Housing
Society, to provide and operate additional non-profit housing
for low- or modest-income people. It recently signed a 10-year
Memorandum of Understanding with the City of Vancouver to
increase affordable housing stock.
S.U.C.C.E.S.S. CEO Queenie Choo is pleased about the
additional, beds at Simon Lee. But “when you’re looking at the
Chinese population, those [10 beds] are a drop in the bucket,”
she says.
Choo is a relative newcomer to Vancouver. She took over
the leadership of S.U.C.C.E.S.S. last year, after a long career
in health services in Edmonton. She admits she has more
questions than answers about how her organization can meet
the needs of more people.
Bringing supports directly to seniors
“There’s a lot of things we can do, as an organization,”
Choi believes. “I know that we need to do more promotion,
outreach into the community, and so on. But I have to be frank
with you, it’s difficult. Resources are a huge problem. We are
stretched to the limit.”
Meeting the need fully would take at least one more facility
the size of the Simon Lee home opening every year for the next
decade.
Choi is familiar with the resources that exist currently for
educated, English-speaking seniors. Innovative as they are, she
knows they won’t be much help to Chinese-speaking seniors
who are already underserved.
“In the [western] mainstream community, seniors are more
sophisticated in finding ways to improve their health,” Choi
says. She sits on a provincial advisory group for healthy living
among seniors. “We talk a lot about using technology and
promotional materials. For a certain category of seniors, this
is very useful because you need to start with prevention, selfmanagement of chronic disease and so on. You need to start
with those people who are in their 60s now, whose education
level is better, whose literacy is better. They can navigate a
computer.”
But web-based initiatives won’t help Chinatown’s seniors,
Choi says. “They don’t even know how to read. They will not
come out to seek information because they don’t know how.
You need a different approach for this group of people. You
need to bring services to them.”
A 2007 report by the City of Vancouver and UBC School
of Social Work laid out 16 ideas for improving housing and
health for Chinese seniors in the inner city. They included
more initiatives to build on the strengths of seniors, counter
the faulty assumption that Chinese seniors are rich enough
not to need help or are automatically taken care of by their
43
families, and to build a stronger network of support and
services.
Providing more opportunities for seniors to be involved
with their community and advocate for each another was also
among the recommendations. The Council of Senior Citizens
of BC (COSCO) exists for that purpose. But Gail Harmer, a
longtime housing advocate and seniors’ workshop facilitator
with COSCO, acknowledges that the Council falls short of
addressing people who don’t speak English.
“The institution has to change itself to accommodate the
new. Or the groups themselves have to organize — and that’s
incredibly difficult when you are very vulnerable,” she says.
Harmer would like to see more Chinese seniors involved
with COSCO. But English-speaking Chinese seniors rarely
cross paths with COSCO. Of approximately 30 seniors who
have volunteered with COSCO and taken training to facilitate
its senior-to-senior workshops, only two are Chinese.
In Strathcona, a neighbourhood adjacent to old Chinatown,
a network of Chinese-speaking mothers provides home
support to Chinese seniors living alone in the area. During
the hours their own children are in school, the women help
seniors with daily tasks like tidying their suites and running
errands. The simple interactions provide a powerful source of
companionship for people living in isolation.
The women receive an average of $13.50 an hour from
a project called Capacity Links, United Way-funded and
operated by Vancouver’s Network of Inner-City Community
Services Society (NICCSS). The program is targeted at low-
income, marginalized Chinese seniors who are ineligible for
the home services that Vancouver Coastal Health offers —
someone who can still bathe herself, for example, isn’t eligible
— but who can benefit from some measure of support.
It’s the type of program that Choi says we need more of
to assist seniors living in private market rental housing or
commercial SROs. “Housing is important, but you have to give
them the support in order to maintain them there,” she says.
“A lot of seniors are living in what we call independent
housing. They’re aging in place, but they’re aging in place
with no support. And social isolation is a very big issue with
the Chinese seniors because of language barriers; some of
them do not have any help from their families, and their health
deteriorates.”
Organizations like, S.U.C.C.E.S.S., NICCSS, the Downtown
Eastside Women’s Centre and Vancouver Second Mile Society
are doing what they can to connect with Chinese-speaking
seniors in the inner city. But “you look at this report they did
it in 2007,” Choi says, referring to the City/UBC report that
suggested 16 ways to improve the lives of Chinese seniors.
“There are recommendations. There was no further action. But
we needed to start even before then. The population in the east
side needed it yesterday.”
44
For Chinese
Speaking Seniors,
Better Service
in San Francisco
and Toronto
Two innovative, holistic models that put culture
and community first. By Jackie Wong
Every morning in San Francisco, 50 blue vans fan out through
the Mission, the Polk Gulch and other neighbourhoods, to
pick up seniors from their homes. If a senior lives in a walkup
apartment with stairs, the driver will park the van, go to the
senior’s door, help her out of the apartment, walk her down
the stairs, and settle her into the van. All the while, the driver is
collecting information about the senior’s living conditions, mood,
and overall well being.
The information will be shared with the team of physicians,
nurses, social workers, counsellors, and occupational
therapists who work collaboratively with the seniors at the
city’s seven On Lok Lifeways day centres. Hundreds of seniors
— many mono-lingual in Chinese — congregate daily at the
state- and federally-funded centres to socialize, share a meal,
and connect with all their health care providers in one place.
On Lok started in San Francisco’s Chinatown around
the same time as Vancouver’s S.U.C.C.E.S.S., with the same
intention to address an under-served population of Chinesespeaking immigrants in the inner city. Now, with 10 centres
in the Bay Area and some 1,200 senior members, On Lok has
expanded its scope to reach people from the non-Chinese
community as well.
Daily attention and one-stop care from a social and medical team supports
clients of the On Lok seniors’ day care network in San Francisco. Photo
courtesy of On Lok Lifeways, San Francisco, California.
While S.U.C.C.E.S.S. serves immigrant and at-risk adults of
all ages, On Lok focuses exclusively on seniors’ health. But
with thousands of Chinese-speaking senior Vancouverites
expected to need linguistically- and culturally-specific
health and housing services over the next 15 years, On Lok’s
innovative, holistic model deserves examination.
Chinese care on a British model
On Lok’s Lifeways PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care
for the Elderly) Centers operate on a “social day care”
model inspired by the organizational structure of British day
hospitals. They started in San Francisco when Dr. William
Gee, a dentist, contacted Marie-Louise Ansak, a social worker,
to study the feasibility of building a nursing home in San
Francisco’s Chinatown in 1971.
Ansak found a nursing home to be both culturally and
financially infeasible. She found that most Chinatown seniors
seemed interested in remaining in their homes, but lacked
culturally- and linguistically-appropriate access to health
and social services. What services they could access were
fragmented and straining to experience for both seniors and
their families. It was stressful to shuttle from appointment to
appointment, place to place.
Together, Ansak and Gee founded San Francisco’s first
adult day centre in 1972. The goal was to create a community
hub where all of a seniors’ health needs — social, physical,
emotional, medical — would be addressed in one place.
On Lok — Cantonese for “peaceful, happy abode” — has
expanded to seven centres in San Francisco, two in the East
Bay area, and one in San Jose. Its model has been replicated in
90 places across the United States.
The great majority of On Lok’s 1,200 member seniors are
low-income: 96 per cent qualify for federal Medicare and state
46
Medicaid funding that covers their enrollment at the seniors’
day centre.
“We get a lump sum amount from both the federal
government and state government, and for that we take
care of everything the senior needs,” says On Lok’s chief
administrative officer, Kelvin Quan, on the phone from San
Francisco. “We pay for the drivers, for the primary care
doctors, hospital care, we pay for medication, and if they have
to go ultimately into a nursing home, we also pay for that.
“When we talk about the problems of navigating through
the system, our seniors don’t have to struggle with that, and
neither do their caregivers or their family. They don’t have to
struggle through ‘My primary care doctor says my mother has
to see a cardiologist but I’m working tomorrow, how do I get
my mother to the cardiologist? How do I get to the pharmacy
to get the medicine?’” says Quan. “On Lok takes care of all of
those things.”
Four per cent of On Lok’s members have financial resources
that take them out of the low-income category. They pay for
what Medicaid would have covered out of pocket.
Confucian duty in the 21st century
Quan holds a master’s degree in public health policy. He’s
also a lawyer. He started working with On Lok only last year,
but grew up with it in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the early
’70s.
While others will say that their city’s Chinatown is radically
different from what it was 50 years ago, Quan has a different
view. “I think that from an economic, societal standpoint,
Chinatown in San Francisco is just as challenged as it was 50
years ago. It’s just in a different way,” he says. “I think the
needs are just as great.”
Quan believes that today’s economy and society put as
much strain on the adult children of aging Chinese parents
as they did 50 years ago. But today generations are more
geographically separated; adult children live in outlying,
English-speaking suburbs where parents don’t want to live —
or across the country. The traditional Confucian obligation to
take care of one’s parents is a source of ongoing family stress,
he says.
One of On Lok’s goals is to alleviate some of that strain.
“The Confucian obligation of children to take care of their
parents is a really great expectation,” Quon observes. “Due to
various sociological reasons, the children are not able to fulfill
that obligation the way that the parents had expected. The
children have families of their own, children to take care of.
And there are only limited reserves of time and resources that
they can spend taking care of their father or their mother. And
that’s when we reach out specifically to the children to partner
with them in the care of their parents.”
47
‘Please help me die’
The Greater Toronto Area is also home to a large Chinesespeaking population. Like On Lok, the GTA’s Yee Hong Centre
for Geriatric Care was founded by a Chinese doctor who
wanted to address the problem of so many Chinese-speaking
seniors falling through the cracks of the English-speaking
mainstream health system.
Dr. Joseph Y.K. Wong was completing his residency as a
medical doctor in the late 1970s. One of his residency rotations
took him to a long-term care home for seniors. “Too frequently,
he would encounter seniors whose family had left,” says Yee
Hong’s director of communications, Anna Wong. “They don’t
speak the language, they don’t know why they were there.
They’d see a Chinese face, a doctor coming by. They would
take his hand, drag him, and say, ‘Please, help me die.’”
It was clear to Dr. Wong that the conventional North
American model for senior care didn’t work for people who
didn’t speak English. Through the 1980s, he educated himself
on how to fund a culturally specific, holistic care program for
Chinese seniors. He founded Yee Hong and in 1994 opened its
first 155-bed long-term facility in Scarborough, Ontario.
Twenty-one years later, Yee Hong’s 1,200 employees staff
four long-term facilities with 805 beds and three adult day
centres, where more than 260 participants receive programs in
Mandarin and Cantonese.
Yee Hong offers a range of services for people at various
stages of life, from fresh retirees to people in palliative care.
But there’s a 10-year waiting list for one of its long-term beds.
By contrast, it takes under 10 months on average to get into a
“mainstream” care bed in the GTA.
But Wong denies that more money will ease the bottleneck.
“It’s not [a need for] more resources. It’s ineffective allocation
of resources,” she says.
“The Chinese population within Ontario is not asking for
the government to give them more money so they can practice
culturally appropriate care,” she insists. “They’re asking for
the government to allocate the [available] resources to the
providers who already do it well, so that the users can benefit
from the care they actually need.”
About half those in long-term care at Yee Hong have come
from mainstream care homes. Shifting resources to more
culturally specific care could improve the quality of life for the
many Chinese seniors who struggle with an English language
system.
“There’s a sizeable percentage that have become suicidal,”
Wong says of Yee Hong’s seniors who arrive as transfers from
western care facilities. “Their depression has been aggravated
from being in a non-appropriate setting for them.”
Preventive caring
Back in San Francisco, the healthcare providers at On Lok
deal closely with the hundreds of seniors who make use of
their services. To get away from a purely medical model of care
and look after the whole person, physicians are consciously
48
positioned as equals, working alongside the social worker,
the nurse, and occupational therapist in the care team — not
above them. At daily meetings the teams comb every issue,
from chronic health concerns to personal arguments between
seniors.
The idea is to catch the onset of new health conditions early,
in an effort to avoid crisis situations later. Preventive care is
often talked about for younger seniors in their 60s, but On
Lok still uses it with clients in their 80s who have, on average,
about 13 to 15 chronic medical conditions.
“With a lot of this very proactive attention and care, we can
head off a lot of more severe conditions that may happen later
on if they were otherwise living independently,” Quan says.
Seniors who lived alone and received no daily interaction,
unmonitored and seldom thought about, would be likely to get
worse much more rapidly.
Those are just the circumstances facing many Chinesespeaking seniors in Vancouver. They are living independently
but lack the day-to-day, face-to-face supports that could keep
them doing so without sudden, panicked trips to the hospital
or doctor that are now common upsets in their daily lives.
By late afternoon in San Francisco, the blue vans drive each
senior from the On Lok home. There, the driver will help them
settle into evening meals, errands, and medication. The seniors
are living independently and also in a community of support.
“It’s a social care model, which means we need to put
resources around the senior so that they get attention
throughout the week,” Quan says. “Not just when they’re sick,
not just when they go in for a medical appointment.”
Vancouver lacks any such comprehensive, culturally
appropriate housing and services for its growing population
of Chinese-speaking seniors. As we learned in previous
installments in this series persistent racial discrimination and
culturally rooted gender inequality have as much to do with
that as does a lack of services on the ground. But examples of
what could address all those issues are not so far from home.
49
One Last Walk
with Judy Graves
City of Vancouver's only full-time advocate for
the homeless to retire in May.
By Jackie Wong
It’s one of the first sunny days of spring, and the herons have
returned to their rookery in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Judy
Graves walks slowly, pausing to admire the wiry herons’ nests,
the new daffodils, and the fluffy cherry blossoms. The 63-yearold’s nails are whimsically painted a lilac pastel that matches her
goofy spontaneity and youthful inquisitiveness. “Here,” she says,
leading us towards the Vancouver Park Board’s headquarters.
We follow her to a side of the building thick with rhododendron
bushes. “When I’m a homeless old woman, this is where I’ll live.”
It takes a moment to understand what she means. She
points to a rectangular covered area with a clean white
concrete floor. Short walls provide some shelter from the
elements. “The people who live here are usually very
organized,” she says. “One man, he would cook his food out
on the beach. And he just loved the flowers.”
The space, so small and hidden by the wall of flowers, is
easy to miss. But to Graves, it’s one of countless spaces hidden
in plain sight that are home to the city’s homeless. They are
places and people she knows well. She has spent more than
half her lifetime working with Vancouver’s homeless and
hard-to-house, and holds the City of Vancouver’s only position
as an advocate for the homeless. It’s a title she’s held since
2010. It evolved from her work through the 1980s, ’90s, and
the first decade of the 2000s, as the city’s tenant assistance
coordinator.
‘I started going out into the streets and asking people, “What happened?”‘
Photo by Christine McAvoy.
Now, her days with the city are drawing to a close. She
turns 64 on Wednesday, May 29, a day that will also mark her
retirement from a career that has spanned over three decades.
In much the same way she’s approached other aspects of
her life, she decided in January to leave, she says, because it
simply felt right. She’s not aware of any plans to replace her.
Graves isn’t the type to self-aggrandize, but she believes
her position should be filled. “I think it’s important to have
an informed advocate within the system who can speak truth
to power. It’s very easy for government to start believing its
own spin,” she says. “And it’s important for government to
have people they trust within their own ranks. I think it’s very
important, as well, that there be somebody doing the public
advocacy and the teaching for the citizens as a whole.”
But so far no one else at City Hall is taking on Graves’
mission to educate. While she humbly notes that many others
have made a positive mark on the city, few have made such a
resonant impact on the individual lives of Vancouver’s most
vulnerable citizens. “I’m not a counter,” she admits, but she
estimates the people she’s helped over the years to secure
housing number in the thousands.
Karen O’Shannacery is a longtime friend of Graves’. She
co-founded Vancouver’s Lookout Emergency Aid Society in
1971 when she was 20 years old, after living on the streets as
a teenager. While she believes the work should continue after
her friend has retired, she doesn’t expect anyone will be able
to fill Graves’ shoes completely. “Nobody could replace Judy,”
she says. “Her impact has really fostered the city taking such
a leadership role in ending homelessness within the city of
Vancouver, which challenges the whole region and challenges
the province. I think she deserves recognition for that.”
51
‘Right away, Judy became involved’
John Ethier is one among thousands who remembers
Graves’ help during a difficult time in his life.
The former commercial fisher moved to Vancouver from a
small town in Ontario in the 1970s. When he wasn’t casting
nets at sea, he, like other resource industry workers, lived
in the previously abundant rooming houses downtown. He
spent the ’90s in the Downtown Eastside and was living in
a downtown Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel when he
met Graves, who at the time was working as the city’s tenant
assistance coordinator.
“I met Judy in 2003 when the old Plaza Hotel on Richards
was being emptied for demolition and redevelopment,” he
remembers. “We were approached by an agent for the owners
who offered to help us relocate to the Marble Arch [Hotel]. We
were told the city was closing the Plaza due to safety concerns.
A call to City Hall revealed the city had no knowledge of this.
We were, in fact, being scammed by the owners. Right away,
Judy became involved.”
Under Graves’ watch, the Plaza tenants were moved to
suitable accommodations. They were not displaced, as they
feared.
“I still run into Judy from time to time and she always has
time to stop and chat,” Ethier says fondly. He now lives in
seniors’ social housing in Downtown South. “Judy, to me, is
a person who is very passionate and dedicated about ending
homelessness.”
The lady in the blue coat
Graves’ work has inhabited two worlds: the streets of
the homeless, and the territory of politicians, bureaucrats,
community leaders, and non-profit service providers.
For years, she took overnight walks through the city,
connecting with people sleeping on the streets, building their
trust, and walking alongside them to find and secure housing,
social services, and income assistance. In the dead of night
she’d appear in doorways, under bridges, and in other outdoor
spaces where the homeless slept.
She’d offer a cigarette, a piece of candy, a treat for the dog.
Then they’d talk, and Graves would visit again and again
until the person was ready to move forward — to a homeless
shelter, onto income assistance, or into housing. People on the
streets know her as “the lady in the blue coat,” walking slowly
through the night to find people all but lost to everyone else.
She spent her days at City Hall, reporting what she learned
on her overnight excursions to the people in government who
could make a difference through policy and funding. “She
was able to get buy-in, persuade the powers that be to do
something about it,” O’Shannacery says. Graves’ first reports
on people sleeping on Vancouver’s streets in the 1990s “made
it real” to the municipal government, O’Shannacery says.
“She made it personal, putting a face on people who were
homeless.”
Graves also persuaded authorities to see that homelessness
was neither unsolvable, nor an age-old problem that has
52
always been with us. She remembers the 1970s and ’80s in
Vancouver, when higher vacancy rates and affordable rooming
houses kept many people off the streets.
In the 1990s, however, homelessness became visible, as
two trends struck the city at one time. In 1993, the federal
government completed its long withdrawal from funding
social housing across Canada. Meanwhile, an influx of cocaine
fueled an active open drug market in Vancouver’s inner city.
By 1997, Vancouver Coastal Health declared a public health
emergency in the Downtown Eastside for its HIV-AIDS
epidemic and high drug overdose rates.
Today, “we’ve got a whole generation who don’t remember
that homelessness is not normal,” Graves says. “Anybody who
was born in the late ’80s would have no conscious memory of
there simply not being a homelessness crisis.”
Counting what didn’t count to others
People view Graves’ work as heroic. “Judy has been the
conscience of our city,” says Maxine Davis, executive director
of the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation. “I defy anyone to hear her
speak about her daily connection with individuals on the
streets, in parks, and under bridges and not be stirred to help
make a difference.” But the overnight walks for which she has
become known — and which were replicated, starting in 2002,
by hundreds of volunteers in the Metro Vancouver Homeless
Count — were borne of simple curiosity.
Graves started work with the City of Vancouver as a
receptionist at Kitsilano’s Pine Free Clinic. She was 25 and
the new mother of a baby daughter. At 30, she started a job at
Cordova House, a city-owned building for difficult tenants.
Then, in the early 1990s, she and other tenant support workers
started to notice people sleeping on the streets.
As more people turned up on the streets, Graves felt
compelled to understand a situation she figured everyone
else knew more about than she. While her City of Vancouver
coworkers held graduate degrees in urban planning, she had
dropped out of high school. “I thought I was the only person
who didn’t understand this was happening,” she says. “So
I started going out into the streets and asking people, ‘What
happened? What can I do to help?’”
Against the wishes of her supervisor, who viewed her walks
as a trivial hobby, Graves says, “I found the best time to do
it was between two and six in the morning,” she says. “The
world belongs to the homeless in the middle of the night.”
As word of her walks spread around the office, people
started asking her for information. And as Vancouver’s street
homeless population grew, reporters started pressing the
municipality for answers. By the late 1990s, Graves conducted
Vancouver’s first homeless counts on her own — crude
estimates done on hand-drawn maps.
“Judy’s early street homeless counts in Vancouver
demonstrated the power of hard numbers in the fight against
homelessness, and doubtless inspired the first Regional
Homeless Count,” says urban planner Margaret Eberle. Metro
53
Vancouver took its first large-scale homeless count in 2002
and now takes a new count every three years. The City of
Vancouver has conducted its own annual count since 2010.
“Judy is the heart and soul of the Vancouver homeless
count,” Eberle says. “What is essentially a data collection
exercise is transformed in the training sessions where
Judy teaches us how to approach the homeless, and how
to understand and treat the homeless with respect and
compassion. Most of us emerge from these sessions with a
sense of awe for Judy — her compassion, humour, and most of
all, her skills.”
The counts Graves inspired have brought street
homelessness into the public spotlight. “Some question the
utility of homeless counts,” Eberle admits. “I firmly believe in
the power of defensible estimates of homelessness in shaping
housing and income assistance policy, and ultimately, in
addressing homelessness.”
‘Deal with homelessness as a disaster’
Graves’ long career has seen numerous ruling parties come
and go at City Hall. She admits that municipal regime changes
have affected how she’s been able to do her work — “but not
predictably,” she says. “I certainly think that Phillip Owen was
a wonderful mayor to work under. And I’m wildly impressed
with the work that [current mayor] Gregor [Robertson] has
done with homelessness,” she says.
Beyond that, she won’t indulge in the criticism or gossip
that often spring only too readily from government staffers
when they’re ready to leave a job. “I don’t believe in taking
any individual on,” she says. “Any of us can change our mind
in a heartbeat. I don’t see people as enemies.”
While she’s not willing to spend time attacking individuals for
perceived shortcomings, Graves has a striking final message
for all of Canada.
Ending homelessness, she says, is probably one of the
easiest problems facing cities to solve. But “until the powers —
and I don’t mean just the city, I mean the province and the feds
— decide to deal with homelessness as a disaster, they could
dab at it for another century and not get it done,” she says.
“It could, actually, be quite easily done, very quickly. We
need probably a couple of thousand units of housing. Not
expensive housing. Not fancy housing. We need rooms with
their own bathrooms, which is exactly what every homeless
person I talk to is asking for. And beyond that, we need to look
at ways of getting nutrition, good quality nutrition, to people
who are very poor.”
Last days on the street
After we parted ways in English Bay at the end of our
afternoon together in Stanley Park, I contacted Graves again
to ask if I could meet her for an overnight walk this month.
She’s usually open to having guests along with her. But she
declined.
54
“Can’t,” she wrote. “The time in the street now is too
personal. Too full of grief. Talking to people who will be still
out there after I have left.”
Graves has no firm plans after retirement. While she has an
apartment in a West End co-op, she’s not sure where she’ll live
next, as her daughter recently moved to Powell River. As has
been the case with other events in her life, things will happen,
she says, when the time is right. “I probably have survived by
rolling downhill like water into a stream,” she says, laughing.
One sure thing is she’ll be dearly, sadly missed. Especially
by those who will no longer be visited in the night by the
lady in the blue coat, with whom they’ll stay up late smoking,
talking, helping each other understand.
Social housing group
left wanting more
from both Libs, NDP
on ‘urgent’ crisis
By David P. Ball
Social Housing Coalition activists (from left) Ivan Drury, Herb Varley and
Dave Diewert speak with BCFED president Jim Sinclair outside last night’s
NDP fundraiser in Vancouver. Photo by David P. Ball.
Although the BC New Democrats have not released their
election platform yet, the party’s housing critic is pushing for
the province to take a “leading role at the table” on affordable
housing, including direct investment in new social housing units.
But activists with the Social Housing Coalition accuse the
party of not taking B.C.’s housing crisis seriously enough,
and last night they pamphleted with a banner outside an
NDP fundraiser in Vancouver, a performance they’ll repeat at
another party faithful event tomorrow in hopes of garnering
concrete commitments in imminent campaign promises.
Joe Trasolini, NDP Critic for Housing, Construction
and Business Investment, said the housing strategy he’ll
put forward will bring together federal and municipal
governments, non-profits, housing advocates and private
interests, with the province taking a leading role to increase
housing stock across B.C.
“We need new supply. Whenever there is supply that comes
on the market, it relieves the pressure on vacancy. When you
don’t have enough vacancy… landlords can get away with
a lot more than when there is more supply of rental units.
I’ve met with a lot of housing advocates who have shovelready projects that have been reviewed by BC Housing staff…
and they’ve been found to be very much needed, qualify for
government partnerships, but nothing is happening. They’re
told that there’s no money,” he told Tyee Solutions Society.
The BC Liberals have made new housing-related
announcements almost every week over the last several
months, with press releases lauding new investment and
hundreds of units in seniors housing, emergency homeless
shelters, and single room occupancy (SRO) renovations.
And while critics claim the province and feds alike are not
“at the table” to the degree they would like, in March the B.C.
government announced a new federal partnership to help
“vulnerable” people with housing in the province, dubbed the
Federal-Provincial Housing (FPH) initiative.
Funding for that affordability program totals roughly
$155 million, the government said, plus $45 million through
a variety of measures such as contributions for capital costs,
exempting some fees for development, and property tax
breaks.
“The B.C. government believes in strong partnerships
and with shared funding from the federal and provincial
governments, as well as local governments and community
organizations,” Housing Minister Rich Coleman stated. “We’re
increasing the number of housing options available to people
most at risk across the province.
“The funding made available through this program is
already contributing to affordable and supportive housing
solutions to help those in need.”
While Trasolini said that the government’s initiatives are
only enough to maintain — not expand — B.C.’s housing
stock, outside his party’s fundraiser at Vancouver’s Bill Reid
Gallery last night, coalition activists questioned whether the
MLA for Port Moody-Coquitlam or his party are treating the
housing crisis as “urgent.”
56
They launched a petition for social housing in B.C., and
chief among their demands is that the province build “10,000
units of good quality social housing per year”; prioritizing
housing for vulnerable or marginalized people such as
indigenous people, seniors, and immigrants; enforcing
maintenance laws on cheap rental hotels; and increasing taxes
to fund more social housing.
The housing activists hope “to push for the NDP, or
whoever gets into the provincial leadership, to do something
about it,” one pamphleteer told Tyee Solutions Society.
“We’ve hit the NDP on a few occasions,” said Dave Diewert,
with the Social Housing Coalition. “They completely waffle
on the housing front… they are very non-committal, and don’t
seem to have a very strong sense of urgency around this issue,
and will probably not do anything. From what they’ve been
saying, it sounds virtually like the status quo. That’s just not
acceptable.”
That status quo is what the coalition is calling one of the
province’s greatest crises, one that Diewert argued has been
“mystified and played down” by all parties.
“There’s a sentiment that we’ve taken care of it all, that
we’ve built a ton of housing and everybody’s okay,” he
explained. “It’s missing a huge sector in the province who not
only live in poverty, but also has to struggle on the housing
front — indigenous people, new immigrants, temporary
foreign workers, youth, seniors, women. Across the board,
there’s a huge need.”
Trasolini told Tyee Solutions Society he is committed to
re-investing financially in social housing if the NDP wins the
election, as well as working with the private sector, municipal
and federal governments, and non-profits to increase the stock
of both rental and supportive housing. But as for 10,000 new
units built a year as the coalition demands, those levels may be
“accurate” in terms of need, he said, but they are unlikely to be
met regardless of which party forms government after May 14.
“Insofar as saying that any government could come up with
10,000 units in one year, it might be a stretch,” he said. “There
has to be a start — a comprehensive plan that we undertake
a step at a time, starting right away — and doing as much as
we can in one year, and making a commitment for following
years.
“It’s probably an accurate number of need. Nobody’s going
to argue about the need. I’ve seen it first-hand.”
For Jim Sinclair, president of the BC Federation of Labour
— one of roughly 150 NDP donors attending last night’s
fundraiser, alongside representatives of the construction
industry, energy firms, unions and others — housing should be
a priority for the party.
Sinclair said he hopes the NDP lives up to its past
commitment to build new social housing, even if it costs
taxpayers to fix the problem. He also criticized the BC Liberal
government’s record on the issue.
“They’ve bought some Downtown Eastside hotels, but
that didn’t increase the number of units. It just saved some
of the units that were there. It’s going to take money. The big
57
challenge that we’ve got as a province is (that) we’re going to
have to fix these problems by paying for them.”
The Social Housing Coalition has planned another
pamphleting rally outside the BC NDP’s Business Leader
dinner tomorrow at the Molson Brewery, as well as at the
premier’s fundraising dinner at the Vancouver Convention
Centre on Monday.
Vancouver Rent
Assembly explores
deeper questions
around tenant rights,
gentrification
By David P. Ball
If you are among the more than half of Vancouverites who rent
their homes, having to fork over a hefty chunk of your income
to a landlord every month might elicit groans or even disdain as
prices climb.
But a conference this weekend isn’t just bemoaning the high
price of being a tenant in Canada’s most unaffordable city. The
Rent Assembly happening today and tomorrow is also asking
deeper questions about tenancy, and most importantly how
communities can address leasing problems.
“We’ve all been struggling with these issues,” organizer
Anahita Jamali Rad told Tyee Solutions Society. “It keeps
getting blown up more and more.
“Everyone involved has similar experience: we all pay rent,
and spend a lot of our time working to pay rent. It becomes
such a big part of your life.”
Co-sponsored by The Mainlander, the Vancouver Renters
Union, and the Kootenay School of Writing, the weekend
assembly is using art, poetry, panel discussions and activism
workshops to explore the history of rent as a concept, tenants’
experiences, as well as concrete examples from communities
which have successfully fought for tenant rights.
There will also be sessions discussing racism in housing,
aboriginal struggles, and gentrification — an urban process
which sees lower-income renters displaced from their
neighbourhoods by rising costs. The extent to which that
geographic phenomenon applies in Vancouver has been at the
crux of an increasingly fierce debate recently, which has seen
blogs like the Gastown Gazette decrying gentrification’s critics
— be they established community organizations or alleged
anarchist vandals making headlines.
The conference’s philosophical approach sets it apart from
usual industry or activist gatherings.
“Paying rent is not natural,” Jamali Rad argued. “Things are
the way they are not because it’s a natural thing, but because
it’s part of the structure right now; it doesn’t mean it should be
the way it is.
“We’re not really trying to give any broad statement; we just
want to open up the conversation, and have people explore
these ideas.”
With tensions flaring in recent months over the
gentrification of the Downtown Eastside, as well as a string of
arts and culture venue evictions or closures due to rent hikes,
organizers hope to cast a critical reflection on why Vancouver
has become so expensive.
“There’s a weird Vancouver standard we have for the price
of rent. If someone pays $1,500 for a one-bedroom in an okay
area, we now all think that’s normal. We don’t realize that
there are all the sorts of background financial things that go
on behind the scenes so that prices are ridiculously high. . .
There’s a constant lowering of expectations.”
The rent assembly launches tonight with a panel on ‘Rent
in Theory’ featuring Jamali Rad, as well as Mainlander
contributor Nathan Crompton, Danielle LaFrance and Maria
Wallstam.
Other events include a Swamp interactive theatre piece,
and a direct action workshop from several organizers of the
59
controversial Pidgin restaurant picket — which has led to one
activist’s arrest and conflict with business owners.
“It’s definitely polarizing the city,” Jamali Rad added. “A lot
of people not interested in these issues. . . are becoming more
and more interested because it’s actually affecting their daily
lives.
“With the explosion of evictions and renovictions of
organizations in Vancouver, it seems like everyone either
knows someone close to them who’s been renovicted, or who
has been themselves. . . More than anything we want people to
come together and talk.”
Housing Justice
Project puts
affordable lodging
and legal advocacy
into action
By David P. Ball
Affordable housing is a recognized human right, say legal
advocates, but too many residents of B.C. are unable to exercise
that right, or even access the legal system as tenants.
UBC law professor Margot Young will address the right
to housing, in particular for Vancouver’s women and girls,
at a major conference today, Engaging Women, Transforming
Cities.
“For anyone concerned about building a just city, this is
really a critical conversation to be a part of,” Young told The
Tyee Solutions Society. “Housing is such a central issue.
“Our focus is to look at housing justice — that is, to
understand housing as a right… It’s not a question about
what’s happening with the housing bubble, prices, or market
mechanisms. It’s looking at what kinds of policies, programs,
laws, and regulations, ought to be in place to ensure that
everybody who lives in Vancouver has decent housing.”
Young is a co-founder of the Housing Justice Project, a
unique collaboration between UBC’s law and community
planning departments, Pivot Legal Society, and the Canadian
Rental Housing Coalition.
The project hopes to educate the public and explore
solutions to the housing crisis by advocating for residents’
legal rights, engaging the community, and developing policies
to address increasingly unaffordable living.
“In B.C., there is a real lack of access to justice for tenants,”
said Darcie Bennett, campaign director with Pivot Legal
Society. “There’s little legal support for housing.
“There used to be poverty law clinics here, but all that
is now missing here in B.C.; it has been eroded over the
last decade. . . For marginalized renters, it’s pretty much
impossible to figure out what to do and how go though the
process of disputing an eviction or landlord harassment. Even
when an order is made, there is not a lot of enforcement to get
money or resolve it quickly.”
On May 28, the City of Vancouver announced it would
grant $8,000 to continue running a Residential Tenancy Branch
to support Downtown Eastside residents, based out of the
Aboriginal Community Career Employment Services Society
(ACCESS) on Main Street.
Unlike other approaches which view housing primarily
through the lens of real estate, municipal zoning, or social
welfare, for example, the Housing Justice Project is attempting
to create a niche in the legal system, and the community, for
positive change to happen.
Funded by UBC’s Peter Wall Solutions Initiative, which
hopes to join academics with community groups to work
for social change, the project held its first public event in
February: a showcase of films about housing struggles, made
by local youth.
When viewed through a legal perspective, Bennett added,
affordable lodging becomes clearly linked to other social issues
and rights. But while there is much research on how to ensure
peoples’ right to housing, there are few avenues to put it into
practice for ordinary people, be they homeowners, tenants or
the homeless.
61
“Seeing things through a justice lens is important, because
pretty much any issue we work on relates to a housing issue,
whether it’s the foster care system or addictions, housing is
a big piece of it,” Bennett said. “We could fill a room with
research on how important housing is as a human right; it’s all
been researched to the ends of time.
“It’s about joining forces to take action on their research…
to be able to use the research they’re able to do as a frame for
some of the cases we take on, to say, ‘This case isn’t just about
this individual, but about issues facing so many individuals
who fall through the cracks.’”
Taking an intersecting and interdisciplinary approach
to housing is key to addressing the housing needs of
marginalized people, particularly for women and girls who
are the focus of today’s conference, organized by Women
Transforming Cities.
Another speaker at the event’s housing-focused panel is
Janice Abbott, CEO of Atira Women’s Resource Society and
Atira property management, an influential Downtown Eastside
nonprofit striving to end violence against women through
housing, support and advocacy services.
Abbott told Tyee Solutions Society that, when addressing
the housing crisis, agencies need to work from an “antioppression framework” — an understanding that people face
greater barriers and stigma if they are aboriginal, immigrant,
sole-parents, or disabled, for instance. Poverty and gender are
also key factors that affect access to safe, affordable housing.
“We need more and better housing options for women who
are poor,” Abbott said in an interview. “We need more places
where women who have experienced repeated incidents of
trauma, likely from childhood, can have a place to be safe and
to heal.
“Housing needs to be able to provide consistency and
predictability across time. There also needs to be housing
where there are women-headed leases. Often at Atira, we
see women form relationships, often with male partners, but
when those relationships go sideways, women are typically
the ones who end up homeless again and have to give up their
housing.”
The lack of a national housing strategy is also a bone of
contention for advocates like Atira and the Housing Justice
Project. But given the “severity” of homelessness and cost of
living across the country, particularly in B.C., Young said, “the
fault lies with all levels of government.”
“It’s a failure to observe a key human right well-recognized
at the international level,” she added, “and arguably part of
the kinds of protections that our own constitutional Charter of
Rights and Freedoms provides.”
For Pivot’s Bennett, the right to housing cannot be left to the
private sector.
“When we think about really basic needs like medical
care or education, we realize there needs to be government
regulation for them,” Bennett argued. “Housing is a really
important basic need, and yet it has been left out of purview of
government.”
62
Both Young and Abbott will be speaking about housing
rights for women and girls today (May 30) from 11 a.m. to
12:30 p.m., as part of the day-long Women Transforming Cities
conference, at Simon Fraser University, 500 Granville St.
Feds have ‘no choice
but to listen’ to
municipal pressure on
affordable housing
By David P. Ball
Over the past decade, the average price tag of new homes
in Canada has almost doubled, and homeownership remains
hindered by skyrocketing personal debt.
And while the country’s municipal leaders head home
from their annual conference, which ended June 3, boasting
of a “united front” to bring the federal government back to
the table to discuss affordable housing, so far they’ve been
unsuccessful in lobbying for a national housing strategy.
Still, Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) vice
president Raymond Louie says Ottawa “has no choice” but to
assist cities and towns that are struggling to create affordable
housing.
“We’re looking for the federal government to… support
us at the low-end of the spectrum and in the middle, perhaps
with tax write-offs to those who are building rental housing,”
said Louie, who’s also a four-term Vancouver councillor, in an
interview. “That was a key component of how rental housing
was built in the past.”
Louie said he and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson
— who chairs the FCM’s Big City Mayors’ Caucus — held
separate meetings with federal cabinet ministers throughout
the weekend, such as Infrastructure and Intergovernmental
Affairs Minister Denis Lebel, Trade Minister Ed Fast, and
Heritage Minister James Moore.
They lobbied for greater federal housing and infrastructure
involvement, Louie said. They also met with Thomas Mulcair,
leader of the official Opposition, and Liberal chief Justin
Trudeau, who also attended the FCM meeting.
“(We) brought forth those concerns to every minister that
(we) met with, and to the opposition parties as well,” he said.
“All parties need to hear that same message, and hopefully it’s
brought back.”
Robertson set a housing-focused tone for the weekend when
he emerged from the Big City Mayors’ Caucus pre-conference
on May 30, saying that cities were increasingly concerned not
only about homelessness, but also the ability of their residents
to own their own houses. For over half of Vancouverites and
many other Canadians, homeownership is simply not in the
cards.
“The rising cost of housing is an issue we see in cities across
the country. Cities are ready and willing to help protect the
economy and solve this housing crisis but we need federal and
provincial partners who are committed to working with us,”
he said in a statement.
The FCM has warned that 500,000 Canadians could lose
their homes, with $1.7 billion in social housing transfers from
Ottawa running out in the next six years.
In the past, Robertson has likened the way cities must apply
for federal infrastructure funding to purchasing a lottery ticket
in hopes of plugging leaks in your roof.
But the federal government counters that it is partnering
heavily on infrastructure investment with cities, and points
to this year’s budget as an example of cooperation between
levels of government, citing a new 10-year infrastructure
commitment.
64
The conference also coincided with the release of the FCM’s
State of Canada’s Cities and Communities report. Although
short on detailed proposals, the 26-page document described
that relationship as an “outdated” and “broken” framework
more fitting to the “19th century,” and called for changes
to Canada’s constitution to better include cities in matters
affecting them.
“The reason is that our cities and communities continue to
operate within an institutional framework better adapted to
the realities of the 19th century than today’s rapidly shifting
urban and economic landscape,” the report stated. “This
outdated framework creates jurisdictional silos that hinder
federal and provincial decision-making, cooperation and
coordination, and often lead to ad-hoc policy interventions
that mask or fail to address real problems and leave
municipalities scrambling to fill the gaps.”
The report was not all bad news for communities. The
authors also pointed to a “growing municipal policy footprint”
over the past 10 years, which has resulted in cities gaining a
much greater “role and influence in national debates.”
“Today, local governments and FCM are actively consulted
on more and more of the national issues playing out in cities
and communities,” the report noted.
Looking back on the four-day conference, Louie said that
any discussion of affordable housing must consider the full
“spectrum of housing” — from housing people on the streets
to families being able to buy their own residences.
“In Vancouver, homeownership and the ability to own a
home is a major, major issue for us,” Louie explained. “The
concept of homeownership is becoming near-impossible for
many of our own citizens.
Louie pointed to the co-op housing model, as well as a local
cohousing project which would create partly shared living
spaces, as solutions being explored by the City of Vancouver.
65
‘Community Land
Trust’: Vancouver’s
Affordable
Housing Fix?
New rental units on city-owned land earn mixed
reviews. By Jackie Wong
Thinking back to the eight months he spent last year as one
of the more radical Vancouver members of the Mayor’s Task
Force on Housing Affordability, Mike Lewis is glad to see one
recommendation starting to bear fruit.
On May 15, Vancouver city council approved a
staff proposal to build 355 units of rental housing on four
city-owned sites, to be operated by four community land trust
partners.
Lewis praises the decision as “one way of pushing back”
against the “rank individualism” of our times.
Last year, Lewis co-authored The Resilience Imperative. In
it he writes about community land trusts around the world. He
sees them as one way of reclaiming the commons and bridging
what he calls the gap between the “we” and the “I.”
Community land trusts do that by owning property under
a non-profit, multi-stakeholder, democratic governance model.
They are guided by the idea that community control of land,
instead of real-estate market investor control, helps keep down
the cost of housing.
View of the Fraser River from the southeast Vancouver site of forthcoming
affordable rental and co-op housing projects on city-owned land. Photo
courtesy: Mike Lewis.
Vancouver’s Community Housing Land Trust Foundation
is a registered charity created two decades ago by the
Co-operative Housing Federation of BC. Under the new
agreement, Vancouver will lease four city-owned parcels of
land to the Land Trust Foundation. It in turn will sub-lease
those sites to four partners to develop affordable rentalhousing units.
The partners are Fraserview Housing Co-operative, Tikva
Housing Society, Katherine Sanford Housing Society and
HFBC Housing Foundation. The Land Trust will oversee
housing development and construction. The four partners will
operate the housing after it’s been built, with the Land Trust
overseeing things and reporting annually to the city on how
they are reaching affordability targets.
67
residents are met,” according to the City of Vancouver staff
report on the project.
With construction slated to begin in March 2014, the first
residents are expected to move in by November 2015.
“This is common sense,” Lewis says. “That’s what I’m
excited about by this social-purpose development partnership.
It’s principled, it’s pragmatic, and it’s leveraging assets.”
Two-bedroom suites for under $950 a
month
Of the 355 units of rental housing, 273 will rent at belowmarket rates. According to initial estimates, based on rates
below BC Housing’s Housing Income Limits (HIL) metric,
that would translate to about $769 a month for a one-bedroom
apartment. A two-bedroom unit would rent for $945.
The four sites are near the Fraser in southeast Vancouver. Image courtesy
Mike Lewis.
Revenues from the 82 market-price units will support the
non-market units, approximately 48 of which will serve people
with mental health concerns.
New Westminster Mayor Wayne Wright praises the project
as “stepping forward where they need to go.” Wright co-chairs
the Canadian Rental Housing Coalition and praises Vancouver
for its innovation.
The four sites in southeast Vancouver are at 1700 Kingsway,
2910 E. Kent Avenue, 2780 Southeast Marine Drive, and 2800
Southeast Marine Drive.
Tenants will be identified through BC Housing and the
four non-profit community land trust partners co-operating
in the project, in order to “ensure that the needs of Vancouver
Keeping existing housing affordable
Lewis, also the executive director of the Canadian Centre
for Community Renewal, is one of many who views the
community land trust project as an important, historic step
forward in Vancouver’s affordable rental housing odyssey.
He’s echoing Vancouver’s rental housing policies in his
own municipality. During the same week that Vancouver city
council approved the four rental housing project sites, New
Westminster city council approved a new Secured Market
Rental Housing Policy.
The policy is designed to protect New Westminster’s
existing, aging supply of market rental housing. Among other
measures, it continues a moratorium on converting rental
buildings into strata title (condo) properties, and will explore
the use of “density transfer” swaps to preserve existing
purpose-built rental stock.
The New West policy primarily deals with rental housing
priced at market rates, however. “In order for affordable rental
housing to be achieved,” the report notes, “other additional
incentives would need to be considered.”
Both Lewis and Wright acknowledged that cities are doing
what they can in the absence of either a national housing
strategy or extensive provincial funding for housing. To
significantly further expand non-market affordability, Wright
believes, “We need federal direction.”
He and Lewis echo others involved in affordable housing
initiatives who bemoan the lack of federal funding for housing
since Ottawa abandoned the field in 1993.
“We don’t have a national housing policy in this country
and we should,” Lewis says. “We’re probably one of the
few OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development] countries that don’t have one.”
68
Absent guarantees
for the neediest
Meanwhile, Vancouver city
council has drawn as much
criticism as praise for its land
trust project from housing
advocates who say there’s no
guarantee of real affordability.
“There are loose, floating
‘targets’ for below-market
Mike Lewis supports the City of
Vancouver’s
new rental housing
rents,” said Tim Louis, a former
project operated by a community
Vancouver city councillor with
land trust. He writes about such
trusts in his 2012 book, The
the Coalition of Progressive
Resilience Imperative. Photo by
Electors. “But just look at the
Jackie Wong.
Olympic Village to see what
happens when there are no guarantees built-in from the start.”
Connor Donegan of the Vancouver Renters’ Union questions
whether the non-profit community land trust partners will
be able to offer affordable housing without further financial
backing from the city. In the initial staff report on the project,
the City of Vancouver made it clear that it will not provide any
operating subsidies or property tax exemptions.
Donegan points to the city’s staff report, which “warns
that ‘affordability may be delayed’ due to ‘future market
economics.’ We need a guarantee that the buildings will be
affordable,” he says. “City-owned land needs to be leveraged
in order to circumvent the market forces that are destroying
affordable housing and causing homelessness: this proposal
fails to meet that need.”
Jean Swanson, a longtime Downtown Eastside housing
advocate and co-ordinator of the Carnegie Community Action
Project, echoes Donegan’s sentiments. “In order to solve the
housing crisis, we need government-funded housing. Charities
just don’t have enough money. And developers won’t build
enough,” she says.
69
the housing continuum. Based on the initial estimates that
one-bedroom units on the land trust sites would rent for about
$769 a month, those units would be affordable for people
making up to $38,000 a year.
“The good part of this is that it’s non-profit. But I don’t
know how much of this housing is going to be used for people
at welfare rates. From our perspective, it would be good if a lot
of it were used for people at welfare rates, because they’re the
ones that have the greatest need.”
The City of Vancouver’s Housing and Homelessness
Strategy is designed to address the housing needs of people
on income assistance. Meanwhile the Mayor’s Task Force
on Housing Affordability, which paved the way for the
community land trust project, is aimed at citizens in a different
income bracket.
“The task force, essentially, was focused on a cohort of
$21,000 to $85,000 household income,” Lewis says. “The
argument that was made, as I understood it, was that the
homelessness strategy and that lower income would not be
really the focus here, that we had an affordability problem
that was broader than just the acute problem of people at the
lowest income levels.”
The community land trust project addresses what the City
of Vancouver refers to as the ‘non-market rental’ portion of
Different housing policies for different levels of need. Source: City of
Vancouver staff report to council, “Agreement with the Community Housing
Land Trust Foundation to Deliver Affordable Rental Housing on City-Owned
Land.”
Ottawa still MIA
People who work in housing at the municipal and
provincial levels often speak extensively about how Canada
lacks a federal housing policy. In Swanson’s view, the fanfare
around the new community land trust project undermines the
city’s own goals in lobbying for a national housing plan.
“The city is trumpeting this as a great thing, and by doing
that, it undermines its own ability to lobby for a federal,
provincial housing program, because it makes it appear that
everything is okay and we don’t have a crisis,” she says.
“In 2007, the city had 14 lots, and they designated them
for social housing. And then they went after the senior
governments to get funding for those lots. And they got it,”
Swanson recalls.
“I think a strategy like that is needed now, where the city
buys land and goes after the senior governments and says,
we want you to fund housing on this land. We’re showing
that we’re serious. We’ve got this land that’s designated for
housing. And we want you to fund it. Because there’s a huge
need. We need thousands of units of social housing.”
To former housing affordability task force member Mike
Lewis, the solutions lie somewhere between allowing the
market to “fix itself” and relying fully on government forces.
Renters’ rights, however, are under provincial jurisdiction
in B.C. During the lead-up to this year’s provincial election,
representatives from six Vancouver non-profits compiled a
set of 13 recommendations for change in B.C.’s Residential
Tenancy Act, in efforts to better balance the rights of tenants
and landlords. Its first two recommendations were to toughen
rent controls and minimize unnecessary evictions.
“If we divorce social goals from what we think about in
terms of economic exchange, which is the essence of ‘let the
market decide,’ that’s an inadequate basis for any kind of
policy,” Lewis says.
“The market is a social construction. And we have
constructed it. This ['Four Sites' project] is a way, small way, of
pushing back, by saying social relations should be right in the
middle of the discourse.”
70
Advocates call
for ‘social impact’
assessments of new
Downtown Eastside
developments
By David P. Ball
The city should require low-income “social impact
assessments” of all new businesses and condominiums in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, similar to neighbourhood
reviews when addictions recovery centres or shelters are
proposed for wealthier neighbourhoods, suggests a housing
advocate.
Low-income residents, “not bureaucrats,” should be in
charge of such a process, said BC Social Housing Coalition
spokesperson Dave Diewert at a rally yesterday, organized
by the Anti-Gentrification Caucus. The group is a participant
in the city’s Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) for the
neighbourhood.
“If you try to put a recovery centre in Kits, or a treatment
centre in any other neighbourhood of the city, they’ll have
a social impact study,” said Diewert. “But when they put in
condos here, or high-end restaurants, there’s no social impact
study on how it will affect low-income people. Those things
need to be in place.”
More than 200 protestors marched from Main and
East Hastings St. to BC Housing’s offices, presenting a
3,000-signature petition calling for more social housing and
a moratorium on condominium development in the most
impoverished parts of the DTES.
Volunteers canvassed street corners and parks, and knocked
on hotel room doors in many of the neighbourhood’s Single
Resident Occupancy hotels, to collect signatures, organizers
said.
Impacts of new development are already thoroughly
reviewed, the city councillor responsible for housing told Tyee
Solutions Society, and the area planning process exists for that
reason.
“This is exactly why the (Local Area Planning Process) was
set up. It says to everyone, all stakeholders, here’s your chance
at the table. If we weren’t serious about that, we wouldn’t have
started this process three years ago,” said councillor Kerry
Jang.
For addictions outreach worker Chris McPartlin, a former
longtime resident of the neighbourhood, the process has not
given the community a sense of being heard at city hall.
“These decisions are just being made arbitrarily, without
that much consultation,” he told Tyee Solutions Society. “I
would like to see actual cooperation with the people who have
called this a community for so long. For decades, this was the
‘scary part of town’ — socially unacceptable, stigmatized. But
you know what? This is the one place in the Lower Mainland
where there is a big sense of community.”
McPartlin said he’s witnessed the “gradual downsizing”
of community over the past decade, adding that he fears that
once condominium residents move into the area, they will
demand the city and police “clean up” undesirable residents
— taking away one of the few places where people can safely
access services like Insite’s needle exchange, addictions
counselling or other low-income agencies.
“How long will it be before the owners of these condos start
complaining to city hall: ‘I don’t like leaving my front door
72
with my little child and seeing this type of activity going on.
Get the police down here, isn’t that stuff against the law?’” he
said. “I can already picture the conversations.”
Low-income participants in the planning process released
an alternative plan for the struggling neighbourhood, which
would see the city cede to long-standing demands for 10,000
new units of social housing.
For David Hamm, a LAPP participant and president
of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), the
problem is that upscale condominium developments continue
to raise prices in the DTES, while the city’s consultation
process is unfolding too slowly. It will not release a draft
report until at least the end of this year.
“What we’d like to see is them listening to us, and getting
on board buying properties that need to be bought; they own
property that could be used too,” Hamm told Tyee Solutions
Society, just before stepping into a LAPP committee meeting.
“They can’t help but hear us.
“But are they going to do anything about it, or have they
already made up their minds? Are they just trying to keep us
occupied?… We are well aware things could go that way, (but)
I try to stay openminded. We are there in good faith, and hope
they are too.”
Meanwhile, a months-long picket protest outside the
upscale Pidgin Restaurant in the neighbourhood continues.
Two activists have been arrested, including Coalition of
Progressive Electors (COPE) executive committee member Kim
Hearty last week.
Some business-owners and the Gastown Gazette blog have
claimed the protests are linked to a string of crimes in east
Vancouver, including arson, vandalism and theft, for which a
group calling itself the Anti-Gentrification Front took credit
online.
Jang said “extremists” and “special interest groups” on
any side of the debate should not direct the work of the area
planning process, which he hopes will produce a draft report
before the end of this year.
“It’s been an arduous process for all participants, on
all sides,” Jang said. “The aim is to provide a balanced
neighbourhood, one where nobody who’s poor is displaced,
but also where there is opportunity for people to move in
as well… We’re not about extremes. Some people are very
frustrated with the extremists; some think we’re not extreme
enough.”
73
Study Details
Canada’s ‘Perfect
Storm’ Housing
Problem
Eroding incomes and plunging rental stock leave
380,600 households in 'severe' need.
By David P. Ball
New research into Canada’s housing crisis has yielded some
disturbing conclusions, including findings that 200,000 Canadians
experience homelessness every year, and three-quarters of that
group is forced to stay in shelters at some point.
Researchers released their State of Homelessness in Canada
2013 report yesterday, billing it as the first comprehensive look
at a growing problem on a national scale. The document also
concludes that 380,600 Canadian households are in “severe
housing need,” and that on any given night there are 30,000
homeless across the country.
The crisis is particularly acute for aboriginal people, as well
as gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth, the report
found.
“This is the first time we’ve ever delivered a comprehensive
attempt to quantify homelessness in the country,” said coauthor Tim Richter, president & CEO of the Canadian Alliance
to End Homelessness, which commissioned the study.
“The worrying thing is, the numbers may actually be a lot
higher than we’re estimating… You see eroding incomes for
the poorest Canadians, and 10 per cent of households living
in poverty. That’s very worrying. Homelessness is a lot bigger
than who shows up in the shelters and on the streets.”
How Vancouver stacks up
Once a student hostel, Vancouver’s Dunsmuir House is currently a supportive
housing project run by BC Housing. Photo by laniwurm in Your BC: The
Tyee’s Photo Pool.
Stephen Gaetz, director of York University’s Canadian
Homelessness Research Network, told Tyee Solutions
Society that Vancouver deserves credit for its “interesting
and innovative” approaches to the housing crisis, including
implementing a “Housing First” strategy, where some
chronically homeless are provided with stable housing and
support services in a more holistic way.
Vision Vancouver’s promises to end street homelessness
by 2015 also earned kudos from the report’s co-author. But
with many experiencing hidden homelessness, such as couchsurfing, as well as long-term emergency shelter use, the city
still faces many challenges which do not end simply by getting
people off the streets, he added.
“It’s been very successful in reducing street homelessness
— not the entire problem, but at least it helps people sleeping
outdoors,” Gaetz said. “The approach in Vancouver is different
than in other places; your housing solutions often involve
housing people in single buildings, rather than a scattered
approach.
“But Vancouver’s affordability problems are the spanner in
the works there.”
According to The Economist magazine, Vancouver is the
most unaffordable city in North America and one of the most
expensive in the world. But homelessness, compounded by
declining incomes, is “plaguing” cities across Canada. Gaetz
argued that despite the high numbers reported in this year’s
State of Housing research, the number of people impacted by
the crisis may be even greater than reported.
“What makes it even scarier is that we were being as
cautious as possible,” he said. “It doesn’t help to overstate the
problem. We were really looking at the bottom end; it’s likely
much higher.
75
“The building industry has shifted from building
apartments to building condos. We’ve seen that across the
country,” he said. “The supply of low-cost rental housing has
diminished at the same time that incomes have diminished.
It’s the perfect storm.”
‘We need better data’
The study is the first report-card style overview of a
growing problem in cities across the country, Gaetz said,
adding that his organization and co-researchers at the
Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness hope to issue a State
of Homelessness every year.
The root causes of homelessness in Canada, such as
structural factors and the federal government’s axing of the
national housing strategy 20 years ago, are “fairly well”
understood, Gaetz said. But few attempts have been made to
improve country-wide data, as this report claims.
“For a long time, we’ve relied on bumbling along in an
ad hoc way,” he said. “We need good numbers and program
evaluations so we can understand their effectiveness. We need
a consistent strategy across Canada. The U.S. does it every
year, but across Canada there are different counts, different
methodologies. We need better data.”
One ongoing problem the report identifies is the increasing
reliance on emergency shelters as a solution to homelessness.
Those temporary services were never intended as a longterm fix to the problem, Gaetz said. In the end, shelters wind
up costing significantly more in services such as health care,
mental health and policing.
The York University researcher likened the homelessness
crisis to a disaster such as the raging Okanagan forest fires
which pushed 45,000 residents from their homes in 2003. But
the difference, he said, is that few would tolerate a failure to
solve the housing loss after 10 years, yet homelessness persists.
“We’re not denying there will always be crises that
push people out of their homes,” he said. “The problem of
homelessness is that we keep people mired in that problem
year after year.
“Imagine going back to Kelowna today and there still being
people living in hockey rinks. You’d think, ‘Wow, we’ve done
something wrong!’ That’s how I see homelessness. We’re using
the emergency shelter system, which was only designed for
emergencies, and it’s become permanent housing for people
who are homeless. It’s inhumane.”
A Housing First approach
That’s why one of the report’s key recommendations is to
expand the Housing First approach, which has been tested
successfully in Vancouver, Gaetz said.
Such a strategy has proven successful, because when
an at-risk person “touches the system” — for instance, by
accessing an emergency shelter, being released from hospital,
or interacting with police — the whole system responds, rather
76
than having that person just move from shelter to shelter, he
said.
Housing First’s integrated systems can work in any
community, Gaetz argued.
“If you take most chronic, hardcore homeless person with
complex issues, and give them housing and the supports
they need — there’s an investment there — then their health
improves, as well as their engagement with the community.
That’s a strategy we know works… but it needs to be scaled up
and accompanied by investment in expanding the affordable
housing supply.”
Richter agreed that the solution to homelessness will
take greater investment from all levels of government,
but explained his report’s ultimate recommendation in
surprisingly simple terms: “Housing cures homelessness,” he
quipped.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to get anywhere
without significant new investment in market rental housing
and social housing,” he added. “There is a fairly serious
housing crisis in our country. The economics show it doesn’t
make financial sense for our country to ignore that problem.”
A Long Way
from Home for
BC Refugees
Jackie Wong examines some of the unique challenges facing
an often-overlooked community: refugees who have fled
violence in other countries, and now struggle to secure a better
life in Canada.
.
Safer from Violence,
Still Seeking a Home
Secure shelter is hard to find for BC refugees.
By Jackie Wong
The sunny sidewalks of south Fraser Street in Vancouver are
full of the casual energy brought out by blue skies and a long
weekend. It’s Good Friday. People crowd the produce markets,
pack the bus stops and fill patios to toast four days off work.
To one young man browsing a produce stand for Red
Delicious apples, bananas and mango juice, the statutory
holiday means little.
Delawar, 27, (he asked that his last name be withheld) is
about ready to give up on his hopes of making a new home for
himself in Vancouver.
His groceries bagged, he takes a side street to the basement
apartment he shares with his roommate Qudratullah, 23, (who
likewise wished his last name be held). Unlike others their age
in the neighbourhood, these guys don’t have big Friday night
plans. Indeed, after a year spent fruitlessly looking for work,
the days have a way of bleeding into each other.
Both are former translators for the Canadian military in
Afghanistan, brought here by the federal government to
start a new life safe from reprisals. But the better life has
proven elusive in Vancouver. Work is non-existent, shelter
unaffordable.
Esther Mang, left, and her son, David. An older son still lives in Myanmar,
which Mang was forced to flee on foot. Photo by Jackie Wong.
Delawar is not alone in his predicament. Poverty and the
constant threat of being put out onto the street dominate the
lives of refugees like him in Metro Vancouver, according to a
2011 Metropolis BC report. The study of precarious housing
and hidden homelessness among new Canadians suggests that
many refugees suffer from low incomes and lack strategies
or resources to advocate for help. As a result, those trying
to put down new roots in Vancouver are often forced into
substandard, overcrowded and unaffordable housing, and are
at the elevated risk of losing their shelter entirely.
Now close to running out of money, Delawar has decided to
move on. On Monday he’ll move to Calgary, a place he’s never
seen.
“I don’t know what will happen there,” Delawar says. “I’ll
try first to find work as a mechanic. Some of my friends living
in Calgary think there’s a lot of jobs [there], so that’s why I’m
moving. Because we are new here in B.C., there are no jobs for
us.”
79
Facing a bleak future in his own country, he willingly
accepted the Canadian government’s offer of refuge, arriving
in Vancouver with hope that his varied experience and
knowledge of English would quickly land him a job and put a
roof over his head.
The federal government provides refugees it sponsors
with transition assistance. Under the federal Resettlement
Assistance Program (RAP), refugees like Delawar and
Qudratullah receive monthly cheques scaled to provincial
social assistance rates. The benefit ends when they find work,
or after a year.
Resettlement assistance, for a while
Vancouver is a city built by immigrants, and Canada has
offered a safe haven to refugees ever since 1776.
The federal government brought Delawar and Qudratullah
to Canada in 2012, designating them under the Convention
Refugees Abroad Class as government-assisted refugees:
people forced to flee their home countries to escape
persecution, war or severe human rights abuses.
The class constitutes the majority of refugees entering
Canada, some 14,500 people a year (see table below). Many
have extensive skilled experience. In addition to working as
a translator in Kandahar for the Canadian Forces, Delawar is
a trained electrical mechanic who worked with the American
Special Forces, and in his early twenties was a sergeant in the
Afghan National Army.
B.C. receives approximately 2,000 refugees each year. The majority are
government-assisted refugees. Source: ISSBC.
Between April 2012 and April 2013, Delawar received $720
a month under RAP. He paid $400 of it for his share of a twobedroom basement apartment — a portion of his income
considered unaffordable by the standards of BC Housing and
the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
Both agencies consider housing beyond affordable reach
if it requires more than 30 per cent of one’s income to secure.
Even though Delawar’s suite at $800 was near the bottom
of Vancouver private market rental rates for two bedrooms,
it nonetheless gobbled up over half — 55 per cent — of his
monthly stipend.
Qudratullah, who came to Canada with his older friend,
worries about how he’ll cover all the rent before he finds a new
roommate. But he understands why Delawar has to go. As a
place to live, he says, Vancouver “is too expensive. We don’t
know why they brought us here.”
That decision was made by Citizenship and Immigration
Canada, which chooses where to place government-assisted
refugees based on their work experience, language community,
and the local availability of settlement services.
Qudratullah is fluent in multiple languages –Afghani,
Pashto, Farsi, Urdu, Punjabi, English — has taken business
administration and computer classes, and most recently
worked alongside Delawar translating for Canadian soldiers
on foot patrol.
In Vancouver, he says, “I gave [out] more than 100 CVs. I
didn’t receive one call from anyone.”
If Delawar has luck finding work in Calgary, Qudratullah
will follow him. “If he says Calgary is good for work, then
I will also move,” he says. “We can’t stay here. We have to
work.”
80
Harder for families
In leaving Vancouver for better prospects in Calgary,
Delawar is following the lead of countless earlier generations
of enterprising new Canadians who kept moving until they
struck opportunity. But what is feasible for a young single man
is less so for a family.
Esther Mang, now 38, and her husband Lianawr, 43, fled
separately in 2006 from their homes in Myanmar, a country of
one of the longest standing military dictatorships in the world.
Myanmar’s army had conscripted Lianawr. When he refused
to carry out some of its barbaric orders, he was tortured
before managing to flee, eventually reaching India. When
soldiers sought Lianawr at the couple’s home, Esther also fled,
escaping overland on foot to India.
By good fortune the pair met up again in New Delhi, where
Lianawr found employment in a radio factory and Esther
as a translator for the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees. The work brought her into contact with
Canadian officials before gaining acceptance for the family as
government-assisted refugees in Canada.
The Mangs arrived in Canada in late 2011 with their infant
son, David. Resettlement Assistance Program workers greeted
them at Vancouver International Airport and took them to
Welcome House — a transitional housing facility downtown
operated by the Immigrant Services Society of BC (ISSBC).
The government-funded agency provides an array of
services to help over 30,000 immigrant clients a year find a
footing in their new country. But beyond offering temporary
accommodation at Welcome House, only one ISSBC staff
position among 365 employees is funded to provide housing
search assistance specifically to government-assisted refugees.
The Mang family managed to rent a one-bedroom
apartment for $850 a month, but it took more than two-thirds
of the $1,218.75 they were receiving through RAP at that time.
After moving three times, they now pay $800 a month for a
small one-bedroom apartment off Kingsway in East Vancouver.
All three sleep in the suite’s single tiny bedroom, a situation
that won’t be feasible as David, now three, grows up.
Stress is ‘difficult to overstate’
Their crowded situation is a common experience for refugee
families. The 2011 Metropolis BC study of such families
in Metro Vancouver showed that most living on federal
RAP assistance were sleeping an average of two people per
bedroom.
Overcrowding, the study’s authors wrote, is just one
consequence of incomes too low to afford larger dwellings.
Other factors include restricted access to subsidized housing,
lack of knowledge about the regional rental market, language
barriers, and vulnerability to abuse from landlords. They
added: “It is difficult to overstate the significance of the stress
experienced by [refugee] focus group participants due to the
challenges they face in the housing market.”
81
UBC geographer and Metropolis BC report co-author Daniel
Hiebert has studied newcomers’ experience with housing for
years. He describes “a mismatch between lived experience and
the way settlement services are funded,” that results in many
newcomers failing to achieve the integration into Canadian
society that the federal government cites as its top priority.
Hiebert considers shelter a critical requirement for new
settlers. But instead of helping refugees secure housing, he
says that service organizations like ISSBC focus too much
on “how Canadian society works. It’s oriented towards
getting people prepared for language instruction and
ultimately citizenship instruction, making sure people get the
wherewithal to get a job.”
“Housing,” he says, “is a side issue.”
ISSBC staffers are well aware of the housing gaps that exist
for newcomers. They’re peddling hard, says ISSBC settlement
services director Chris Friesen, to stretch their limited
resources to better serve the organization’s clientele.
“What we’re trying to do, and the populations we’re
working with — for example, refugee claimants — are not
deemed a priority by the federal government,” Friesen
observes. “They’re not interested in providing the housing
for that population. So we get caught, we fall between the
[funding] cracks because of the population we’ve identified
and prioritized.”
Nonetheless, the Immigrant Services Society is expanding
one of its resources. A new Welcome House centre is being
built in Grandview-Woodland. Some 200 beds will take
the place of the 80 beds currently downtown to address
the immediate housing needs of refugee and immigrant
newcomers. Accommodation will be configured to serve both
singles and families for stays as short as two weeks and as
long as a year. The new regional shelter and service hub for
refugees and other newcomers is expected to open in 2015.
(We’ll explore the new Welcome House in more detail in the
final installment of this series.)
Small victories, lingering regrets
In the meantime, there are small victories to be celebrated.
Since their RAP support ended last December, the Mang family
has become self-supporting. Lianawr makes $1,900 a month
working construction — although 42 per cent of that goes to
rent, still an “unaffordable” level of expenditure, according
to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and BC
Housing.
Esther has more professional qualifications than her
husband — she was a teacher in Myanmar — but has had more
trouble finding employment. A teacher’s salary would bring
in at least $38,894 — but certification in B.C. would require her
to upgrade her education, a luxury she can’t afford. Instead,
she works as a Burmese translator at the Mount Pleasant
Family Centre. She enjoys it, but the $16 an hour she earns for
sporadic on-call shifts doesn’t amount to much.
Watching David, now three, show off his muscle-man
poses and ninja moves on an abandoned couch outside their
82
apartment, Esther thinks about her older son. He was seven
when she was forced to leave him with her older sister in
Myanmar because he was too little to keep pace with Esther as
she escaped. He’s now almost 12.
Few of her neighbours know much about Esther’s life.
Compared to Myanmar or India, she finds her new home
terribly quiet, and Canadian society peculiar in its reserve.
“In Asian countries, we visit each other, we share our
problems, we talk about our experiences,” she says. “Here, it’s
quite different. No chit-chat, nothing.”
On another afternoon, Delawar and Qudratullah’s basement
apartment darkens as the day wanes. Delawar opens his
laptop to look at pictures taken a year earlier in Kandahar.
There are shots of the two friends wearing Canadian military
fatigues, flak jackets dusty with sand. Some show spectacular
expanses of desert. Then come pictures of the two mugging for
the camera with friends, green bottles of beer in hand.
Each photo is looked at for a long time, Delawar explaining
each one in detail. The slideshow ends on a formal studio
portrait of a woman in her mid-twenties with dark eyes,
pretty long hair and fuchsia lipstick. He quickly minimizes the
screen. There’s nothing else to say.
Relying on luck
The Resettlement Assistance Program counts on
government-assisted newcomers to Canada to become
employed, financially self-sufficient and stably housed within
the course of a year — for many that means learning a new
language while fresh from the traumas that forced them to flee
their homes.
Those who reach Canada on their own, relying on this
country’s historically open arms to recognize their claim to be
refugees from an intolerable homeland, can expect even less.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada is emphatic that “the
Government of Canada does not provide shelter for refugee
claimants in Canada,” as a spokesperson wrote in an email in
response to a question about newcomers struggling to afford
housing in the private rental market. They should lean on
the provincial, not the federal government for aid, the email
added.
With Delawar departing for Calgary, Qudratullah checked
out provincial social assistance — and was shocked at the $610
monthly rate for employable singles. Instead, he’s doubling up
on his search for work.
He says he’s grateful for the help he has received so far,
worried about his future prospects, but also optimistic. “In
Islam, we call it luck,” he says. “If luck is not with you now,
it’s going to be okay one day.”
Canada may be a safer home for Delawar, Qudratullah and
the Mang family than the troubled countries they have left
behind. But while this country may happily be free of violence,
abuse or intimidation, the haven it provides still stops far short
of secure, affordable or sufficient shelter for many.
83
Bonded by Shared
Horrors, Refugees
Find Housing
Solutions
An exceptional Achehnese community in BC
works towards prosperity. By Jackie Wong
In an alley behind a run-down noodle shop off Kingsway in
East Vancouver, a group of men in T-shirts, jeans, and flip-flops
stands smoking, laughing, and talking among parked cars. A
piece of hand-painted plywood mounted high on the garage
door behind them displays the name of the group, the Achehnese
Canadian Community Society. Its members comprise Canada’s
first generation of newcomers from Acheh Province, Indonesia,
a troubled, violent region on the northern tip of the island of
Sumatra, west of Malaysia.
The 15 or so men gathered in the alley are relatively young.
Most are in their mid-thirties, part of approximately 200
families from Acheh province living in Metro Vancouver.
About 60 of those families contribute $20 a month each to
help pay rent for the Community Society’s basement meeting
space, which features a large common room for Muslim faith
practices, and for sitting together in wide circles to socialize
and share information.
Most importantly, they come here to support one another.
They have all lived through unspeakable events that forced
them out of their home country. Now they grapple with
new challenges. Chief among them are the gaps between the
incomes they earn, mostly in the construction or food-service
industry, and how much it costs to put a roof over their heads
— even at the bottom end of the rental market.
Abdul Andib, right with friends Muhazier Bahrum, left, and Faisal Aminsyah,
centre, at the Achehnese Canadian Community Society hall make a “wish-list”
for collective action in 2013. Photo by Jackie Wong.
Their housing and income struggles are similar to other
refugees in the Lower Mainland, who commonly struggle with
poverty, low incomes, and precarious or substandard housing.
But few other refugees share the unique solidarity of the
Achehnese community.
The people mingling at the Community Society today are
among thousands of Achehnese who fled their home province
in 2003. In May that year, after eleventh-hour negotiations
over demands for local independence failed, some 50,000
Indonesian soldiers and police imposed martial law in Acheh,
launching a large-scale crackdown on members or supporters
of the separatist Free Acheh Movement, known in Indonesia as
Gerakan Acheh Merdeka, or GAM.
Indonesian forces routinely singled out young Achehnese
men on suspicion that they were among GAM’s estimated
5,000 armed members or supporters. Suspects were beaten,
arbitrarily detained, forced to disappear, or killed. If men
failed to cooperate, the military went after their families.
Abdul Halim Andib describes his country at the time as a
“war zone” where it soon became impossible to live.
He fled by boat across the busy Malacca Strait to nearby
Malaysia. But the refuge it offered was scant. “There’s
no government,” is how Andib puts it. What Malaysia’s
government lacks is a system to receive or protect asylum
seekers.
Among the lucky ones, Andib found shelter in a refugee
camp. Other Achehnese in Malaysia were less fortunate. They
faced police extortion and extreme poverty. Some were even
deported back to the violent conflict they had risked their lives
to escape.
85
A Canadian welcome
Acknowledging the unbearable situation for Achehnese
refugees in Malaysia, the federal government, at the time
under Liberal Party of Canada political management, stepped
in.
“Canadian Immigration supported us from the UNHCR
[United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] in
Malaysia,” recalls Safrizal Dulysah. He and Andib both
reached Vancouver in June 2004; they were 25.
“Usually, the men or the husbands were in refugee camps
in Malaysia, so we came here first,” Dulysah, now 34, adds.
“Then, we supported our wives and some kids. They came
here after that.”
The Canadian federal government supported families
fleeing Acheh as landed immigrants, not as refugees. They
received permanent residency as soon as they arrived. As is
the custom for other government-assisted refugees, they spent
their first two weeks in Canada at the Immigrant Services
Society of BC’s Welcome House in downtown Vancouver.
“They gave single men $500 welfare for rent, but a family,
maybe more,” Dulysah recalls. “Enough for rent and food.”
Armed with the barest essentials, the Achehnese worked
steadily to rebuild their lives in Canada. They searched for
jobs. They studied English and became fluent speakers. They
rented what apartments they could afford to accommodate
their growing families.
Nine years later, Dulysah is the father of three children and
works as a finishing carpenter. He pays $1,100 a month for a
two-bedroom apartment in Burnaby for his five-person family.
Their success, community members say, comes from the
fact that they have each other. Early on, the men and women
who fled Acheh’s violent divisions
took steps to keep connected and
support each other, even when
prohibitive housing costs forced
them to live in far-flung spots
across the Lower Mainland.
“As soon as we came here, we
thought we might need to stay
together, so we decided to rent
Father of three Dulysah: “Right
a place,” Andib says, explaining
now, it’s very hard to pay rent.”
the origins of the East Vancouver
gathering space. “Because we are
Muslim, we needed a place to gather together.”
Only a year after most had arrived, the group registered the
Achehnese Canadian Community Society with the provincial
government in 2005.
Approaching their tenth anniversary in Canada next year,
the community has much to be proud of in addition to its
modest meeting hall. All its members have learned English.
They’re employed and self-supporting. They don’t make use of
income assistance from the provincial government.
86
‘They won’t cry for help’
But the Achehnese community’s record of steadfast mutual
support of one another is exceptional.
“There’s a popular myth that in newcomer communities,
everybody takes care of everyone. I hear that all the time,”
says Stephen Gaetz, director of the Canadian Homelessness
Research Network (CHRN) and an associate dean of York
University’s education faculty.
Behind the popular ideas that ethnic immigrant
communities take care of themselves, he says, is the harsher
reality that people of all backgrounds face setbacks, job loss,
financial difficulty — and struggle to keep a roof over their
head.
“Newcomer homelessness is a very complicated and
important issue,” Gaetz says. “It’s not all hugs. Issues around
settlement, and the breakdowns that can happen: breakdowns
with refugees, breakdowns in families, moving with family,
reunification, things like that can happen.”
A 2005 study for the National Secretariat on Homelessness,
conducted by MOSAIC, a settlement services agency, and the
UBC geography department, examined relative and absolute
homelessness among immigrants, refugees, and refugee
claimants in Greater Vancouver. It found that newcomers’
success in finding housing relies heavily on the social capital
of ethnic or cultural communities that already reside here.
The youthful Achehnese community, determined to stick
together, built their own social capital.
“Something that I really appreciate about the Achehnese
community is the way that they come together, [to] make
decisions as a community,” says Byron Cruz, a Downtown
Eastside healthcare worker who has been working with the
Achehnese community since its members arrived in 2004.
But while it has unity on its side, the community still
faces significant challenges, Cruz says. “Despite the fact they
are not on social assistance, and they are working so hard,
housing is an issue for them. For a hardworking person in the
construction industry, they have a hard time paying the rent.”
And not every refugee has a ready-made community of
people from their home country to buffer their landing in
Canada. “While established ethno-cultural communities may
have the ability to ‘take care of their own,’” MOSAIC found,
“Other groups who lack extensive social networks, including
recently arrived individuals and refugee claimants, may fall
through the cracks.”
Even for those with support, success is relative. “The extent
of relative and absolute homelessness among immigrants,
refugees, and refugee claimants is less than would be expected
given the income levels of these groups,” the MOSAIC report
reads. “This is not to say that the delineated groups are well
housed.”
Social networks may keep newcomers off the street, but the
alternative for many is to live in crowded, often substandard
homes, with family members double-bunking in living rooms
in what small spaces they can afford.
87
Sherman Chan was the principal investigator on that
2005 report. In his view, refugees will continue to be poorly
sheltered until people start speaking out. But the settlement
services director of MOSAIC says that outcry won’t come
from refugee communities themselves, even those who are
struggling. “They won’t cry for help,” Chan says.
“It’s unlikely they will do anything big to voice their
concerns or to really deal with the issues that they are
suffering from,” he says. “I think that’s always the challenge,
in terms of becoming more visible and voicing out the
concerns, pushing the policy makers.”
As Chan sees it, policy makers are “paying more attention
to the aboriginal homelessness issue, the youth homelessness
issue, seniors’ homelessness issues, [and] mental health,
because they are more visible.
“Many of the ethnic communities, they tend to
accommodate themselves, couch-surfing, or they’ll stay with
somebody’s family for a while and then move to another one,
or they may be housing in a really overcrowded environment,”
Chan says. “So they are not coming out.”
Aiming higher
The Achehnese community is exceptional in that as well.
Proud of its achievements to date, the group is eager to aim
higher.
“When we started working, we got paid very low [sic],”
says Dulysah. “We started from $10 without experience and
without English.” He improved his own circumstances slowly
over time, forcing himself to study English in the evenings
after work, finding new work through his community of
friends.
But while everyone’s found some sort of shelter in the
private market, Achehnese families are scattered in various
configurations across Burnaby, Surrey, and East Vancouver.
Many struggle with affordability and inadequate space.
Andib, like Dulysah a finishing carpenter, makes $3,000
a month. He lives in Surrey with his wife and two children,
sharing a one-bedroom apartment that rents for $850 — just
barely affordable by national standards that dictate shelter
should consume no more than 30 per cent of one’s income.
“Right now,” Dulysah volunteers, “it’s very hard to pay
rent.” He wants something better that he can rely on.
The same is true for others in the group. Once again, they’ve
come together through the Achehnese Canadian Community
Society, this time to draft a community “wish-list” for 2013.
Exploring alternative housing possibilities is high on the list.
There are as yet no concrete plans for how to proceed, but
Dulysah says some ideas have been floated already. “What we
want,” Dulysah says, “is a place for the community [to gather]
and a co-op building or rent-to-own for life.”
The dream is for Achehnese families to live in the same
co-operative housing complex, or another such affordable,
community-oriented space they co-own or rent to own. Ideally,
88
there would be enough room for the kids as they grow up, as
many Achehnese children are now double- or triple-bunking
with siblings or parents in small apartments.
Most importantly, secure long-term, affordable housing
would free the group’s energies to pursue ambitions that
extend beyond housing innovations. They want to build
a social enterprise, for example, where those employed as
carpenters donate their skills to the community at large.
With characteristic solidarity, the community’s 2013
wish-list also includes doing more for parents, siblings and
cousins left behind in Acheh. For the many who did not flee, a
destructive tsunami on Boxing Day, 2004, added homelessness
to the existing miseries of the troubled region.
Like many others, Andib’s small budget for shelter and
other household expenses in Canada is stretched further by the
amounts he regularly sends back to family in Acheh province.
“I’m really proud that we have come together,” Andib says.
He looks around at his friends, who nod. “We have close
friendships, and we have stayed together.”
It’s a good bet the same spirit will find a way to secure
affordable housing too.
Fleeing Danger,
Refugee ShelterSeekers Find
Exploitation
One Victoria non-profit's efforts to assist
vulnerable renters offers hope.
By Jackie Wong
Amelia’s family was large and influential in the West Asian
country where she grew up. That brought her the opportunity,
rare for a woman in the Arab nation, to study medicine. (Fearing
for her safety, she asked not to reveal her real name or home
country.) Although not a doctor, she was still the woman whom
friends and relatives would call during their final moments of
pregnancy. “I helped them give birth,” she says. Now 48, she
adds, two generations of children “were born in my hands.”
Her friendships with women, particularly those who
accomplished the extraordinary feat of going to medical
school, felt deliciously radical, Amelia recalls. All of her life,
both men and women told her she was stupid, shameful and
worthless, she says: “The female is not a respected person in
our society, even if she is a doctor or a professor.”
Brothers and male cousins abused her physically,
emotionally and financially for decades, Amelia says. When
she went against their wishes, she adds, they would admit her
to a psychiatric hospital. There she met other women similarly
confined: in one stay, she encountered a gynaecologist whose
son had admitted her under similar circumstances.
The sunny view from Victoria’s Immigrant and Refugee Society. It’s hard to
find shelter without basics like ID or the word for ‘tenant.’ Photo by Jackie
Wong.
Amelia’s last confinement in a mental institution became the
first step in her escape plan. A monthly pension provided her
with some cash that her hospitalization allowed her to save,
along with the passport she had acquired and hidden from
prying family members. She also found help.
“The nurses there, they were feeling sympathy towards
me,” she says. When her release date arrived, one persuaded a
hospital driver not to take her home.
“There is one hotel [in my home city] that allows females to
live without [a] divorce,” Amelia says. “I told them, take me
there.”
As soon as she could, Amelia bought a plane ticket and fled
her native country. Four months later, she presented herself
at the Canadian embassy in Abu Dhabi, a desperate, fuzzy
picture of Victoria, B.C. in her mind. She’d visited that faraway place with family in 1997.
Others were there applying for investment visas that would
give them permanent residency in Canada. But with only
$5,000 to her name, Amelia was eligible only for a visitor’s visa
that would let her stay in Canada for up to six months. Making
a formal refugee claim, she says, didn’t enter her mind. “I told
them, ‘That’s okay. I will go.’”
Who’s a ‘refugee’?
Although Amelia’s flight from pervasive physical
maltreatment, financial exploitation and incarceration may
seem the very definition of a “refugee,” in Canadian law and
policy the word has a more specific and narrow meaning.
Under the six-decades old U.N. Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees, Canada promises not to send people back
to home countries where they may be persecuted on the basis
90
of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social
group or political opinion.” Gender, however, is not on the list.
Other laws and agreements distinguish “migrants” — those
seeking to enter Canada solely for economic advantage —
from “refugees.”
The federal government prefers to determine who meets
its test to be considered a refugee before they come to
Canada. Those who pass that test arrive as governmentassisted refugees entitled to settlement assistance and a small
income during their first year in Canada. People who arrive
before making a claim, totaling nearly 700 in the first third
of this year, are known as “inland” refugees. They receive no
assistance and are subject to different rules. Toughened up
in 2012, those rules include for many the threat of detention
while their claim is assessed.
Amelia’s visitor’s visa and one-way ticket landed her at
Vancouver International Airport on a cold November Saturday
in 2012. Borrowing quarters for the payphone in the arrivals
terminal, she called the only person she knew in Canada, her
uncle in Victoria.
He begrudgingly let her stay at his home. But he made it
clear she wasn’t welcome. “From the first day I arrived in
Canada, they were treating me badly,” she says. “I cried.” His
family members repeatedly threatened to “teach her a lesson,”
and told her she should feel sorry for leaving the happy life
they were convinced she led back home, she recalls.
After putting up with her extended family’s hostility and
verbal abuse for three months, Amelia found a landlord’s
name in a magazine, called her, threw her belongings in three
garbage bags and left.
The landlord charged $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom
apartment. Amelia was still collecting $1,500 a month in a
pension from her government, but was left with only $500 for
the rest of her monthly living expenses. “Maybe she thought
I was a very rich woman. I don’t know,” she says of the
landlord. “She treated me like a bloodsucker.”
On Canada Day, Amelia moved again, this time to a suite
where, by her account, a neighbour had said she could stay for
free. The day she moved in, the neighbour demanded $925 a
month in rent. Meanwhile, Amelia’s family back home has cut
off her pension.
Now running out of money as well as options for a place to
live, and with her six-month visitor’s visa expired, Amelia is
working with a lawyer to make an inland refugee claim.
The most vulnerable renters
For those like Amelia whose status in Canada is uncertain
at best, exploitative landlords are a common story. Still reeling
from the traumas that forced them to flee their home countries,
forced into the legal margins and typically without income,
social connections or knowledge of the B.C. laws that might
otherwise protect them, they make ripe targets for exploitation.
“Finding housing is very difficult, especially if you are not
Canadian,” Amelia says. “I’ve been forced to live in places
where I don’t feel comfortable.
91
“I’m new to the culture, environment, community.
Everything. I need at least five years in order to [become]
familiar. So during these five years, should I have to be a
homeless person, or live in a house where I feel not more than
10 per cent comfortable?”
A 2011 Metropolis BC report on Canadian newcomers’
housing described Amelia’s experience as common among
refugees. “There is not space in this report,” its authors wrote,
“to describe the many abuses residents were forced to put up
with.”
That certainly rings true for Carlos, 33. He and his wife have
moved around Sidney four times since they arrived in B.C. as
refugee claimants from Colombia six years ago. Before that,
he’d been studying marketing in Connecticut, while she was
working as a psychologist with poor children at risk of being
recruited into violent gangs.
Then Carlos got an emergency phone call from home.
“[Certain] people didn’t like my wife’s job. She was taking the
future workforce out of their [the gangs'] hands,” he says. “My
wife’s work was to give them more choices, help them with
education, help them get into trade schools.” Gang leaders
threatened to kill her.
So she joined Carlos in the United States, and they made
their way to Canada and submitted a refugee claim.
They had extended family to stay with at first, but it was
important to Carlos that the couple find a space of their own.
With so few choices, he remembers living in suites he knew
were illegal and for a while was stuck with half an entire
home’s hydro bill while only occupying the basement.
After a hearing before the Immigration and Refugee Board
of Canada, which accepted their refugee claim, Carlos and his
wife are landed immigrants now. He’s working as a janitor
while taking pre-med classes at Camosun College. With her
psychologist’s training, his wife is having a hard time finding
work on Vancouver Island that matches her professional
qualifications. She is now following some leads on working
with seniors.
Life is stable for Carlos and his wife now, but they are
reliving the tensions of being refugee claimants through his
parents. Carlos’s father worked in human rights in Colombia
and fled with Carlos’s mother under threats to his life. The
older couple is sleeping on their son’s couch, preparing for a
refugee hearing of their own in late August. (Out of concern
not to affect their chances, Carlos also asked that his name be
changed for this story.)
“It’s scary,” Carlos says, of the tense anticipation a claimant
feels. “I’m here, but am I going to stay? You’re working. You
have your apartment, your stuff, your computer, your life. But
it’s a really sour feeling.”
Many unaware of rights
Neither Amelia nor Carlos knew that they have rights under
B.C.’s residential tenancy system. That’s a common occurrence
among new immigrants and other vulnerable groups — and a
92
weakness that Ready to Rent BC, a two-year-old Victoria-based
non-profit, is trying to remedy with information, resources and
community connections, to help both singles and families find
and keep rental housing.
Kim Shelley, Ready to Rent’s acting coordinator, used to
facilitate rental workshops at the Victoria Immigrant and
Refugee Centre Society. She found that newcomers to Canada
in her workshops shared a host of similar challenges. Most
faced difficulty communicating with prospective landlords,
both in writing and in person. Some weren’t even familiar
with the words “landlord” or “tenant,” let alone ideas like
“arbitration” and “dispute resolution.” When asked for a
credit history, references or a rental history in B.C., most
refugees had little to provide.
Ready to Rent provides a 12-hour course, based on one
pioneered in Portland, Ore., to educate renters in the Capital
Regional District on their rights and responsibilities and arm
them with information and a renter’s portfolio to take to
prospective landlords. “BC Housing takes the certificate from
program grads to act as landlord references,” Shelley says.
“And part of the exercise is to write a letter of explanation
for any of the blanks that might be on the application form,”
including explanations for why a renter might have no credit
or rental history in Canada.
Ready to Rent’s course might have helped Amelia and
Carlos during their first days in B.C., had they known about it.
“Every time we talk about a resource,” Shelley notes, people
say, “‘Oh, I wish I knew about that five years ago’. One [need]
that stands out for me is how to get the word out before they
take their first plunge into the rental market.”
Company for shelter seekers
Were there funds, Ready to Rent’s coordinator would like to
provide one-on-one support workers to accompany vulnerable
shelter-seekers in the Victoria region on their search for
housing.
In Vancouver, Andrew Kuipers is already providing that
rare assistance. The soft-spoken and approachable recent
masters in social work graduate is the settlement coordinator
at Kinbrace House, a six-unit transitional housing facility for
refugee claimants. He’s also taken on the mission of personally
accompanying clients to apartment viewings.
When their English is limited, he’ll phone prospective
landlords on their behalf to set up an apartment viewing. He’ll
drive the renter and family members to the apartment in his
small car to walk with them through a suite. He’ll coach them
on the ins-and-outs of application forms, lease agreements and
damage deposits.
Located on Venables Street, off Commercial Drive in East
Vancouver, Kinbrace is designed to house refugee claimants
for up to three months while they find their footing in Canada,
get paperwork together and prepare for their hearings before
the Immigration and Refugee Board. The residence charges
$375 a month for a room — keyed to shelter allowance rates
for a person on income assistance. Once the three months
93
is up, or they’re ready to take a swing at the private rental
market, it’s one of Kuiper’s many responsibilities to help them
find permanent housing.
The task is increasingly difficult. “When Kinbrace started
in 1998, everybody was sort of moving out to this [nearby]
apartment building or that apartment building. It was easy
and there were no real problems,” Kuipers says.
No more. Rising rents are pricing would-be residents out
of the Commercial Drive neighbourhood. “It’s way, way, too
expensive, especially on income-assistance rates for a single
person,” Kuipers says. The hunt for affordable housing for his
clients is sending him on long drives out from East Vancouver
to Surrey, New Westminster and Burnaby.
Kuipers cites two other barriers his refugee clients run up
against repeatedly. “The first [challenge] is somehow bringing
up [that] whoever it is, is on welfare,” he says. “Once the
[landlords] hear that, I think they quickly pigeonhole who this
person is or what they’re about.”
The second barrier, Kuipers says, stands in the way of
“families with kids. Lots of landlords just don’t want kids.
Especially a family of five in a two-bedroom. They think that’s
too many. But that’s the money that we have to work with.”
The Metropolis BC report on newcomer housing found
that newcomers often felt driven to desperate measures to
find suitable rental shelter, including lying to landlords and
moving frequently. “These buttressing mechanisms tend to
be reactive,” the report dryly noted, “and, as is the case with
living in overcrowded conditions to address affordability
issues, do not ultimately lead to improved housing outcomes.”
While it paints a bleak picture of newcomers “making
do” in a rental market that provides few options, the report
describes even those as increasingly precarious. Metro
Vancouver’s most affordable rental housing stock is shrinking,
even as the number of more expensive rentals goes up.
“Although the total stock of rental housing grew by over
eight thousand units between 2009 and 2010, most were in the
form of investor owned condos and single-family homes,” the
report reads. “Losses from the rental inventory tend to be at
the bottom end of the spectrum, while new additions tend to
be in the upper parts; therefore, while the rental inventory may
be stable or even growing, it is shrinking at the lower end.”
More than a bed
Personal connections and a community were two of the
things Amelia longed for most during her first few months in
Canada, she confided.
Had she arrived in Vancouver instead of Victoria and
promptly made a refugee claim, she might have become
acquainted with a supportive network of friends from the
weekly community dinners and social events that Kinbrace
House hosts. “We try to integrate people into systems and then
connect people into meaningful, supportive relationships,”
Kuipers says.
94
“This idea of welcoming people and being the first to put
out your hand, it’s something I hadn’t thought about so much
before working here,” he admits. “But I think a lot of people
are looking to be connected. And I think as Canadians, and
Vancouverites, sometimes we don’t do a really good job of
this. It happens in some pockets; the Commercial Drive area is
fairly good for that. But that would go a long ways in a lot of
different areas.”
A few blocks south of Kinbrace House, construction is
slated to begin this winter on a new community resource and
housing hub for refugee newcomers, at East 11th Avenue and
Victoria Drive. The Immigrant Service Society of BC’s new
Welcome House Centre will be the first of its kind in the world.
A Home for Refugees
‘Caught In-Between’
One-of-a-kind Welcome House centre could offer
stable shelter for marginalized newcomers.
By Jackie Wong
The evening was warm and bright as three dozen members
of the African immigrant community solemnly filed into the
Dodson Hotel on East Hastings Street last Thursday. They were
there to remember John “Mudi” Salilar, a dear friend whom many
considered to be a hero, the “Robin Hood” of the community.
It’s a perception that might have surprised those from
outside his community who knew Salilar. And it reveals a
reality for an unknown number of refugees who come to
Canada fleeing horror, only to wind up at the very margins of
their new society. For them, precarious shelter becomes both
symptom and cause of a discouraging cycle.
Salilar fled Liberia by boat at 18 and arrived in Canada as
an undocumented refugee in 1986. He died on July 12 at 45,
unable to recover from injuries sustained after people beat
him up at the Balmoral Hotel last month, leaving him bleeding
from the head. As his friend Jean de Dieu Hakizimana
describes it, he was “kicked like a dog.”
Salilar was homeless for the decades he spent in Vancouver,
staying with friends, sleeping on the streets, and spending
considerable time in jail — he was well known to police, and
incarcerated 57 times for shoplifting. But his minor crimes
belied a generous nature. He routinely stole food, alcohol, and
cigarettes to give to those he felt needed it most, primarily
single mothers and low-income African immigrants.
Artist’s rendering of the planned Welcome House transitional shelter and
centre for refugee settlement services. Refugee newcomers form a significant
part of the homeless population. Photo courtesy of ISSBC /Henriquez
Partners Architects.
“He really [meant] a lot to people in Vancouver, Surrey,
Richmond. People who are low-income [and] don’t have
food, drink,” Hakizimana says. “They called him Johnny the
Supplier. Anything he had, he gave away.”
Going from place to place on his delivery runs, Salilar
attracted a strong network of people who both relied on him
and loved him. He also had other ambitions. “He wanted to
know how to read the newspaper and to speak English. He’d
never been in school. He wanted, so bad, to go to school,”
Hakizimana says. “He wanted to change his life. He was
tired.”
But change wasn’t easy. And sadly, it never came for Salilar.
ID, driver’s license, ‘he didn’t have it’
Hakizimana, through his work as the founder of
Neighborhood International, a non-profit aimed at
empowering newcomer individuals, families, and
communities, tried to help Salilar where he could. He got
Salilar onto income assistance — for the first time in his life —
in January this year.
The two had met as young men in 1998, a year after
Hakizimana had arrived in Canada as a refugee claimant
fleeing the fallout of the Rwandan genocide.
“He had no social insurance number, no identification
except the papers from jail,” Hakizimana says. His friend’s
lack of identifying documents, his limited language ability,
and Salilar’s own reluctance to deal with government officials
(itself a sign of trauma) made it especially difficult for him to
find a foothold that would allow him to escape the streets.
“When he [wanted] a room, they [asked] for social
insurance number. He didn’t have it. They ask for driver’s
96
license, he didn’t have it. The ID all Canadians have, he didn’t
have it,” Hakizimana says. “It was impossible for him.”
Salilar never was formally accepted into Canada. Instead
he simply stayed, an undocumented refugee. At various times
in his life, he was among the visible street homeless and the
more nebulous “hidden homeless”— those who aren’t sleeping
on the street or in shelters but staying temporarily, sometimes
precariously, with friends or family with no permanent place
to call their home. Like other newcomers in his situation,
he often resorted to emergency shelter, lacking the means to
house himself.
“For refugee claimants, of which there are upwards of
2,000 that come in to British Columbia [annually], they arrive,
in many cases, essentially homeless,” says Chris Friesen,
settlement services director of the Immigrant Services Society
of BC (ISSBC), the province’s largest immigrant-serving
agency.
A ‘huge need’
The ISSBC operates a downtown Vancouver transitional
housing facility called Welcome House, which has some 80
beds. The 800 to 900 government-assisted refugees coming to
B.C. each year are brought to Welcome House, leaving little
room for refugee claimants.
“We are mandated, whether we have space or not, to find
[government-assisted refugees] temporary accommodation
— temporary being two-week accommodation — while we
support their search for longer-term rental housing,” Friesen
says.
That becomes harder in the waning months of the calendar
year, “between mid-September and mid-December,” he says.
“Because the target of government-assisted refugees is done on
a calendar-year basis, often in the rush to meet the targets, we
have upwards of 40 to 50 per cent of the annual target arrive in
the last quarter of the calendar year. And so we often have to
go to nearby hotels on temporary basis.”
With government-assisted refugees getting preference,
the modest, 28-year-old Welcome House facility can’t always
accommodate everyone it’s designed to serve. “In the past
year, there were well over 800 people — refugees without legal
status — that required emergency shelter. And we were not
able to meet that need,” Friesen says. “It is a huge need.”
It’s a population he refers to as “uncounted homelessness,”
individuals who fly under the radar of conventional homeless
documentation and tallying methods, chiefly the Metro
Vancouver and City of Vancouver’s homeless counts.
Vancouver’s few refugee-serving agencies do keep some
record of local newcomers who are either homeless or at risk of
homelessness.
Between 2011 and 2012, the Inland Refugee Society placed
190 newcomers into emergency housing, including hotels,
shelters, private homes, or housing provided by faith groups.
During that same period, Settlement Orientation Services
reported 60 to 70 per cent of its clients — 590 to 689 people —
needed emergency shelter because they had nowhere to live.
97
And then, in 2011 Metro Vancouver Regional Homeless Count
noted in its tally — widely understood to be an undercount
of the total number of homeless people in the region — that
58 homeless people surveyed described themselves as new
Canadians.
In that light, it is possible as many as 1,000 people a year
— or half of all of those arriving in B.C. each year in search
of a new and safer life — fall into the statistical gap of the
uncounted, or “hidden” homeless. This is familiar information
to settlement workers like Friesen. But to most everyone else,
“the issue of homelessness among newcomers isn’t understood
and not widely documented,” he says.
“The [regional homeless] count that’s done annually
doesn’t, in my opinion, do enough outreach to non-English
speaking people who are homeless,” Friesen says. Among
other things, non-English-speaking refugees, like Salilar, may
be reluctant to participate in a survey where the language
spoken is not their own.
“Also, there are issues of honour, shame, vulnerability,” he
adds. “Mistrust of how this information is captured and how
it will be used, whether it will have any impact on their claim
process if they’re refugee claimants. It’s more complex than
doing a count with Canadian-born individuals.”
Newcomers require more assistance than others, but
relatively little is known about their housing situation, or lack
thereof. “The issue of homelessness among newcomers isn’t
understood and not widely documented,” Friesen says. “We’re
trying to spray paint the invisible man.”
Shelter key to settling
Previous installments of this series found that newcomers,
particularly refugee claimants, are greatly helped in their
settlement success if they receive some concerted assistance
when it comes to finding and securing housing.
The authors of 2011′s Metropolis BC study of newcomer
housing experiences conclude their 132-page report with
this: “maintaining suitable, adequate, and affordable housing
requires more intensive assistance than simply providing ‘how
to’ instructions. Therefore, just as employment resource centres
have been created to assist unemployed people with finding
and maintaining employment, it would be beneficial to have a
housing resource centre where newcomers who are struggling
in the housing market can access effective assistance over a
longer time frame than settlement workers are able to provide
given their limited mandate and busy schedules.”
ISSBC is trying to respond. It has plans for a new and
expanded Welcome House, with some 200 beds in 28 reconfigurable units to accommodate singles and families
of different sizes. The ambitious scope also includes an
onsite health clinic, a refugee trauma support and treatment
centre, child-minding, a youth drop-in space, food bank and
community kitchen, a law clinic, multilingual support staff,
a teaching facility linked to local post-secondary institutions,
and ISSBC’s corporate service offices.
So far the agency has lined up funding toward the
anticipated $24-million project from a $1-million capital grant
98
from Vancity Credit Union, equity leveraged from selling
the current Welcome House location at Seymour and Drake
streets downtown, pre-existing revenue transfers from all three
levels of government, and donations from private foundations
and individuals. The City of Vancouver gave ISSBC a 60year lease on land at 2610 Victoria Drive, in East Vancouver’s
Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood near John Hendry Park,
for $1 a year.
Still, Friesen says, “We have a shortfall, at the moment, of
between $4 and $5 million for the project,” Friesen says. “The
housing component is essentially the largest shortfall area.”
ISSBC has tried unsuccessfully to secure funding from both
the Streetohome Foundation and BC Housing. “[Streetohome]
did not see a clear match between their current priorities
and our project,” Friesen says. “BC Housing has given us
a small [proposal development funding, to pay some of
the costs of a full formal proposal], but we have up to now
been unsuccessful in obtaining a capital grant through BC
Housing.”
99
“We’ve really come to the conclusion that this population is
so vulnerable and at-risk when they first arrive in this country
that whatever we can do to bring those systems together under
one roof will, undoubtedly, provide a better starting point for
them as they continue and become future Canadians,” Friesen
adds.
Another rendering of the planned Welcome House transitional shelter and
centre for refugee settlement services. Photo courtesy of ISSBC /Henriquez
Partners Architects.
The agency is committed to breaking ground on the project
nonetheless. Construction is scheduled to begin in winter
2013. The facility is expected to open on June 20, 2015, World
Refugee Day.
Breaking ground
The new Welcome House Centre will be the first integrated
housing and service facility of its kind in the world. The aim
is for it to serve people across the region, not just those in
Vancouver. “The intent is that this regional facility will be a
hub, with spokes going out to various other cities in the Metro
Vancouver area and offices to continue to provide the support
that this particular population needs, regardless of where they
live,” Friesen says.
If John Salilar had spent his first few nights in Canada at the
new Welcome House Centre, the rest might not have been lost
to the street and emergency shelters. “His life would have been
different,” his friend Jean de Dieu Hakizimana says.
The loss was not his alone. Whether they arrive in secret
flight or under the government’s wing, refugees are following
the same path taken by the rest of Canada’s settler majority,
with much to contribute if they’re able to leave the fringes and
fully participate in society. Salilar “was caught in between,”
Hakizimana remembers. His haven in Canada from the
violence of the past proved largely an illusion.
“The doctor says it’s very rare to see someone 45 years old
[have the physical traits of an] old man,” Hakizimana shares.
But with what Salilar had experienced in his life, says his
friend, “He was old.”
Are Stats Glossing
over Vancouver’s
Housing Crisis?
First set of data since long-form census axed
suggest affordability progress, but others doubt.
By David P. Ball
The long-awaited release of 2011 National Household Survey
data garnered headlines earlier this month by hinting Vancouver
is not actually doing all that terribly on homeownership and
affordable living.
To the bafflement of some observers, the city seemed
scarcely behind the rest of the country in the number of us
owning our own homes. It also apparently came close in
affordability to Montreal and Toronto (our sibling cities in the
planner-nicknamed “MTV” trio).
The data seemed a bit comforting. More than 65 per cent of
Vancouverites now own their own homes. Just over one-third
of households spend more than 30 per cent of their income
on lodgings, the official definition of “unaffordable”; on that
count it seems we’re doing better than the rest of the MTV by a
couple points.
So much for the outcry that Vancouver is the “most
unaffordable city” in North America.
Right? Well, maybe not so fast.
Spend a little more time swimming in the government’s
vast data stream — wading through agglomerations, divisions,
subdivisions, tracts and districts (six hours of which induces
a distinct sense of info-suffocation) — and questions begin to
swirl in eddies.
Squeezed between the sea and the neighbours, Vancouver gets more reason to
consider higher density accommodation. Photo by Dan Fairchild in Your BC:
The Tyee’s Photo Pool.
Among the first things you learn is that to Statistics Canada,
most data about Vancouver actually refer to the Census
Metropolitan Area (CMA), encompassing everything from
West Vancouver to Langley and all the way down to White
Rock.
When you zoom in on the actual City of Vancouver itself,
the numbers are less surprising: The majority of us (51.5 per
cent) are indeed renters. The only major Canadian city with
fewer homeowners per capita is Montreal — and the average
rent there is massively more affordable. Tenants here fork over
an average of $1,089 in rent every month, almost 50 per cent
more than the fortunate renters of la belle ville.
In Vancouver, nearly half of us (46 per cent) are paying more
for lodging than we can afford, at least according to the official
definition. But some analysts warn that even these numbers
could be understating the problem.
The National Housing Survey provides the first nationwide, official data to emerge since Prime Minister Stephen
Harper axed the mandatory long-form census in Aug. 2010, to
the chagrin of statisticians.
And as with many things, the devil’s in the details. A closer
look at the numbers reveals much about the state of today’s
housing crisis in B.C. But it also raises the worrisome question
of how political leaders can make vital policy decisions with
less accurate data than ever before.
‘Not representative’
The demise of the long-form census continues to vex
planners, policy wonks and researchers three years after its
forced retirement.
“The housing questions themselves are pretty much the
same as they were on the long-form census,” explained Jerry
101
Situ, senior housing analyst with Statistics Canada, of the
National Housing Survey. “But now it’s a voluntary survey.
“Definitely the methodology is different from a mandatory
survey to a voluntary survey. With the topic of housing, when
we look at things like affordability, it does become more
difficult.”
In the absence of margins of error from random sampling
and required responses, Statistics Canada had to invent a new
indicator to reflect their incomplete data: the Global NonResponse Rate.
It blends the overall percentage of no-shows with partially
completed answers. Across the country, it was roughly onequarter of all recipients of the National Housing Survey,
despite national advertising and selective nagging.
“In addition to media campaigns to encourage Canadians to
answer the survey, if a household was selected for the survey
and they did not answer, there were several follow-ups,”
he explained. “The follow-up was very targeted to focus on
where there were large differences in characteristics, where we
needed responses.”
For critics, however, the elimination of the mandatory longform survey dealt an insurmountable blow to accurate data
collection.
“The Conservatives have changed the way we do statistics
in Canada,” says Sean Antrim, executive director of the
Coalition of Progressive Electors. “I have the utmost faith in
the staff at StatsCan, but I have no faith in their leadership.”
102
Among the consequences that could have affected the
results, suggests planner and researcher Andy Yan, is the
roughly one-quarter of City of Vancouver respondents who
didn’t bother filling out the voluntary survey.
Geller says. “There’s a very large number of illegal basement
suites in Metro Vancouver,” he offered as an example. “[They]
may well not be responding to such questionnaires.
Yan, senior urban planner at Bing Thom Architects,
speculates that among those significantly overlooked in the
new survey’s data are poorer communities and those who
don’t speak English — many of whom rely on services that
governments provide based on the very demographic statistics
that may now be failing to include them.
‘Dream’ homes just that
“It’s a pretty substantial non-response rate,” said the
researcher. “There are also questions about whether people
have honestly responded.”
“There’s an issue with certain communities being
undercounted, like the renter community and those underhoused,” Yan said. “It would not be surprising if they were
lower-income, with English or French not their primary
language. Arguably that would affect the results of the
National Household Survey.”
Even Statistics Canada admits that missing responses pose
“a substantial risk of non-response bias,” according to its
website, and that therefore “the results are not representative
of the true population.”
Could the voluntary aspect of the National Housing Survey
mean that certain sectors of the population are systematically
less likely to fill it out than others, thus biasing the results?
One individual who thinks so is architect Michael Geller.
“This is based on the people who filled out the new census,”
“They may not have gotten them, or they may be reluctant
to fill them out when they know the suite they’re in may be
illegal.”
But even in its shortcomings, the survey offers some curious
revelations.
StatsCan’s Situ said the Metro Vancouver data show that
home ownership levels are decelerating after decades of steady
rise. “In Vancouver, we still see that homeownership rate is
increasing, but at a much slower rate than in the past.”
And a clear lesson from the survey’s first detailed look at
condominiums, he added, is that whether owned or rented,
condos are becoming a central source of housing here.
“We now have almost a complete picture of condominiums.
In Vancouver, in terms of new constructions, condominiums
are now playing a very large role in terms of housing,” Situ
said.
Comparing Vancouver’s neighbouring cities also offers
some curiosities.
Those most likely to skip filling out their optional housing
survey form were the wealthy of West Vancouver, with nearly
a 28 per cent non-response rate. Surrey and New Westminster
tied for second-highest non-response rate, at 26.5 per cent.
103
Richmond residents participated in the survey with most
gusto: four out of five recipients filled out and returned their
forms.
If Vancouver is to truly be liveable, he argues, poorer
renters’ concerns need to be heard and addressed.
Within the Metro region, the highest rate of home
ownership appeared to be in survey-shy West Van, with only
two of five households renting. As one might expect, the North
Shore community also has by far the most expensive monthly
housing costs, at $1,787 on average.
But whether attainable or not, the dream of home
ownership hasn’t died by any means. “The fact that housing
is very expensive in Vancouver doesn’t mean people don’t
become owner-occupiers,” says Tsur Somerville, at UBC’s
Sauder School of Business. “But it does mean that they do so at
higher price, for less unit, than somewhere else.
When it came to the subject of the exercise, Burnaby
revealed higher levels of home-ownership than Vancouver, at
63.5 per cent, but still lagged behind Calgary (72.4) and Ottawa
(67.3).
“I see a huge potential there,” he says. “But you have to ask
the people affected how to solve them… If we started building
a movement to talk to the people most affected by the crisis,
and listening to their voices, we’d start moving in the direction
of finding solutions to these problems.”
For COPE’s Antrim, Vancouver’s majority-renter population
reflects the collapse of the “ideal” late-20th century life
trajectory — get a job, move up the work ladder, save for a
down payment and buy a house that becomes a nest egg for
your future.
“Condominiums reflect a reality that people are keen to
enter homeownership, even if they don’t have the resources to
buy a house. Part of that is they see it as a path to eventually
owning a house.”
“The focus on home ownership is still built on that dream,”
he argues. “[But] I know very few people who can afford to
buy a home. Even those I know who own can’t even afford to
maintain their homes. Most renters are just struggling to pay
their rent, let alone dreaming of buying a home.
In those circumstances, Antrim considers the preoccupation
with home ownership a distraction from deeper issues. “We’re
the most unaffordable city in North America for a reason,”
Antrim says. “On the ground for renters, it’s not getting
better.”
By sea, by land, by air we prosper
The contrast between home ownership rates and housing
affordability in Vancouver and its surrounding municipalities
should put a spotlight on one of the tensions currently
simmering at city hall. They reflect a fact of geography not all
Vancouverites seem ready to acknowledge.
Surrounded on all sides by sea and other municipalities,
Vancouver proper has nowhere to expand — to build the new
units that might tip the supply-demand equation toward lower
prices — but up. And that will only happen if its residents
accept greater housing density.
But while many people complain about Vancouver’s
expensive housing, to just as many “density is a bad
word,” notes Anne Mullin, president & CEO of the Urban
Development Institute (UDI), which represents Canadian
developers. “But it’s an important discussion to have.”
She’s alluding to neighbourhood uprisings that have
blossomed across Vancouver against city hall’s efforts to
boost density. Marpole residents, for instance, blocked a “thin
streets” proposal to allow more houses per lot. GrandviewWoodland neighbours became incensed at the idea of high-rise
towers being added to the bustling transit hub at Commercial
and Broadway.
“Vancouver land prices are high,” Mullin says, “but if we
provided more of a diversity of housing, there’d be more
opportunities.”
As for the National Household Survey’s admitted
weakness, urban planning researcher Andy Yan hopes the
federal government will consider better public engagement
and follow-up, to get the non-response rates down from their
current heights.
That would at least make sure civic decision-makers have
all the facts before they lock in — or out — developments that
will influence housing availability and cost in Vancouver for
decades.
104
Generation Rent: Two
Cities, Two Directions
.
Beautiful, eclectic, iconic, Pacific harbour towns: the words
describe both Vancouver and San Francisco. Yet the two cities
have taken different directions in the treatment of renters.
In 2013, Tyee Solutions Society reporter Jackie Wong visited
San Francisco to see what that older but similar city could teach
us.
Generation Rent:
Cities of Renters
While Vancouver worships homeowners, San
Francisco tenants are first-class citizens.
By Jackie Wong
If we always want what we can’t have, Vancouver’s
unwavering obsession with real estate is approaching masochism.
Despite exhaustive local research and evidence to suggest home
ownership is out of reach for most of us, the idea of one day
owning property remains an undead, albeit unattainable, dream.
Vancouver most recently tried to expand home ownership
through former city councillor-turned-SFU-fellow Peter
Ladner’s HomesNow initiative, an ideas competition for
non-profit housing operators and developers proposing to
build homes on municipal land that people earning $35,000 to
$80,000 could afford to own.
Ownership of their homes, Ladner argued, would
strengthen neighbourhoods. “People who own tend to have
more of a stake in the community,” Ladner said last month.
“They’re more involved politically. They’re paying more taxes
more directly. And they tend to be more active in schools and
community centres and so on.”
The project failed. A June 2013 report blames its demise on
numerous factors. Local government refused to invest without
senior government support. There was political dissent against
publicly subsidizing shelter for any but the most vulnerable
and impoverished.
Still, HomesNow was just one of many attempts to make
home ownership possible for more people by changing the
way we think about real estate. And researchers will likely
continue to look for ways to fine-tune the system to give more
of us a shot at home ownership.
In the meantime, more than half of us in Vancouver —
300,000 households, 53 per cent of all the households in the
city — will continue to rent.
A different dream
So maybe it’s time to change the dream. After all, there’s
also mounting proof that purchasing a home doesn’t yield the
happiness we’ve been taught to expect.
People still consider owning real estate to be a “central
component of happiness and a critical aspect of the American
dream,” UBC psychology professor and Vancouver condo
owner Elizabeth Dunn told the New York Times this summer.
“But there is little research to support that.”
There’s also little to suggest that every renter in Vancouver
lies in a state of catlike readiness to buy real estate at the
first opportunity. For one thing, almost half of all tenant
households in the city can barely afford to pay the rent as it
is — spending 30 per cent or more of their household income,
a level considered unaffordable by the Canada Mortgage and
Housing Corporation.
So, what can be done to improve the lot of Vancouver’s
renting majority?
The current Vision Vancouver-led city council has attempted
to turn the corner on the city’s accommodation crisis by
announcing several affordable-housing initiatives this fall.
In the last three weeks, the city approved two affordable
rental projects in southeast Vancouver; approved a
107
new green building code for rental buildings; passed
a milestone in approving over 1,000 new permits to
build laneway houses; and extended the timeline for public
consultation on the impacts for tenants and others of
its beleaguered and controversial community plans in four
neighbourhoods. As well, the City has hired a new staff officer,
Muktar Latif, from the United Kingdom to work on affordable
housing projects, starting this month.
Motivating Vision Vancouver party Mayor Gregor
Robertson may be the potential loss of voters in the next
election to the further-left Coalition of Progressive Electors,
whose affiliates founded the Vancouver Renters Union.
Such recent steps notwithstanding, Vancouver has
only lately turned its attention from seeking solutions
to homelessness to addressing the much wider spectrum
of citizens facing housing affordability stress, especially
those making low or modest incomes who will rent for the
foreseeable future.
A sibling city by the Bay
Not far down the coast, another city shares our stress.
San Francisco is even more of a renter city than Vancouver
is. Nearly two-thirds, 65 per cent, of its residents are renters.
And also like Vancouver, San Francisco is a waterfront
metropolis short on extra land to develop. Its natural beauty
and arts communities draw professional creative workers
(sound familiar?), especially those working in technology. It
also boasts an even more attractive-to-investors real estate
market.
Those parallels end however, when it comes to comparing
the rental culture between the two cities.
San Francisco handily eclipses Vancouver in its
sophisticated, historic, and politically influential tenant
advocate organizations. Its 34-year-old Rent Control and
Stabilization Ordinance covers some 183,500 rental units, more
than four-fifths (83 per cent) of the city’s rental stock.
The ordinance puts restrictions on annual rent increases,
and when and how tenants can be evicted. Controlled rents
can go up by a limited amount each year; for 2013, it was 1.9
per cent. There is no cap on how much landlords of non-rentcontrolled apartments may boost the monthly charge.
In B.C., by contrast, annual allowable rent increases are
set at the rate of inflation (the 12-month average change
in the all-items B.C. Consumer Price Index), plus two per
cent — currently 3.8 per cent. That’s twice San Francisco’s
allowable rent hike this year, but there is a trade-off: B.C.’s
cap covers all rental housing — not just units built before June
1979, as San Francisco’s ordinance does.
While Vancouver’s tenant advocates have a strong history
of forming ad-hoc groups around flashpoint evictions or condo
conversions, San Francisco is home to scores of continuing
groups and hundreds of activists. They wield enough influence
at City Hall that San Francisco mayor Ed Lee recently called a
landlord to suspend the eviction of an elderly couple who had
no other housing prospects.
108
A tenant identity
“San Francisco has an identity as a tenant city,” says Maria
Zamudio, the San Francisco housing rights organizer for
Causa Justa, which promotes equality for low-income San
Franciscans. “Anyone who wants to get elected — regardless
of what they actually feel — when they’re out campaigning,
they talk about how much they support rent control and how
much they value it.”
While strong bylaws and a vital renter culture give tenant
citizens in San Francisco a measure of support Vancouverites
can only envy, other forces, mainly economic, are challenging
those protections. And in a cautionary note to Vancouver’s
courtship of the tech industry, many Bay area housing
advocates blame San Francisco’s recently skyrocketing noncontrolled rental rates (one-bedrooms go for about $3,023,
twice the price of similar units in Vancouver) on its red-hot
tech boom.
Social media giant Twitter, DIY accommodations booker
Airbnb, and social media for corporations service Yammer
have all put down roots in the heart of San Francisco, and the
city is just an hour’s drive away from Silicon Valley, home to
the famously sprawling campuses of Facebook and Google.
This isn’t San Francisco’s first flood of high-paid tech
workers. In the dot-com boom of the 1990s — roughly from
1994 until the bubble burst in 2000 — the average rent for a
two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco (including both rentcontrolled and uncontrolled stock) more than doubled, from
$1,274 in 1994 to $2,750 in 2000. The median price of a threebedroom house rose 70 per cent.
The latest tech rush has brought a fresh influx of highly paid
employees into previously working-class neighbourhoods and,
to serve them, upmarket wine bars, coffee shops, and grocery
stores.
But affordable housing advocates say the influx of wellheeled new residents with ample budgets is pushing up rents
citywide. And while 83 per cent of all rental units in the city
are rent-controlled, San Francisco’s rent ordinance lacks what
advocates call “vacancy control”: once a person moves out of a
rent-controlled apartment, there is no legal limit on how much
a landlord can raise the rent on that unit.
“We have some of the strongest laws in the United States
around rent control,” says Sarah Sherburn-Zimmer, an
organizer with the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee.
“And we are still losing.”
“I’ve been doing rent control for a long, long time,” says
San Francisco Rent Board executive director Delene Wolf. “I
have never seen the rents like this. Now that the economy
has picked up, studio apartments are renting in parts of town
that nobody used to want to live in, and they’re more than my
mortgage on my three-bedroom house in San Francisco. I’m
talking about $2,000 studios in the Tenderloin [San Francisco's
Downtown Eastside].” Landlords are doing everything they
can to get tenants out so they can raise the rent.
The rising cost of shelter in San Francisco is pushing
middle-income earners out of the city, adds Marcia Rosen,
109
executive director of San Francisco’s National Housing
Law Project. “It’s affecting the ability of the people who are
teachers, nurses, bus drivers, BART [the Bay Area's transit
system] workers. The NGO world and the arts world are also
affected and having a hard time hanging on.
“There’s a real affordability crisis for even middle-income
families,” Rosen say. “We see an exodus of families. San
Francisco has the lowest family rate of any major city in
America. It really threatens to erode the diversity and the
cultural flavour of the city.”
As I’ll be reporting in the rest of this series, San Francisco’s
present may be Vancouver’s future. Lucky for us, that gives us
a chance to take some lessons — and warnings — from a twin
city.
Generation Rent:
San Francisco’s
Citizen Tenants
Why does San Fran's tenant majority have so
much more clout than Vancouver's?
By Jackie Wong
Amy Farah Weiss thought she’d landed her dream home when
she moved into a beautiful San Francisco apartment near the
diverse, centrally-located Divisadero Corridor in 2008. “I loved it,
and I loved my housemates,” the 36-year-old says. She paid $750
for her spot in the space she shared with two people. City rent
control assured her, she says, that she could afford to live there
for years.
“If you had asked me two years ago where I was going to to
be in 10 years, I would have said in that apartment,” she says.
“I was thinking I was going to live in that place forever.”
It turned out not to be so. Weiss butted heads with her
landlord when, according to her, she tried to assert tenant
rights that the landlord refused to acknowledge. Weiss was
evicted, sharing a fate that’s befallen thousands of other San
Francisco renters.
Getting turfed from her home was heartbreaking. She’d
grown attached to the place and had started to put down
roots and plan her future. Forced to leave, she found herself
asking: “When I rent, am I allowed to say that I belong to this
neighbourhood and it belongs to me? I haven’t quite gotten
that message. But if you own property, you can say that.”
Amy Farah Weiss, 36, was evicted from her San Francisco apartment last
year. She moved into her current home near the Divisadero Corridor, shown
here, this spring. “When I rent, am I allowed to say that I belong to this
neighbourhood and it belongs to me?” she asks. Photo by Jackie Wong.
A double standard of citizenship between renters and
property owners has been with us a long time. Early in
Canada’s history, only the latter could vote (if they were also
male). To this day, it’s a widely-held belief that home owners
have a stronger stake in their communities than renters and
therefore make better citizens.
111
But that idea discounts more than half of us: the renting
majority. In Vancouver it’s 53 per cent of all households. In
San Francisco it’s nearly two out of three: 65 per cent of San
Francisco households rent.
Weiss’s goal, she says, is to engender a sense of
empowerment and belonging among local renting residents
that she hopes will fortify them to resist mounting pressures
from investors to redevelop the neighbourhood for a wealthier
demographic.
Last year Weiss founded a non-profit to explore the
potential power behind the citizen renter. Her group,
called Neighbors Developing Divisadero (NDD), brings
new and longtime residents, especially renters, together to
support inclusive, enriching and sustainable development
in the rapidly-changing Divisadero Corridor and several
surrounding neighbourhoods including the Western Addition,
North of the Panhandle and Alamo Square.
From rent control, strong neighbourhoods
So are renters really civic non-entities? Not if Weiss is any
example.
The group cares for a community garden where it holds
neighbourhood events. It’s also leading a local campaign to
save the Harding Theater, an historic vaudeville house
reminiscent of Vancouver’s Pantages, from demolition.
Weiss’s group is just one of a rich and flourishing ecology
of pro-renter groups in the Bay Area. The 43-year-old San
Francisco Tenant Union has two paid staff, nearly three
dozen volunteer counsellors and publishes an annually
updated Tenants Rights Handbook. The current edition runs
to 315 pages. Not far from the union’s headquarters, in the
historically working-class Mission district (reminiscent of
Vancouver’s Commercial Drive), the San Francisco Housing
Rights Committee provides tenant counselling services to
about 5,000 low-income renters per year.
Central to her message is the idea that controlled-rent
tenants can be just as committed urban citizens as their
mortgage-paying neighbours.
They may not own their land or airspace the way title-
holders do, she concedes. But tenants who live in rentcontrolled apartments have a strong extra incentive to invest
in their community. Predictable, modest rent increases give
a reason to stay put, Weiss argues, and social and personal
investment by long-term residents — as well as financial
investment — are what neighbourhoods need to thrive as
inclusive spaces for everyone.
For many of those fortunate San Franciscans living in one of
the 183,500 rent-controlled apartments in the city — that’s 83 per
cent of the city’s entire rental housing stock — it would take a
major life change or an eviction to get them to leave. For some,
affordable accommodation can even feel a little like a pair of
golden handcuffs.”The more time I’m here, the better deal [on
rent] I’m getting, so I’m going to continue staying,” Weiss says
of her own experience in the new rent-controlled apartment she
found this spring near the Divisadero Corridor for a little over
$800 a month. “Rent control ties you to a place.”
112
fleeing hostile homes and homophobic communities in the rest
of America.
Tommi Mecca has rented in the Castro for the 21 years he’s
lived in San Francisco. He came here from Philadelphia at
42, reeling from the loss of both parents within a year of each
other and on the heels of a decade burdened by the deaths of
most of his friends from AIDS. Like other gay men who lived
through the AIDS crisis, Mecca was traumatized by his own
survival. “I came through the epidemic [HIV] negative,” he
says. “That’s a thing I was feeling a lot of guilt about.”
Moving to the Castro was transformative and healing. A
minimum-wage job at a bookstore easily covered his share of
the controlled rent in a two-bedroom apartment, and left him
time to volunteer in the housing justice movement.
Amy Farah Weiss pays about $800 for a room in a Victorian home she shares
with eight people. Since the house was built before 1979, it is covered by San
Francisco’s Rent Control and Stabilization Ordinance. That means rents can
only go up a certain amount every year. For 2013, it’s 1.9 per cent. Photo by
Jackie Wong.
The Castro is an iconic San Francisco neighbourhood about
10 blocks south of where Weiss lives. It’s also been one of the
most prominent sites of gay activism in the United States,
amassing political influence due in large part to its affordable
rents that became a magnet for gay and transgender youth
“It was a neighbourhood that was so alive with everything,
not just the activism, but life — celebrating life and being
alive,” he remembers. “And having a freedom. You could live
cheap.” Affordable living was central to the political vitality
of the Castro of the past, Mecca says. Protection under rent
control meant landlords were limited in how much they could
raise rents each year (for 2013, it’s 1.9 per cent).
Now that’s disappearing, as dwellings are removed from
the coverage of San Francisco’s Rent Control and Stabilization
Ordinance. “The people moving into the Castro today are very
upscale. The rents are among the highest in the city,” he says.
“People with AIDS are being pushed out of their long-term
apartments left and right.”
Mecca is 62 now, and still living
in the same apartment. Even though
his minimum-wage bookstore
days are behind him and he’s got a
steady job as counselling director at
the San Francisco Housing Rights
Committee, Mecca says he can’t
afford to retire. Nor can he afford to
move out of his apartment. Thanks
to two decades of controlled rent,
he still only pays $566 a month for
a shared two-bedroom. He’s well
aware that he couldn’t afford the
going market rents in the Castro.
“My apartment’s worth about
$3,000 [a month] now. It’s absolutely
immoral,” he says.
113
Some landlords leaving their jobs under the Ellis Act sell
their former buildings to real estate developers, and both
parties turn a profit. Tenant advocates like Gullicksen point to
the Act as a primary culprit for depleting San Francisco’s stock
of affordable, rent-controlled housing.
For some, nowhere else to go
Tommi Mecca, 62, lives in a
rent-controlled apartment
in San Francisco’s Castro
neighbourhood. He pays $566 a
month and works as a housing
counselling director. “I grew up
at a time where working-class
people could retire,” he says. “I
can’t have a retirement.” Photo
by Jackie Wong.
Immoral or not, the growing gap
between the income a property can return to its owner under
rent-control versus the open market is the powerful force
behind a wave of conversions that have taken apartments out
from under rent control. Mass evictions conducted using the
Ellis Act, a California state law, have tripled since the start
of this year, according to the San Francisco Tenants Union’s
Ted Gullicksen. “There’s no defence to it whatsoever. It’s very
effective,” Gullicksen says. The Ellis Act allows landlords to
get out of the landlord business by evicting all tenants from
their building.
Six kilometres northeast of the Castro, the lively hum of
restaurant patios lining fashionable Nob Hill’s Polk Street
stops abruptly at the corner of Jackson Street. The quiet bulk
of a Chinese Community Church punctuates a nondescript
residential block.
Here, 73-year-old Gum Gee Lee lives in a rent-controlled
two-bedroom up a narrow flight of stairs across the street from
the church. It’s the only home she’s known since immigrating
to the United States with her family from China in 1979, the
same year the Rent Control Ordinance came into effect.
She raised seven children in the cramped space, working
at different times as a seamstress, dishwasher and caregiver,
while her husband worked in restaurants and later as a cleaner
at the Marriott Hotel downtown. “It was ample space for us
all. I considered myself very fortunate,” she says in Cantonese.
“I was always very happy here.”
Now the couple shares the rooms with their last daughter at
home, a 48-year-old with a developmental disability.
114
has lived in a place for a year or more is supposed to receive
$5,153 — half on the event of eviction notice, half when they
move out. Seniors and people with disabilities are entitled to
another $3,436 each. Eviction orders also have to give tenants
at least 120 days’ notice, with senior and disabled tenants
getting a full year’s warning.
By contrast, tenants being lawfully evicted in British
Columbia are entitled to compensation of one month’s rent. In
Vancouver, that could amount to $1,200 to $1,500 for a typical
one-bedroom apartment, about a fifth of what renters in San
Francisco receive for relocating.
Gum Gee Lee, 73, raised seven children in this two-bedroom Nob Hill
apartment. Photo by Jackie Wong.
When the family moved in 34 years ago, they paid about $325
a month for their apartment. Earlier this year, they were still
paying only $778, a fraction of the $2,800 a month that a onebedroom in the centrally-located neighbourhood fetches on the
open market today.
But Lee’s days in the apartment are numbered. A year ago
she received an eviction notice: her building’s owner sold the
building for $1.2 million to a condominium developer. The
former landlord stepped out of the residential rental market
altogether which, under the Ellis Act, allowed him to evict all
tenants. On Sept. 25, the Lees were ordered to leave their home
of three decades.
Benefits somewhat soften the blow. Tenants evicted under
the Ellis Act are entitled to relocation payments: a renter who
Despite San Francisco’s comparatively generous support
and year-long advance notice, by the end of last month
the Lees had overstayed their tenancy and faced forcible
removal from the apartment. At that point, the city’s large and
influential tenant advocacy community swung into action.
About a hundred people attended an all-day demonstration
at the family’s apartment, which attracted local and national
media coverage. San Francisco’s Mayor, Ed Lee, called the
landlord on their behalf. And the Chinatown Community
Development Center (CCDC) redoubled its year-long effort to
find the family a new home.
Lee was grateful, but not entirely optimistic. “I’ve searched
so many places,” she said. CCDC housing support workers
“have helped me apply for so many housing opportunities. But I
haven’t been lucky. My name doesn’t get drawn in the lotteries.”
Her luck may soon change. Some San Francisco supervisors
(the equivalent of Vancouver city councillors) have called for
Ellis Act evictees to jump to the head of wait lists for citysubsidized affordable housing.
115
partly because units are being converted into condos, or
they’re being brought up to market-rate rent.”
A ‘backdoor’ for controlled-rent leakage
San Francisco’s tenant-positive rental ordinance turns out to
have a backdoor. It limits the amount the landlord of a covered
building or unit may raise its rent each year. But it lacks
vacancy control. That means that when a tenant, voluntarily
or under inducement, moves out of a rent-controlled unit, the
landlord can raise its rents to whatever the market will bear
without regard for the permitted annual increase.
Matthew Miller purchased several neighbouring buildings on Jackson Street
in Nob Hill, a downtown San Francisco neighbourhood, for $1.2 million in
2012. The eight-unit peach-coloured building (centre) was home to workingclass immigrant families. Its former landlord used the Ellis Act, a California
State law, to evict all tenants. Photo by Jackie Wong.
The response to the Lees’ predicament reflects San
Francisco’s vigorous tenant-support agencies, pro-tenant local
politicians and large renter majority. Yet despite a civic identity
built in part on tenant clout, the Lees aren’t the only San
Francisco renters being pushed aside.
Says Maria Zamudio, a housing rights organizer for Causa
Justa, a multi-ethnic social justice organization: “Our stock of
deeply affordable housing, which is rent-controlled housing
stock, we’re losing it. They’re being taken off the rental market,
(The same is true for Vancouver. Though all rental units
in B.C. — not just some as in San Francisco — are subject to
annual limits on rent increases, when a tenant vacates a unit a
landlord may raise the rents as much as they wish.)
Like other observers, Zamadio blames deep-pocketed
techsters for luring landlords to encourage their tenants in
rent-controlled units to depart.
“The rental market has become so saturated by all of the
people that the tech boom has brought into our city. It has been
not only saturated with people, but saturated with money,”
Zamudio says. “It’s not uncommon to go to an open house and
have 20 people there for one two-bedroom apartment. And
have half those people offer $1,000 more than the asking price,
right then and there. Landlords are going to take whatever’s
given to them.”
But, she points out, “that inflates the cost of housing
overall.”
Back in Amy Farah Weiss’ Divisadero apartment, the indie
rock band Idiot Glee plays while she makes a banner for a
friend’s birthday party. Like Mecca, she’s a non-profit worker
living in relative poverty, making $1,200 a month as a patient
consultant for a Vancouver-esque medical cannabis dispensary.
It’s a lifestyle San Francisco has allowed her. “I’ve lived
for the last five years in San Francisco [earning] at least under
$20,000, and some years under $15,000,” she says. She’s yet to
see a paycheque from the hundreds of hours she’s dedicated to
Neighbors Developing Divisadero.
“I could find a job where I was making a decent living,”
Weiss says. “But I’m willing to struggle to do something I
love.”
116
Generation Rent:
Urban Facelifts Serve
the Well-Heeled
Do nicer neighbourhoods price residents out of
their homes? Third in a series. By Jackie Wong
Vancouver is a self-consciously pretty city. And like a teenager
counting the brush strokes through her hair in the morning, it
strives daily to become even more so. Perhaps it should be careful
what it wishes for.
The City of Vancouver’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan set
the ambitious goal of becoming “the greenest city in the
world” in just seven years. Like a personal fitness program,
the effort is having secondary benefits: while expanding
bike paths, food-producing gardens and composting, green
initiatives are adding grace notes to the face of the city, like
public gathering spaces called parklets where parking spaces
used to be.
Once voters elected former farmer, Happy Planet juice
company entrepreneur, and avid commuter cyclist Gregor
Robertson to the mayor’s chair in 2008, the 2010 Olympics shot
the city down a rabbit hole of compulsive civic introspection to
reassure itself that yes, Vancouver was indeed the world-class
city of its own advertising.
But even as it prepared for its close-up in the world’s
spotlight, Vancouver worried about its poorer citizens being
displaced.
Remy Nelson, 33, opened the Mojo Bicycle Cafe (the storefront to the right) in
2007. His bicycle repair and coffee shop is one of many businesses catering
to a new wave of residents in San Francisco’s Divisadero Corridor, named
“Comeback Neighbourhood of the Year” in 2011. Photo by Jackie Wong.
Those tensions didn’t deter international accolades.
Vancouver celebrated its ranking in The Economist magazine’s
international list of the world’s most livable cities — scaled on
stability, health care, culture and environment, education, and
infrastructure.
But after topping the ranking’s “livability” scale for almost
a decade, Vancouver recently slipped to third place. Like
runners-up in a beauty pageant, civic leaders and business
improvement associations are now redoubling their efforts to
restore livability to under-toned neighbourhoods.
The two-year-old Hastings Crossing Business Improvement
Association is Vancouver’s newest civic group with ambitions.
Led by 33-year-old Wesley Regan, it seeks to balance the
business and social interests of an area spanning the eastern
fringe of upscale Yaletown and the heart of the hard-luck
Downtown Eastside.
One neighbourhood further east, the 12-year-old Hastings
North Business Improvement Association has rebranded
what used to be known as Hastings Sunrise as the new
“East Village” — drawing some controversy for its effort to
appropriate the cachet of the Manhattan neighbourhood of the
same name.
Such initiatives aren’t housing providers, but they do
influence who can afford to live where. Retooling the
Downtown Eastside and Hastings Sunrise, both historically
working-class and immigrant neighbourhoods, to appeal
to wealthier new residents can, like the lovely, eco-friendly
“parklets” budding across the city, foster both a greater
neighbourhood appreciation for some, while leaving others
feeling pushed to the door.
118
A little bit older, deeper in redevelopment
In looks, as in so much else, San Francisco is our
American doppelganger city, just a little bit older and further
along some of the same paths Vancouver is following.
San Francisco’s Hastings Sunrise neighbourhood is the
Divisadero Corridor. The historically African- and JapaneseAmerican neighbourhood is northeast of the famed bohemia of
Haight-Ashbury, next to the predominantly African-American
Western Addition.
Until recently the Divisadero was a hotbed of crack
cocaine sales and use, sex work, and associated violence.
Remy Nelson, a lifelong San Franciscan and owner of the
neighbourhood’s Mojo Bicycle Cafe, remembers the early
2000s, when at least once a month he heard gunshots, and
every few months someone was shot down.
The view of across the street from the Mojo Bicycle Cafe offers a glimpse of
Divisadero Street’s blue-collar roots. Photo by Jackie Wong.
He remembers the summer he opened his bike repair
store and coffee shop, in 2007. “Up [Divisadero Street] at the
barbecue joint, guys got an automatic and went and hosed
down the entire joint, the street, the cars, everything. There
were bullet shells everywhere,” Nelson says. “That was one of
the last [big shootings]. That was a moment when something
had to happen. The supervisor [San Franciscan for city
councillor] came through and demanded foot patrols. And
really that changed a lot of it, having a police presence.”
The movement for crime-free streets coincided with the
arrival of new residents. “A largely Caucasian crowd,” as
Nelson describes it, “bought property and was going to have
kids and wanted to send them to school. They wanted their
property values to go up. And that blight — of unemployment,
people shooting each other in the middle of the day — it was
kind of taking away from their money.”
The Divisadero Corridor is different now. Thanks in
part to a $3.4-million city-led revitalization project, “the
Divis,” as new residents call it, was named 2011′s comeback
neighbourhood of the year by San Francisco’s Neighborhood
Empowerment Network. The now-fashionable area boasts two
Tumblr blogs mainly celebrating hot restaurants on the strip,
plus its own Twitter account.
The streets are safer now than a decade ago. But the
Divisadero’s new popularity makes it increasingly hard to
hold on to for people of modest means.
119
Inevitably, rising costs
The topic comes up often between Nelson and his father.
Both men are landlords. The younger Nelson rents five rooms
above his Mojo Bicycle Café for $400 to $1,000 a month,
depending on the size of the room.
His father, Joel, is a former high school teacher who
now earns an income from rental properties in the area.
They exchange stories of the people who rent from them —
especially the recent influx of 20-somethings working in the
tech industry. Nelson finds the rents some are willing to pay
eye-popping.
He used to live above his café too, but now rents a small,
top-floor studio nearby for a rent-controlled $1,450 a month.
The place is mouldy and leaky when it rains, he says. But he
can do his own repairs and even remodelled the kitchen. The
low rent justified the extra work.
It’s “a kick-ass deal,” he boasts. “[Market] rents start at
$2,300 for a one-bedroom.” Not that he begrudges landlords
who charge that much. “Landlords, they’re running a business.
They’re going to raise prices whenever they can, to whatever
the market will bear,” he says. “If I could sell a cup of coffee
for an extra $0.25, I bet I’d do it.”
It’s no surprise to Nelson that rents continue to go up in San
Francisco. “No one ever said it was affordable,” he says. “It
was always crazy. We live in a very desirable place.”
120
He’s made peace with it. But he’s also among those riding
the wave of the neighbourhood’s new popularity. He knows
other longtime residents are having a harder time.
Other residents can’t compete with the money that tech
workers can spend on accommodation, Wolf adds. “It’s just
that housing happens to be a necessity.”
Vancouver celebrates every opening of a new high-tech
head office. Even Pixar’s recent exodus from Gastown made
the news. But in San Francisco, the young, moneyed tech
worker has become a gleefully-derided caricature.
As the gap widens between market rents and those allowed
under the city’s Rent Control and Stabilization Ordinance,
incentives mount for property owners to find ways to push
tenants out of rent-controlled units and re-rent them at often
much higher rates. “Evictions haven’t been this crazy since the
late ’90s when the last tech boom happened,” says SherburnZimmer.
“I feel like the locals have been a little bit drowned out,
just because there’s so many more people coming to this
neighbourhood,” he says. “With a new wash of people coming
in, a certain number of those are going to have higher incomes
than people who currently live here. Those people are going
to want to move in, to take over the apartments that are made
available, and raise the rents.”
“This is a 20-year-old’s town now,” says Delene Wolf,
executive director of the San Francisco Rent Board. She’s
talking about the scores of young tech workers renting
apartments in San Francisco, commuting to work in the Silicon
Valley, and congregating in the hipster enclave Mission district
to party on weekends. They’ve changed the whole feel of the
city, she says.
“The [tech] corporations have made it possible to do it
without stress and strain. The Google buses, they’ve made it
[so] that you can live and play in the city and work down there
[in the Valley]. But it’s not a hassle because they will pick you
up and drive you back and forth and do your damn laundry.”
“Prices have gone up because of the tech boom,” agrees
San Francisco Housing Rights Committee organizer Sarah
Sherburn-Zimmer. And that’s had a worrisome knock-on
effect.
Intact community
On a typical Tuesday night, 27-year-old Alejandro Villarreal
is at home, nursing an after-work Anchor Steam beer in the
company of his housemates’ cat, Croissant. His bed is on a
makeshift loft above a forest of bicycle frames, repair stands
and spare tires. Soft-spoken and thoughtful, Villarreal hardly
embodies the hyperspeed Aaron Sorkin character that some
San Franciscans see as the tech-kid stereotype.
Briefly an auto mechanic, he’s spent the bulk of his adult
life working for Google, now as a program manager in the
mapping department. He’s one of Wolf’s ‘Google Bus’-riders.
Unless he ambitiously decides to make the 65-kilometre trip to
Google’s Mountain View campus on his bike, he walks three
blocks to catch one of the company’s white private shuttles for
the one-hour drive.
He considers himself lucky to have landed a room for $1,020
in a bright, spacious rent-controlled apartment he shares
with three roommates. The apartment is ideally located near
Mission Dolores Park, a popular hangout for bike-loving,
microbrew enthusiasts like him.
121
a building that just went up in North Mission near Market
Street. They set aside a certain amount of apartments that will
be affordable to people who couldn’t afford a normal unit. I
would like to see that expanded,” he says. “It helps to keep
the community intact while allowing for growth. I think that’s
really important.”
He doesn’t believe that tech workers like himself deserve
the scorn widely directed at them. Besides, Villarreal adds,
the technology sector includes many people who work in
biotechnology, engineering, and other fields away from the
high-profile stars like Google, Facebook and Twitter.
“This attitude that all tech people don’t care about where
they’re living, and they can just throw money at things, I don’t
think it’s fair to paint everyone with that stroke,” he says.
“Myself, I live above a family business, I shop there all the
time, I make relationships with people around me. I frequent
the same places. I care about this place.”
An ideal San Francisco, Villarreal suggests, would allow
people like him and his roommates to thrive alongside the
family who owns the Guerrero Market and Deli on the corner.
Such a reality may be increasingly difficult to achieve,
however, if the city continues on its current trajectory.
Alejandro Villarreal at home in his apartment. An avid cyclist, Villarreal
sometimes makes the 62-kilometre commute to his job at Google’s
headquarters on his bike. Photo by Jackie Wong.
Comfortable as he is, Villarreal thinks often about housing
inequities. He supports a city policy mandating the inclusion
of affordable units in new housing developments. “There’s
Everything’s for sale
In the parklet in front of his Mojo Bicycle Cafe, Remy
Nelson balances a cup of hot black coffee and slides into the
last open spot on a shared banquette. The space is packed with
30-somethings meeting friends or reclining solo with their
iPhones in the late-August heat.
Friendly, funny and self-assured, Nelson’s got the easy
charisma of the popular kid in high school. Not surprisingly,
Nelson loves it here. He’s proud of the community of artists
and cyclists he helped bring together through the Mojo Bicycle
Cafe. It’s certainly hard to deny that his sun-dappled parklet is
preferable to the gun violence that once shattered the peace of
the Divisadero.
If not everyone who lived there then can afford it now, he
expresses no regret.
“It’s not beautiful,” he says, “but the reality is that San
Francisco is becoming very much a socioeconomically divided
city that’s not at all inclusive. There’s an increasing divide
between black and white, rich and poor. I think it’s going to
get worse. The rich will want the most desirable, and they will
be able to afford it.”
Unconsciously echoing a pair of young Vancouver landlords
who consider their city to be a young New York in the making,
Nelson considers that evolution the way of the world.
“I don’t know if there’s any way to control that, stop it,
change it,” he says. “Because everything’s for sale.”
122
Generation Rent:
The Secret to a
Great Rental Home
A visit to San Fran and my new place revealed
it. By Jackie Wong
“I’m moving into a really nice two-bedroom for July 1. It’s
very cheap. The whole place is $1,000. Top floor, lots of light,
two full-size rooms, original hardwood, and the front door fully
closes! You’d be welcome to the second bedroom.”
For a moment I thought I’d misread the text from my friend.
Or just imagined it. Reading the message a few more times, I
realized she wasn’t kidding, and I couldn’t believe it.
I stared at the claw-like tangle of house keys in my lap, each
one a symbol of the pity-flecked generosity of friends with
extra room in their apartments. A one-two punch of life events
earlier this year had left me with nowhere to live. I had thrown
my belongings into a knapsack and two grocery bags and for
the next 21 days couchsurfed across three neighbourhoods,
pretending all the time to be a dignified professional.
I spent the first few nights on a West End couch usually
the domain of a charming and toothless FIV-positive cat.
Then, it was a single mattress on the floor in an empty room
over Victoria Drive, next to an abandoned kitchen filled with
boxes of 1970s Penthouse Forum and Playboy magazines. We
nicknamed that place “Widow’s Peak,” for the remarkable
succession of heartbroken people who stayed there this
summer. Finally, relative comfort: a tastefully appointed
Yaletown office closet in which the pull-out single bed/
armchair occupied the entire surface area of the floor.
San Francisco’s secret? A ‘warm’ rental landscape. Photo by Jackie Wong.
Life at the time was so chaotic and, well, blackly comedic,
that I couldn’t even begin thinking about the daunting search
for a new apartment in expensive, low-vacancy Vancouver.
That Thursday afternoon, through what felt like an overdue
stroke of luck, my new home found me.
A walkup of one’s own
I love everything about living here, from our yellow
Formica countertops in the kitchen, to the stairs covered in
cigarette ash down the side of the building. It’s a three-storey,
nine-unit Fairview walkup. We found the place through
my roommate’s old roommate, who lives downstairs and
moonlights as the building manager.
It’s a building where our big-hearted, salty-tongued
neighbours keep the doors open when they have parties,
emerging from their bedrooms in sparkly blue tights and
campy blonde wigs to blow out the candles on a birthday cake.
I feel deeply grateful for the rent we pay. I know it’s a
terrible rarity and exquisite gift. After all, accommodation in
Vancouver is notoriously unaffordable.
As I’ve come to realize however, we also found a place
that we both like and can afford to live because of something
else that’s rare and precious: a supportive community. Both
my roommate and I grew up in Vancouver suburbs. We have
many deep roots and connections here, including the longtime
friends who helped us find this apartment.
But that’s something not everybody has.
Amy Farah Weiss, a community organizer in San
Francisco, noted earlier in this series that rent control ties
124
people to a neighbourhood. The longer you stay, she said, the
better the deal is.
A similar thing might be said about renting in Vancouver:
the longer you live here and the more people you know, the
easier it is to find a good spot. That’s not because housing
becomes any cheaper over time. It’s because more time spent
living in the city improves the chances of building a personal
community that can help you find and secure a home.
After investigating the rental situation in famously tenantfriendly San Francisco, and coming home to my snug thirdfloor flat in Vancouver, it seems clear to me that a supportive
community is perhaps the most vital determinant of securing
affordable housing in either city.
Housing takes a village
Earlier in this series, we met a number of San Francisco
renters who have found affordable accommodation: Amy
Weiss, Tommi Mecca, Remy Nelson, and Alejandro Villareal.
They are all quite different people, with different lives and
incomes. What allowed them to secure living spaces they
could afford wasn’t incredible wealth (although Nelson is also
a landlord, and Villareal a well-paid tech worker. Instead, they
all possessed a strong arsenal of knowledge- and communitybased supports that help them navigate the system.
San Francisco has a notoriously competitive and expensive
rental market. As they do here in Vancouver, prospective
tenants compete fiercely for limited spots in choice apartments.
Most of the renters I met were successful because they knew
how to work their networks to their advantage to help them
find housing.
Weiss snagged her room in a Divisadero house through
a coworker. Nelson wrote his now-landlord an engaging
personal letter about his life history in San Francisco.
Villareal is the only renter I met who found his apartment
the (relatively) old-fashioned way, through a classified ad on
Craigslist. But his personality and predilections sealed the
deal: his enthusiasm for the SF trifecta of bikes, beards, and
craft brews induced his now-housemates to offer him space
ahead of a crowd of other would-be tenants.
But other renters lose out: those who lack such social
networks or, critically, fluency with the prevailing language,
culture, and social tastes of the moment.
Cantonese-speaking Mrs. Gum Gee Lee is about to be
evicted from her longtime home, a rent-controlled apartment
in San Francisco’s Nob Hill. With the help of local housing
outreach workers, Lee has applied for a spot in publicly
subsidized housing in the city. But her name hasn’t moved up
on the list.
Apart from that help, she doesn’t know what else to do,
or where to go. She lacks the language ability to advocate for
herself in English. Without San Francisco’s robust network of
housing outreach and tenant support workers to help her, it’s
likely she, her husband, and their developmentally-disabled
daughter who lives with them, would face straits even more
dire than their current precarious situation.
125
Pillars of affordable housing
The kind of dedicated housing advocacy community that
has swung into action on Mrs. Lee’s behalf is one of four
pillars of an affordable housing system, according to Marcia
Rosen and Wendy Sullivan, who last year reported on three
decades of affordable housing policy in San Francisco.
“The overall success of the housing system and policies
employed is a result of an interaction of four key factors,” they
write. Those factors are:
• Dedicated community advocacy and strong coalitions.
• Development of and access to substantial funding sources.
• A holistic vision of building “not just housing, but communities.”
• Constantly evolving housing programs that meet new challenges and opportunities.
Vancouver’s municipal government is doing what it can to
work on point four. But here are some ideas that San Francisco
inspired for how Vancouver can start to address the other parts
of the list.
Idea #1: Give renters more political clout
Vancouver’s tenant advocates have been trying for years
to sell B.C. politicians on reform of the B.C. Residential
Tenancy Act. And while high-profile moments may bring out
Vancouver’s housing activists, the city lacks unified, ongoing
renter representation at either the ballot box or the boardroom
table. In San Francisco, the opposite is true.
“The political forces are very aware that we’re a force to be
reckoned with. We have clout,” adds Sara Shortt, executive
director of the San Francisco Housing Rights Committee. “To
get votes, politicians know they’d better be on the right side of
tenants. There’s a sort of ‘don’t mess with us’ kind of attitude.”
Idea #2: Improve B.C.’s tenant-landlord
arbitration process
The San Francisco Rent Board is an agency of the city and
county of San Francisco. It makes and enforces rent laws for
the city.
In B.C., the provincial, not municipal, government
oversees rent law. Tenant-landlord disputes are arbitrated
in hearings over the phone or in person at B.C.’s Residential
Tenancy Branch offices in either Burnaby or Victoria. Disputeresolution officers, better known as DROs, convene the
hearings. DROs have varying degrees of legal training —
some are law students, others have no formal legal education.
Their decision-making process and judgements have
been criticised for sometimes lacking procedural fairness,
transparency or accountability.
Last week, the Vancouver-based Community Legal
Assistance Society released a report identifying systemic
problems with decision-making and enforcement at the B.C.
Residential Tenancy Branch.
“There are significant and ongoing [the authors' emphasis]
problems with the Branch’s adjudication services at all stages
126
of the adjudication process, resulting in inconsistent and
unreliable enforcement of the legislation,” write report authors
and housing lawyers Jessie Hadley and Kendra Milne. “Our
findings in this report are troubling and, in our view, reflect
serious threats to the public’s faith in the Branch and the
efficacy of current legislative protections.”
San Francisco’s equivalent of B.C.’s Residential Tenancy
Branch, meanwhile, is staffed by legal practitioners, not
criticized by them. A team of Administrative Law Judges
(called ALJs) convene tenant-landlord mediations and
arbitrations in the downtown former Masonic temple where
the San Francisco Rent Board is headquartered. If tenants
disagree with an ALJ’s decision, they are entitled to file
an appeal that goes through a mayor-appointed board of
commissioners consisting of tenants, landlords, and neutral
parties. They can also sue the rent board.
“Rent control is a pro-tenant ordinance,” says Delene Wolf,
executive director of the San Francisco Rent Board. “This is a
tenant town. This city would be totally changed without rent
control.”
Idea #3: Help housing outreach workers
expand their work
Murk and mystification pervade many Vancouver
conversations about housing. This city lacks the widely
available tenant information, support and outreach that
San Franciscans enjoy, from a detailed history of their city’s
changing housing policies over three-and-a-half decades, to
the robust tenant organizations that serve multi-ethnic and
multi-lingual communities.
As a result, vulnerable renters who lack the ability
to advocate for themselves risk exploitation, harassment, and
are often forced to settle for sub-standard housing because it’s
all they can afford.
The Vancouver Renters Union was formed only last year. Its
members stage housing protests at eviction sites across the city.
The San Francisco Tenant Union (SFTU), on the other hand,
is 43 years old with two paid staff. It operates a drop-in clinic
where some 400 people receive accommodation counselling
each month.
“Our attitude has been that the law is not complicated at
all. The law is really easy to understand, and anybody can
pick it up,” says SFTU executive director Ted Gullicksen.
The volunteer counselling model works at the SFTU in part
because it’s based on a self-help model: counsellors strive to
equip renters to help themselves.
Open your doors
The apartment I finally found is the first I’ve lived in where
neighbours routinely enjoy each other’s company. Everywhere
else, there have been nodding acquaintances at best.
That’s not surprising. Vancouverites are known
for their aloofness and reserve, to the point that 3,841
residents polled by the Vancouver Foundation last year
127
described the city’s most pressing local issue — worse even
the lack of affordable housing — was social isolation and
loneliness.
To live well in a city is to feel connected to the people you
share it with. Living well also means living affordably. Much
as I hoped to find them, San Francisco didn’t present big-ticket
policy fixes on rental affordability. But I was struck by the
easy, open way people welcomed each other into their homes,
whether it from necessity (renter-roommate households were
often enormous by Vancouver standards, with five to eight
people routinely sharing accommodations) or simply because
renters are more accustomed than property owners to sharing
space with others.
The culture of civic engagement in San Francisco likewise
takes many forms, from widespread participation in political
events to the way so many people I met had a strikingly
encyclopedic knowledge of the San Francisco rent ordinance.
“The successful evolution of affordable housing programs
in San Francisco cannot be understood by simply looking
at the local codes and ordinances, policies, development
requirements and restrictions separately,” Rosen and Sullivan
conclude. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
There’s clearly more to affordable housing than what
decisions pass (or don’t) at city hall. Hopes of creating more
affordable rentals in Vancouver don’t rest solely on municipal
or provincial legislation, either — though a more effective and
better financed Residential Tenancy Branch and more housing
outreach workers would go a long way. Still, some of the most
effective solutions that might lead us later to larger, systemic
changes may be simpler and more human than that. We just
need show each other how that’s done.
128
Infographic:
Cities of
Renters,
Vancouver vs.
San Francisco
How two West Coast housing markets
stack up.
More Lower Mainland
Rental Housing,
but For Whom?
New developments won't much help affordability
without deeper system change, says planner.
By Jackie Wong
Jerking the portafilter onto the head of the espresso machine,
Jeremy’s mind would race as he struggled to recall customers’
special requests, the high choking screech of the milk steamer like
a dental drill to his brain. It’s a popular notion that minimumwage service-industry jobs like his as a barista are plentiful and
easy to do, providing an employment lifeline for generations of
young people. For Jeremy, however, that’s simply not true.
Jeremy asked Tyee Solutions Society not to publish his real
name because he feels too vulnerable to speak publicly about
his experiences. The 25-year-old is smart, affable and diligent,
but he struggles mightily to keep a roof over his head. Today
he pays $469 a month for a small room in a waterlogged,
mouldy basement suite shared with a roommate near Fraser
Street and 49th Avenue in Vancouver’s Sunset neighbourhood.
The rent is 52 per cent of the $906 he receives each month.
The reason for Jeremy’s struggle to hold down a job is also
the reason the provincial government sends him that monthly
$906, the amount a single person is entitled to receive on
British Columbia’s Persons with Disabilities (PWD) benefit.
Jeremy became entitled to it after several mental health teams
diagnosed him with Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum
disorder.
The proposed Landing Post purpose-built rental tower next to the New
Westminster SkyTrain station is estimated to cost $110 million. The 40-storey
tower will feature 32 storeys of purpose-built studio, one-bedroom, and twobedroom units. If approved, renters could move in by 2015. Image courtesy
VIA Architecture.
“I have trouble with anxiety and depressive episodes.
I’ve had long suicidal periods, and basically am doing better
because of the PWD income and the small amount of freedom
it provides,” he says. “But the amount is still inadequate.”
He’s had the most success landing jobs in customer service,
but struggled with the short-term memory requirements and
claustrophobic hustle of those jobs. He gave the barista gig his
best shot, but in the end the stress was so intense that he broke
down in tears in front of his boss. Humiliated, he quit. He’s
now out of work, scraping by each month on $437 after paying
rent with most of his PWD benefit.
“This is the fundamental absurdity: [the B.C. government]
gives $375 for shelter, but this is not enough for market
housing anywhere in the province,” Jeremy says. “And then
they put people on housing lists for years, giving them false
hope.”
Jeremy has lived in his current home for five years. For the
last two, he’s waited on the BC Housing applicant list for a
spot in subsidized housing. He joins thousands of other British
Columbians on that list, and he’s rapidly giving up hope that
his name will ever be drawn.
Jeremy wants to go to university and earn a degree so he
can work from home as a copywriter, one job he can imagine
doing with happiness and peace. But he’s put off using his
part-time college transfer credits (he earned a 4.18 Grade
Point Average over five years) because he can’t afford to move
closer to the University of British Columbia, where he would
like to complete an undergraduate degree. “It’s stable yet
precarious at the same time,” he says. “I can’t move if I can’t
find anything more affordable.”
B.C.’s private rental market is not designed to house people
like Jeremy. Market landlords are in the business of providing
homes to people, and they are also are in the business to
make a profit. Those motivations have been made clear for
133
years by both individuals and representatives of professional
associations.
Even today, in the rezoning submission for a proposed
purpose-built rental tower with 32 floors of residential
units adjacent to the New Westminster SkyTrain Station, the
architects state explicitly, several times, that the development
“is intended to be market rental and not ‘social’ or ‘affordable’
housing.”
The same is true of many of the new market rental units city
councillor Geoff Meggs discussed in his recent Tyee editorial
on what the City of Vancouver has done in encouraging more
rental housing construction. “To go further, faster, all levels of
government have to hear the voices of renters, loud and clear:
build rental housing!” Meggs concluded.
Most would agree with Meggs that it is critically important
to build more rental housing. But most of the new stock being
built is not the kind people like Jeremy can afford.
‘Massive’ intervention needed: planner
“Housing affordability — the reasons why it’s not
happening — are very deep-seated. And they’re very
structural. And all you’re ever going to be able to do is toy
with that larger structural machine to get housing affordability.
Within the current economic system that we work in now,
unfortunately, it’s very, very difficult to achieve,” says Tom
Lancaster.
“Unless there is massive government intervention, or some
third-party intervention to change the playing field, you’re
going to see increasing unaffordability as opposed to heading
in the direction of affordable housing.”
Lancaster is an urban planner working for VIA Architecture,
the progressive Vancouver architecture firm working
in consultation with PWL architects to bring the New
Westminster purpose-built rental tower proposal to life. The
40-storey tower, called the Landing Post, features 32 residential
floors, eight storeys of above-ground parking, and two storeys
of amenity and commercial space. It’s the fourth of four
new residential towers going up around New West SkyTrain
station.
The towers are part of a project called Plaza 88, backed
by developers Mike and Patti Degelder. Plaza 88 is part of
an ambitious downtown revitalization initiative that aims to
change the hard-luck face of downtown New Westminster
by adding public gathering spaces, new commercial strips
and new residents. The Landing Post is the only purposebuilt rental tower of the four — the others are strata title
condominiums.
“Our mission [at VIA Architecture] is about creating
connected and connective communities,” Lancaster says.
“This [Plaza 88] project really speaks to me because of the
transformation that it’s had in the area, and how it catalyzed
a safer place for people to live. And when the possibility for
doing rental [at the Landing Post] popped up and we had a
couple of lenders who were willing to throw the money in for
134
this project, I saw that as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It’s
just strictly a developer willing to take a risk, a lender willing
to take a risk to do purpose-built rental housing.”
The Landing Post development is still pending approval by
New Westminster city council (the last meeting on the subject
took place Nov. 4). But the fact the project has come this far is,
in its own way, a miracle. Rental housing is typically risky, and
difficult to secure funding to build.
Site of the proposed Landing Post tower in New Westminster, B.C. Photo by
Jackie Wong.
“Banks are not generally willing to throw a bunch of money
at something with a flexible return,” Lancaster explains. “Cap
rates are a measure of how fast a development pays itself off.
Hotels have cap rates. Rental buildings have cap rates. Nonstrata offices have cap rates. A straight-up strata development?
There’s no cap rate, because I’m selling you something and
I’m generally pre-selling it. Rental buildings are much riskier
because you never know what’s going to happen.”
But people invested in the condos in the three other Plaza
88 towers. Many investors are renting the condos at market
rates. “They have resold at really high values. Investors are
willing to come in and throw money at them,” Lancaster
acknowledges. That security set the stage for the Degelders to
roll the dice on the Landing Post and develop it as purposebuilt rental. Unlike other new rental projects, it has no support
from the municipal government. “There’s no offset of cost
provided by a housing authority,” Lancaster says.
Reaching ‘deep market affordability’
The Landing Post responds to widespread calls for more
rental housing stock near transit lines. New Westminster’s
May 2013 Secured Market Rental Housing Policy is designed
to meet some of the housing directions called for in the city’s
February 2010 Affordable Housing Strategy.
“[New Westminster] city staff are very progressive in what
they’re trying to do,” says Lancaster. New Westminster Mayor
Wayne Wright chairs Metro Vancouver’s Housing Committee
and co-founded the Canadian Rental Housing Coalition, a
group aimed at working with all levels of government to
increase rental housing supply across Canada.
If council approves it, the Landing Post could see its first
renters moving in by 2015. Rental rates will vary according to
135
unit type and floor — there could be approximately 16 units
per floor of varying sizes to accommodate different family
type. But, Lancaster says, “we have to generate approximately
$30 per square foot per year on average before deducting
property taxes, property management and operating
expenses.”
While the Landing Post rezoning submission states that it
is “intended to be market rental and not ‘social’ or ‘affordable’
housing,” it also notes “that purpose-built rental stock tends to
become more affordable over time because rates are not set by
individual strata owners.”
Even so, reaching deep market affordability — the kind that
people like Jeremy can afford — will take more than projects
like Landing Post.
“Until there is some mechanism of stepping in and
halting that accumulation of wealth through land assembly
and ownership, it’s very, very difficult to come up with
a real solution to this problem,” Lancaster says. “That’s
why government intervention, or some kind of third-party
intervention, has to step in, if you are to look at a real, systemic
housing affordability solution.”
Lancaster sees the Landing Post as one solution to one
component of affordable housing. He’s also embarking on
extra-curricular research to bring an innovative, Europeanstyle idea to B.C. called “community development
corporations.”
“[It's] a partnership between a group of people who own
a little bit of capital,” he explains. “It’s mission-based instead
of profit-based. When you create that scenario, you create the
opportunity to change the rules of the game.”
It works like this: groups of people create mission-based
community development corporations in Vancouver. They
work with the City of Vancouver to depress the value of cityowned land by putting a development moratorium on it.
“The City can do that. It’s well within their jurisdiction
to find a chunk of land and say, that land is going to be an
affordable housing block that has a certain density on it if
you’re a community development corporation,” he says.
“If the City gets involved and we have this non-profit
development thing and a lending institution backs us, we
can afford to build something that stays functionally off the
market.”
To Lancaster, the proposal is “radical, but it’s not so radical
that it’s imaginary.” To him, the key to building housing
affordability is to find new ways of structuring the world of
development.
“That doesn’t mean you’re going to preclude other means
of doing development; that’s a full-on restructuring of the
capitalist system that we’re not in any position to do right
now,” he says.
Housing ‘defines who are’
Lancaster will continue research on how to bring
community development corporations to B.C., and continue
work on purpose-built projects like the Landing Post. He’s
136
in the business, he says, because housing is not just about
keeping people safe and healthy.
“It’s part of grounding people mentally in a place they can
call home, which then dramatically increases their overall
happiness, and parallel to that, their mental health and
emotional health. Where we live impacts dramatically who we
are, how we think, how we interpret the world, and how we
interface with the world. It’s critical. It defines who we are.”
Lancaster and other urban planning professionals are well
aware of the impact housing has on people’s livelihoods
and mental health. Jeremy is, too. While others grapple with
systemic changes to increase housing affordability for people
like him, Jeremy waits for change.
Since it’s the only place he can barely afford, he plans to
stay at his apartment near Fraser and 49th for now. He’ll
tolerate the mould and rot, a situation that has become so
severe that the third bedroom has squishy craters in the
hardwood floor. His foot sinks in when he steps on the holes.
But he’s had several nice roommates, he says. It’s home.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever lived in Vancouver. It was the
first place I interviewed at,” he says, recalling when he found
the place at 20 and was accepted by the landlord.
“In comparison to everything else in my life, relatively
speaking, that was a stroke of luck.”
The Quiet Agony
of the Landlord
For property owners in BC, it's hard to stay in
the game. By Jackie Wong
It’s been about two decades since Calvin and his wife Sarah
started earning an income as landlords. They live in Richmond
and rent out a four-unit Burnaby duplex, renting the twobedroom, 850-square-foot units for $875 a month downstairs and
$1,000 a month upstairs. “I would say each unit can be rented for
$25 to $50 higher, but I prefer to charge good tenants a little less
than market rent,” Calvin says.
His tenants’ quality of life and safety are important to him,
he adds. He’s spent many weekends maintaining the 60-yearold building. “We spent a lot of money updating it so it looks
and functions newer than [its age]. In fact, parts of it are nicer
than what I have in my own home,” he says. Both a carbon
monoxide detector and smoke detector can be found in each
suite, something most landlords don’t provide, he notes. “I
try to provide decent living units where I personally wouldn’t
mind living myself. I also try to put myself in the tenants’
shoes.”
Calvin works full-time as an accountant. He never aspired
nor expected to become a landlord. But Sarah had purchased
the building before they were married. “She lived at home
with her family until she was in her 30s and spent her salary
on mortgage payment for the rental property,” he explains.
“She got into it because other family members invested in
real estate and she was regularly reminded that real estate is a
good investment versus, say, stocks.”
Being a tenant can be tough, but landlords hit their brick walls, too. Photo in
Vancouver’s Chinatown by dons projects in Your BC: The Tyee’s Photo Pool.
Calvin sees landlording as one way to diversify his
investment portfolio. But after going through three arbitrations
at B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) over the last six
years, his enthusiasm for landlording is wearing thin. He’s
138
still embroiled in his most recent dispute with the RTB. Not
wanting to prejudice his case with the arbitrators, he asked
Tyee Solutions Society not to publish his real name.
and taken disputes to the RTB, Calvin doesn’t feel he’s
received the service he should have from the agency in charge
of administering provincial residential tenancy legislation.
He knows there would be consequences to selling the
building at this stage. He gets along well with three of the four
tenant households in the duplex. He thinks they’ll be “sad” if
he quits his job as a landlord.
“Arbitrators need to be better trained,” he says. “Yes, part of
the decision should be based on the laws and regulations. But
just as importantly, the decision should be based on common
sense. RTB staff need to treat clients and taxpayers better.”
“I am amazed,” he says, “at how biased the DROs [the
dispute-resolution officers who run landlord-tenant hearings]
were in favour of the tenants. With all the hassles I have
been experiencing, I have also been thinking of selling and
getting out [of landlording] entirely. The hassles are due to
unreasonable and irrational tenants, as well as the RTB.”
One reason is what he knows is likely to happen to the
building if he sells it: “If I sell out, a developer may buy it and
build a new duplex on it to sell.
“If that happens, there goes four units of affordable
housing.”
Three fixes for an unloved agency
B.C.’s rental housing landscape can be unforgiving to
renters. But those providing housing to rent in the private
market don’t seem to have it much easier.
Calvin and Sarah are small-time landlords whose property
is not part of a professional property management corporation,
and whose professional and personal lives go beyond the
Burnaby duplex. But when they’ve had trouble with tenants,
“By no means am I asking the RTB to be biased in favour
of landlords,” he says. “I am just hoping one day the playing
field will be leveled.” Perhaps unwittingly echoing a group
of exhausted West End tenants who struggled for years with
the RTB, Calvin calls for more balance, professionalism and
transparency in B.C.’s landlord-tenant arbitration process.
According to the advocacy agency Landlord BC, the RTB
convenes some 22,000 dispute hearings each year. Calvin offers
three unfussy solutions for improving them:
1. Commission an independent survey of client satisfaction
with RTB staff, and work to improve whatever the survey
results indicate needs improving.
2. Require an independent review of an arbitrator’s decision
upon a landlord or tenant’s request.
3. Move towards a more accessible appeals process, after
decisions are handed down.
The last idea addresses a quirk of the system: as it stands
now, any appeal of an arbitrator’s decision — whether by a
landlord or tenant — cannot be made at the RTB. It must apply
for judicial review at the BC Supreme Court: a prohibitively
expensive and time-consuming process, even for most
landlords.
“I just checked yesterday to see how much a judicial review
at the BC Supreme Court would cost,” Calvin says. “I was told
about $3,500 to $4,000.”
He understands the system may be challenged for
resources. “I have no doubt the RTB is under-funded,” he says,
“as suggested by ‘On Shaky Ground,’” referring to a critical
report by tenant advocates earlier this year that called for a
major overhaul of B.C.’s system. “However, with the funding
they do get, I am sure they can do a better job.”
‘Only so much a landlord can take’
But raising the standards of the residential tenancy system
includes landlords, says Amy Spencer, spokesperson for
Landlord BC, recently-renamed from the BC Apartment
Owners and Managers Association.
The group represents some 3,500 landlords in B.C., a
small fraction of the untold real number of property owners
renting suites to tenants across the province. It’s an advocacy
organization aimed at professionalizing the landlord and
property management industry.
“We offer education for landlords. We offer networking
opportunities. We exist to make a landlord’s life easier, to
make it easier for them to do business,” Spencer says.
139
“We are also looking for more balance in landlord-tenant
relations,” Spencer says, “thinking about landlords and tenants
as a community rather than separate fighting entities.”
Her membership includes large firms like Hollyburn
Properties and Concert Properties, but 80 to 90 per cent are
more like Calvin and Sarah, owners of 10 or fewer rental units.
And Spencer says most landlords aren’t looking to make
life miserable for their tenants. “In the media, probably
about five years ago, you were starting to see a lot of words
like ‘renovictions’and ‘slumlords,’” she acknowledges. “That
small percentage of people were really tarnishing the industry
as a whole. We want to talk about all the good landlords that
are out there, not just the bad ones. And our ideal hope would
be to not have anyone do untoward business practices, not
have anyone be called a slumlord.”
Spencer spends her weekdays in the office fielding calls
from landlords like Calvin and Sarah across the province.
They complain about the Residential Tenancy Act, or about
the decision from a hearing at the RTB. She will hear them and
direct them back to the RTB, to investigate what happened, but
she knows those powers — and her own — are limited.
“This is the interesting part: they don’t have the power to
change a decision,” she says. “So the onus is on the landlord,
then, to take it to judicial review. It’s kind of an onerous
process, I would say, for landlords, especially those who
maybe only have a secondary suite, basement suite or laneway
house, something like that.”
Absent a more supportive RTB, the landlord group is
planning a number of initiatives next year to provide its
members and other landlords in B.C. with more resources
and some support. It’s launching an online education
initiative called the Connected Landlord, and considering
bringing Ontario’s Certified Rental Building program, which
streamlines practice standards, to B.C. The organization is
also considering providing a mediation service to its member
landlords and their tenants in efforts to help them avoid taking
their case to the RTB, thus reducing the RTB’s already-crowded
caseload.*
Such professional community supports are crucial for
improving the occupation overall, Spencer says. Many
landlords work in isolation and under stress, many trying to
stretch the annual allowable rent increases in B.C. (the price of
inflation plus two per cent) to cover routine maintenance costs.
“There’s only so much a landlord can take,” Spencer says.
Striving for professionalism
Scott Ullrich has worked in rental housing property
management for 30 years. He’s now the CEO of Gateway
Property Management, a 50-year-old property management
corporation with properties under contract in B.C., Alberta,
and Quebec. Gateway works as an agent for landlords (the
company does not own the buildings it operates) and has
16,000 residential rental units under its belt.
140
Ullrich has seen great change in the landlording industry
over his decades in the business. “When we first started,
property managers and landlords were basically like
custodians. Pretty simple, pretty basic. They owned or
managed a unit, they found a tenant, put the tenant in,
collected the rent, paid the expenses,” he says. “It wasn’t, in a
lot of cases, even considered a profession.”
Gateway is now part of Landlord BC and has worked, like
other firms, to professionalize and legitimize the landlord
industry, Ullrich says. But he still sees educational gaps
among property managers — housing literacy, it seems, is
something that could use improvement among both tenants
and landlords.
What Ullrich, and Landlord BC’s thousands of property
managers and landlords in B.C., as well as Calvin and Sarah,
have in common, is that they are renting homes on the private
market in order to generate income — to turn a profit.
People forget that, they say.
“What I wish more people knew is the difference between
providing market housing and affordable housing,” Spencer
says. “We have to start making that distinction and think
about what we can do to help people who can’t afford market
housing.”
Adds Ullrich: “Landlords have to eat, too. There’s got to be
some sort of profit in it for them. I think what has to happen is
thinking outside of the box. How else can you make it work?”
Affordable Housing:
Some Parts Just
Aren’t City Hall’s Job
Vancouver councillor and new housing officer call
for clarity, and candour, on housing file.
By Jackie Wong
On the phone from the home he shares with his wife and
children in East Vancouver, David Wong’s voice is heavy with
exhaustion. The Vancouver-raised architect and author is burnt
out, he says. He’s spent the last two weeks speaking out publicly
on behalf of the Ming Sun Benevolent Society, whose former
headquarters at 439 Powell Street made headlines when news of
the 122-year-old building’s impending demolition spread.
Until recently the building’s upper floor housed 10 lowincome, Chinese-speaking seniors, a population known to
struggle to find affordable and culturally appropriate housing.
The Ming Sun Benevolent Society, which owns the building,
also rented out the 1,000-square-foot space on the main floor to
a local artists’ collective, Instant Coffee, for $1,000 a month.
In late November, City engineers ordered both the seniors
upstairs and the artists downstairs out, saying the aging
building had become unsafe.
Most of the seniors are now living with relatives outside the
inner city, says Wong, a third-generation descendant of one of
the Ming Sun society’s founding families. They’re not happy,
he adds. According to Wong, residents “were given no notice”
of the emergency eviction. Some were so rushed they “left
their things behind. One old lady, she came back several times.
She came back with a little plastic bag and did a whole bunch
of trips back and forth all by herself on the bus. She was crying
on the floor. I had to pick her up off the floor and comfort her.”
City of Vancouver housing officer Mukhtar Latif (left) and Vision Vancouver
councillor Geoff Meggs (right) stand in front of city hall. Photo by Jackie
Wong.
Wong says he considers some city councillors to be friends.
“[Vision Vancouver councillor] Kerry [Jang] and those
guys… I still consider them friends,” Wong says. “Their job’s
difficult. They’ve got lots of pressure. I understand where
they’re coming from. And I don’t really want to vilify the
City [of Vancouver] because it takes good people to run it.”
Nonetheless, Wong is an outspoken critic of many of the City’s
decisions, particularly regarding the Ming Sun building. “I’m
just sad that [the City] somehow put the blame on this old
family society. They say that [the Sun Ming Society] are bad
landlords, which isn’t true.”
142
our city staff is to make sure people don’t die in fires. So we
make no apology for enforcing the basic rules around those
buildings, even if unfortunately, from time to time, there’s
consequences.”
‘Willful confusion’
Geoff Meggs bristles at Wong’s comments.
“David Wong is not telling the truth about what the City
has said and done with regard to the Ming Sun project,” says
the two-term Vision Vancouver councillor, “and that’s caused
a lot of confusion.” The demolition, Meggs insists, was not
initiated by the City, as Wong describes it. Rather, it was a
necessary response to the building’s imminent “landlordcaused collapse.”
“This is a very, very old building. And the building next
door did collapse. So life-safety issues came to the fore and
city engineers intervened and established that further work
was needed.” After the brick east facade of the Ming Sun
building collapsed onto its neighbour in July, City inspectors
determined that the entire building was inadequately
maintained, and required significant structural improvements
to remain habitable.
“People condemn the City for shutting down a building that
could burn down at any moment!” Megg objects. “The job of
The former Powell Street headquarters of Instant Coffee artist collective and
the Ming Sun Benevolent Society. Photo by Jackie Wong.
The controversy surrounding the Ming Sun demolition,
Meggs says, is an example of what he describes as frustratingly
widespread, “willful confusion” within the affordable housing
advocacy community.
Irked by what he heard from panelists at Tyee Solutions
Society’s Generation Rent storytelling night and panel
discussion last month, Meggs fired back in an opinion
piece lauding City progress in addressing rental housing —
efforts he felt the panelists failed to acknowledge.
His remarks set off a spirited exchange. First Filipino
community advocate R.J. Aquino and former NDP MLA
David Chudnovsky countered Meggs’ commentary. Then Sean
Antrim, a frequent Meggs critic and executive director of the
Coalition of Progressive Electors, the far-left municipal party
that has lost members to Vision Vancouver recently, penned
an essay on the Mainlander news site that lays out three
recommendations for the city to move forward on affordable
rental housing solutions.
Antrim called on the city to:
1. Stop zoning high-end market rentals and condominiums
in neighbourhoods with high existing concentrations of
affordable housing;
2. To curb evictions for renovations, or “renovictions,” refuse
renovation permits unless the landlord can guarantee tenants will
be allowed to return to the new unit without an extraordinary
rent increase;
3. Reactivate the city’s dormant public housing corporation.
Meggs dismisses Antrim’s ideas as infeasible. Allowing
tenants back into renovated suites without extraordinary
rent increases, he says, would unfairly force landlords to lose
money. “I don’t think anybody, regardless of their perspective
on rents, can afford to renovate a home and not pay off that
renovation somehow,” he reasons.
Drawing another distinction, Meggs adds: “Our critics
reject new [housing] supply as part of the solution because
143
they consider it too expensive. We [in Vision Vancouver] think
there’s a value to building new rental housing, provided it
doesn’t destroy old rental housing, because it’s at price points
that are very accessible to people who could not afford to buy
a home. And we are trying to respond to the housing needs of
everybody below the home ownership level to the degree we
can.”
Meanwhile, he insists that Vancouver is using what
regulatory tools it can to protect existing rental stock, “which
is very significant, and has been completely ignored [by the
City's critics].” Meggs places the blame for threats to that
housing on forces beyond city hall’s control. “It’s at risk
because the [Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, or
CMHC] mortgage program is ending, the CMHC itself may
be ending. Our leases [on city-owned land] are coming to an
end.”
He’s talking about the expiry in 2014 of the federal housing
agency’s Investment in Affordable Housing (IAH), though
work is underway to extend the program to 2019;* federal
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s recent musings that the agency
itself has grown too large and needs trimming back; and the
somewhat more distance expiries of leases on city-owned sites
occupied by affordable and market rental housing.
As for adding to affordable housing units, “what we’ve
heard from our critics is, well, the City should build housing:
it should become a landlord. That’s a viewpoint that simply
ignores a lot of the financial realities,” Meggs insists.
The idea, popular among advocates, that the City could
tap the $3-billion value of its property endowment fund to
construct housing in the city, he says, misunderstands the
nature of that fund. “Very little of those assets are in cash
form. A lot of them are parks, schools, other community assets
like community centres and so on, which have a value from
the standpoint of managing the City’s finances as collateral,”
Meggs says. “But they could never be developed.”
The challenge is regional, not city alone
According to Meggs, the City of Vancouver has “the best
record in the region” for affordable housing initiatives. One
144
such initiative was its October appointment of new chief
housing officer Mukhtar Latif. Vancouver wooed the housing
project manager and development director away from London,
U.K., in response to a 2012 recommendation from the Mayor’s
Task Force on Housing Affordability.
Latif’s first assignment is the creation of a Vancouver
housing authority, but he’ll also spend part of the next year
investigating ways to make two- and three-bedroom units
more affordable to families in the private rental market.
Expectations for Latif’s mission are hemmed in by what Meggs
calls the city’s “brutal” land costs. “And we are not able to
repeal those market laws on our own.”
HOUSING LESSONS FROM LONDON
The City of Vancouver appointed its
first-ever chief housing officer earlier this
fall. Mukhtar Latif brings with him ideas
from his last post as director of Savills, a
global real estate services provider, and
board member of the Inquilab affordable
housing association in London, England:
On options for middle-income families:
“One of the difficulties people have
is raising the deposit to access housing.
So one option is you can create an
opportunity where part of the mortgage
is supported by either the government
or the developer, and there’s a lower
deposit requirement from the actual
purchaser. [In Britain] the government
will support part of the mortgage
payment so that people can get access to
housing.”
On rental supplements:
“In the U.K., you’ve got housing
benefits. It takes into account your needs
and the rents you pay; it supports the
difference. They are means tested, but
they do recognize the private sector as
well as the public sector. If they can’t
accommodate you in public-sector
housing, and you are housed in a
private-sector house, they will cover the
rental difference.”
On federal investment in housing:
“The government in the U.K. recently
invested $1.7 billion into private rental
stock because they wanted to show
institutional investors that this was a
good asset class for them to invest in.
What governments tend to do is initiate,
show what can be achievable, and then
hopefully the market can sustain that
going forward.”
Jackie Wong
He finds it frustrating to see the city so criticized, Meggs
says, when he doesn’t see the same pressure placed on
surrounding municipalities. “The rental stock that’s in
Burnaby, New West, and Surrey, in many cases, doesn’t have
the same protection that it does here,” he says. “I think it’s
long overdue that people looked at the housing crisis in the
region as a regional problem.”
It’s not only the other regional municipalities he’d like to
see called out on their support for housing. “It’s frustrating to
be in a debate where the alleged shortcomings of our program
are 80 per cent of the focus,” Meggs says, “when we know
that to fix the problem we need action at senior levels [of
government]. The City has demonstrated the possibility and
raised the hopes, I think. But we can’t close the deal without
provincial action and federal action. And those are very remote
right now.”
A new rise for the Ming Sun?
Residue from December’s rain darkens the wooden exterior
walls of the former Ming Sun Benevolent Society headquarters.
For the first time in over a century, its upstairs hallways are no
longer full of people.
David Wong remains optimistic about the future of
the society. He’s hopeful that community members could
collaborate with the City on building a new space for Ming
Sun. “After this incident, a whole bunch of different groups
have come together, from the Dunbar Residents Association, to
145
Downtown Eastside groups, to the Nikkei Museum, the Powell
Street Festival, the Chinese-Canadian Historial Society,” he
says. “I’m sure the artists and the whole community could
come out to work with the city.”
Meggs is less sanguine. “There may be a solution there, but
it seems like the situation’s becoming more irretrievable by the
day. There are buildings of that age that are perfectly safe. And
this one is not,” he says. “And why is that? Is that the City’s
fault? I get impatient with people who feel that the City should
be able to fix everything after the fact, retroactively. It’s simply
not possible for us to do. ”
Meggs is aware that his stand garners him criticism. But
he’s clearly unapologetic in his view that the City is moving in
the best ways possible to build affordable housing for lowerto middle-income citizens — those identified as a priority by
the Mayor’s Task Force on Housing Affordability. Very low
income citizens on social assistance are the responsibility
of the provincial government; those who can afford to buy
condos are, as Meggs puts it, “not our department.”
Meggs will take his case to voters next year, when Vision
Vancouver prepares for the fall’s municipal elections. But even
if he fails to win a third term next November, he says, “at least
I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that there’s two to three
thousand additional rental units that wouldn’t have been there
otherwise.
“And I invite those like Sean [Antrim], who hope I’m
defeated next year, to produce some practical proposals to do
better. I haven’t heard them yet.”
Latest in Vancouver
Density Battle:
Demolition at
Marine Gardens
Townhouses along key SkyTrain line must be torn
down to make way for big development, city says.
By David P. Ball
As part of Vancouver council’s plan to densify housing
in the city, more than 200 residents of a townhouse complex
in Vancouver will be forced to leave their homes behind to
accommodate a long-planned tower development.
Residents of Marpole’s Marine Gardens complex insist their
longstanding opposition to the demolition of their community
has been ignored, despite numerous open houses on the issue.
But city council says the demolition must occur if plans to
greatly increase densification along a main SkyTrain artery is
to succeed.
After a series of city-mandated consultations, GBL
Architects Inc. filed a rezoning application on March 12 to
build three buildings on the site owned by Concord Pacific,
including towers 27- and 23-storeys high, totaling 584
residential units, including 70 at “affordable” rates.
Now the 70 existing rental households at 445 Southwest
Marine Drive have formed a new resident association to
advocate against the demolition with a “single voice,”
according to a spokeswoman. A Dec. 10 letter to the city
demanded that any offers to residents, short of saving the
townhouse complex, would be unacceptable.
Children play in the courtyard at the heart of Vancouver’s Marine Gardens
complex, slated to be replaced by three Concord Pacific towers. Photo: Jillian
Skeet, submitted.
“The demolition of Marine Gardens is a tragedy on so many
levels,” said Jillian Skeet, representing the Marine Gardens
Residents’ Association. “I have been to virtually every open
house and town hall. The level of consultation, in terms of
holding these meetings, has been unprecedented, but the City
has not been listening. They are not open to actually accepting
the input from residents.”
Demolition may still may be several years away, as the
rezoning application process continues.
City Councillor Raymond Louie said that although
his council still must make a final decision when the 445
Southwest Marine Drive proposal comes before them, and
staff can request changes to the building plans, there is no
question that Marine Gardens must be torn down as part of the
process of densifying the area around Marine Drive Canada
Line station and installing new amenities there, known as the
Cambie Corridor Plan.
147
“Council made a very clear decision this would be an area
where densification would happen,” he explained. “The city
is planning for the people currently in our city, but also for
future generations to come as well.
“Transportation-oriented development is the key to us
having a sustainable city. We cannot continue to have people
drive cars as the primary mode of transport in our city,” he
added.
Density or bust
Marine Gardens was designed by architects Michael Katz
and Cornelia Oberlander in 1974, as a demonstration project
for the Vancouver-hosted United Nations Habitat Forum two
years later. The complex included several rows of townhouses
clustered around a central courtyard.
Skeet said that children’s safety in the enclosed outdoor
space has been a defining feature of life in the community,
as well as a central shared laundry facility designed to bring
people into contact with one another. “The whole idea was
how to design a housing development that will really foster
community,” she said.
Marine Gardens was created as a demonstration project for the UN’s Habitat
Conference in 1976, but today is in the path of the city’s green and housing
priorities. Photo: Jillian Skeet, submitted.
Louie said an “extensive process” went into the plan to
densify around transit stations, including many open houses,
and at this point only the “actual form and how it’s actually
laid out” can potentially be modified, not the demolition itself.
“Everyone who lives in Marine Gardens really values the
community we have, the affordable housing we have, the type
of housing we have… Our children have an opportunity to
play outside. Our homes are small, our kitchens are tiny, but it
doesn’t matter because we have community here,” said Skeet.
Louie agreed that the townhouse complex served an
important and historic function in the city.
“Certainly that development was ahead of its time in
providing higher levels of density and family housing in our
city,” he said. “But if the community’s opinion is that nothing
should change short of saving the houses, that’s not possible
given that council has decided this is a densification area.
A redevelopment of the space will require the demolition of
these townhouses to accommodate the new development.”
According to the developer application, the buildings slated
to replace Marine Gardens are compatible with the city’s plan
to create a dense urban core surrounding Marine Drive station
to make “effective use of land, transportation, and energy.”
“Our intention is to respect these goals through heightened
density, an enlarged daycare, and renewed rental housing,”
GBL Architects Inc. stated in its design document. “The
landscape design intent is to create a ‘permeable sanctuary’
that not only proposes a series of sheltered open spaces, but
also addresses public access through the site.”
The city has faced increased push-back lately from several
neighbourhoods undergoing community planning processes.
In Marpole, residents held protests earlier this year and
thousands of lawn signs have risen against densification of the
south Vancouver region. Likewise, proposals for towers at the
Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station drew protests over
the Grandview-Woodland plan. In both cases, the city agreed
to improve its consultation process as well as amend its
proposals
148
Retirement Savings
Could Jump-start
Victoria Affordable
Housing
Redirect RRSP investments into local projects,
and re-engage progressive citizens.
By Jackie Wong
Victoria, B.C. is a study in contrasts. On one hand, the
capital city’s tony-campy Downton Abbey-esque Oak Bay
district retains its reputation for being “more English than
England itself” (residents are jokingly said to live inside “the
Tweed Curtain”). Elsewhere though, fleece-jacketed, thicksocked phalanxes of generally leftish-leaning frontline workers,
researchers, academics, and public servants fill the streets and
offices, evoking a 1990s grunge aesthetic and political sensibility
a little reminiscent of its historical sibling Portland, Oregon,
founded just five years after the Canadian city.
Politically, the result is a seemingly dissonant collision of
deep-pocketed, old-money wealth, with a socially progressive
citizenry that elected the only Green Party MP in B.C.,
and exclusively New Democratic and Green MLAs in this
year’s provincial election.
The preponderance of well-paid, highly educated people in
the city provides a supportive environment for organizations
like the Community Social Planning Council of Greater
Victoria and now, an ambitious new attempt to expand the
city’s housing options, while enriching its community social
bonds.
Using RRSPs for today, as well as tomorrow
A population given to progressive activism: Victoria on Idle No More Day.
Photo by Professional Recreationalist in Your BC: The Tyee’s Photo Pool.
As 2013 ran out the clock, the Social Planning Council was
putting the finishing touches on an innovative ‘Community
Investment Fund.’ The essential idea is to invite Victoria’s
citizens to direct a portion of their individual Registered
Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs) money to finance new
affordable housing projects in their own region instead.
150
A national shift
The CIF will be independent of banks or investment
companies. The Community Social Planning Council of
Greater Victoria has set up an independent organization to
govern the CIF: the Vancouver Island Community Investment
Cooperative is to be a multi-stakeholder group of local
residents and people with professional backgrounds in the
non-profit sector, small business and venture capitalism. The
Social Planning Council will incorporate the cooperative’s
board of directors in early 2014. The founding board will offer
memberships to the public, and later set about raising its first
round of investment capital.
Victoria’s CIF is inspired by Nova Scotia’s Community
Economic Development Funds, provincially-supported pools
of capital aimed at re-investing a percentage of the maritime
province’s estimated $600 million of RRSP investments into
public-interest community projects. But it’s part of a growing
number of such initiatives across Canada that also includes
a Community Bond Project launched by Toronto’s Centre for
Social Innovation.
Instead of trying to solve that problem by raising money
through traditional philanthropic channels, fundraising drives
or bids for donations, its creators hope the CIF will leverage
already-existing funds: money that Greater Victoria’s citizens
are already putting into their RRSPs. By investing some of
those RRSP savings in local rental housing instead, proponents
say, progressive-minded Victorians will be rewarded twice:
earning both financial returns and a social return from helping
improve their community.
The CIF aims to tap a percentage of the estimated $360
million that Greater Victoria residents invest in RRSPs each
year, and use that to finance affordable housing projects.
Amyot has already been in talks with the Greater Victoria
Housing Society and St. John the Divine, a Victoria Anglican
Church, about collaborating on both organizations’ many
forthcoming housing projects, including a mixed-use
affordable housing development spearheaded by the church.
The idea grew out of Nicole Chaland’s 2011 research on
social finance options for affordable housing in the Victoria
area. Chaland found the main barrier to building affordable
housing was a lack of access to long-term, low-cost financing.
All these, believes Sarah Amyot, the Community Social
Planning Council’s program manager who has been working
with prospective investors to launch the CIF, are “part of a
broader trend to try to think of having a more relationshipbased economy. It’s about shifting how we think about projects
in our communities, to where we use our relationships and our
social capital to support projects that we want to see happen.”
At present, progressively minded Victorians have no
vehicle for investing retirement savings dollars in desirable
community initiatives, according to Amyot. That needs to
change, she says, reflecting changing perspectives on how
people approach civic participation.
“We’re in a time of immense change in the way we think
about the traditional dividing lines between public, private,
and civil society or non-profit pursuits. I think those lines
are increasingly blurry,” she says. “That value, of citizen
engagement, citizen investment and contribution, in affordable
housing and other social-purpose projects, is a really
important part of the work that we’re trying to do.”
The CIF, she says, is unlike traditional philanthropy in that
it’s an investment that comes with both risk and return. Its
goal is to complement, not displace, traditional philanthropy
and public funding sources. And the larger aim is to empower
citizens to engage differently in their communities by investing
their private capital in social-purpose housing in new ways.
“It’s a way of engaging citizens in decision-making and
goal-setting for our community,” Amyot says. “In some ways,
the [Vancouver] Island culture is really one of the strengths of
being able to do this here, which is that these initiatives are
dependent on people’s relationships, and their sense of trust,
and the reputation of people in your communities who are
going to champion local projects and champion investment in
those projects.”
Seeking a legal shoe-horn
Starting a CIF in B.C., and working with the legal rules
governing RRSPs, has proven technically challenging, Amyot
151
says. “We are operating in a regulatory and in a policy
environment that is really not set up to support this type
of community driven initiative to raise community sourced
capital,” she explains.
“There’s a number of communities, and a number of
projects, including our own, that have found a way to make
that regulatory environment work. But in many ways, we’re
really trying to shoe-horn ourselves into an environment that’s
not built to facilitate individual citizens investing in their own
communities.”
She calls on British Columbia’s government to follow
several steps already in place in Nova Scotia:
1) Provide a tax credit to people investing in local
community investment funds. In Nova Scotia, “that tax credit
rolls over a number of times, so that it encourages you to
keep your money in that fund for longer so that it can be,
essentially, more and more patient for the projects it invests
in,” Amyot says.
2) Authorize the use of a “simplified offering statement”
for community investment funds — in contrast to the
dense legalese in the fine print of most financial-product
offerings. “They simplify the process to meet the regulatory
requirements and in doing so, they made it much more
affordable for community investment funds to get started.”
3) Advocate to the Canada Revenue Agency to have
any investment in a local community investment fund be
considered eligible for inclusion in a self-directed RRSP.
Victoria’s CIF is still in its earliest days. But its creators hope
to use the fund to increase the region’s stock of purpose-built
rental housing units, which has stagnated in recent years.
“The secondary rental market here — condos and basement
suites — make up half of our rental market. And condominium
rentals are, on average, 19 per cent higher than they are for
purpose-built rentals,” noted Marika Albert, who works with
Amyot at the Community Social Planning Council on poverty
reduction initiatives.
“Secondary suites are an important part of the solution,
but that can’t be [all of] it,” Albert adds. “We see the potential
of diversifying the rental housing stock to make it more
accessible for more people.”
Using — and rewarding — other Victoria residents for
investing in that diversification may also strengthen their
sense of being involved participants in their community,
enriching everyone’s social capital.
152
Judge Again Orders
Abbotsford Homeless
Camp Eviction
By David P. Ball
As temperatures plummet and snow billows down before the
holidays, today a B.C. Supreme Court judge ordered the eviction
of an Abbotsford homeless camp by 4 p.m. Saturday.
Justice Murray Blok approved an injunction for the city,
after months of legal wrangling and a previous eviction order
against the Jubilee Park encampment, and authorized police to
“dispose” of their structures and arrest anyone interfering.
The camp saw its residents camped out since October in the
park and inside a wooden structure in a nearby parking lot,
which must itself be removed by Monday. The move to Jubilee
followed the city slashing their tents at a previous location
in early June dumping chicken manure into their lodgings,
for which the city manager later apologized after widespread
media attention.
“The City of Abbotsford will be serving this notice to the
protest organizers as well as to all current residents at the
encampment at Jubilee Park today,” the city stated in a press
release today. “Jubilee camp must be vacated by 4:00 pm
tomorrow … All tents and belongings must be removed.”
The statement added that community service agencies will
be present until the eviction “offering all persons requiring
shelter accommodations,” and that the Salvation Army would
offer those evicted “temporary storage for anyone entering a
shelter that needs to store belongings.”
In his decision, the Supreme Court judge ruled that the
defendants must “forthwith cease, and shall be enjoined and
restrained from erecting, placing, constructing or building
154
tents, shelters, and other constructions in the lands known as
Jubilee Park.”
belongings and dumping chicken manure over the makeshift
lodgings.
encampment’s residents, warned in a statement earlier this
week that evicting the camp would “place a sweeping set of
restrictions on homeless peoples’ access to parks and other
public spaces across Abbotsford.”
down, so these people don’t continue to be displaced,” Larkin
said. “This is unconstitutional.
Pivot Legal Society, which was in court advocating for the
“Obviously we were very disappointed,” Pivot housing
lawyer DJ Larkin told Tyee Solutions Society. “They know the
importance of complying, but the reality is they’re panicking
right now.”
She said that homeless campers are now “honestly trying”
to find shelter, but with the judge basing his decision on the
city’s promise there are enough shelter beds available to house
the 30 to 40 residents, Larkin questioned if the listed lodgings
are in fact available to them. “The reality is, we don’t know if
that’s actually the case,” she said.
But Justice Blok concluded that “there will be places for
them to go,” he told the court. One of the camp’s residents,
who identified himself as “Tiny,” told the Abbotsford News,
“It’s a despicable thing to do before Christmas.
“There is no human aspect to this,” he added. “How can
you make a judgment like this on people who are just trying to
survive?”
In November, Pivot filed its own complaint before the B.C.
Human Rights Tribunal on behalf of homeless residents over
police coating their tents with pepper spray, slashing their
“We have to take it to trial so these laws can be struck
“They are making people’s lives dangerous. The bylaws
have to go and they have to do better.”
In November, Abbotsford Mayor Bruce Banman argued the
camp was a safety issue.
“Since the weather turned cold we now have people using
open barbecues, open heaters, candles, the tents and clumped
together, this is a real fire hazard,” he told CBC News on Nov.
26. “There’s not that many that are really homeless in that
particular camp. So we will work with them to make sure we
find them a place.”
To Help Vulnerable
Renters, Boost
Housing Literacy
'Ready to Rent BC' gives Vancouver Island
residents the keys to a great tenancy.
By Jackie Wong
Megan Wright cradles her cellphone on one shoulder while her
10-month-old daughter, Kandra, stirs in her arms. It’s a crowded
house in Victoria, B.C., and Wright has few places and moments
to conduct conversations in peace. At night Kandra sleeps in the
bedroom Wright shares with her common-law husband, Tony
Edwards, and 10-year-old son Aidan is in the second bedroom
down the hall. There isn’t enough space for everyone to live
comfortably, Wright says, a frustration compounded by “a huge
list of stuff” in need of repairs.
For two years, the family has lived in the two-bedroom
apartment part of a house without smoke detectors, with a
barely-functioning stove and a refrigerator that doesn’t work.
But at $1,100 a month, it’s hard to complain; the apartment is
what they can afford. Wright is a hairdresser. Tony, unable to
work due to a longstanding hip injury, is on disability.
Currently, Wright is on maternity leave from work. “It’s
been a tough year, paying that much for an apartment,” she
says. In June, Wright added her family to the thousands of
applicants on the BC Housing wait list for subsidized, lowincome housing.
Ready to Rent BC aims for ‘fewer evictions, fewer bad tenancies.’
Households like Wright’s form the majority in Victoria,
where 60 per cent of households rent (in Vancouver that
number is slightly lower, at 53 per cent). While renting is a
long-term reality for many B.C. families, renters still face a
host of systemic barriers that have the effect of treating many
renters — especially the most vulnerable ones — like secondclass citizens, even though renters have considerable political
and social clout in nearby American cities.
One particularly sore gap in B.C. over the years,
say housing advocates, has been the widespread lack
of educational opportunities for renters to learn about their
rights and responsibilities. For 15 years, The Portland Housing
Center in Portland, Oregon has operated a housing readiness
course for renters facing barriers such as criminal records,
credit histories, or a lack of references, that prevent them from
easily finding homes.
In 2007, 11 housing agencies in Victoria’s Capital Regional
District started research on adapting a similar program on
Vancouver Island. Two years later, Ready to Rent BC held its
first courses on renter education.
Today, Ready to Rent BC’s six-week, 12-hour course on
tenant and landlord rights and responsibilities has been held
101 times in Victoria and surrounding municipalities. Over 702
people have graduated from the course, including Wright, who
took it this summer on the advice of a person helping her with
her BC Housing application.
Renters like Wright — those “just slightly under the radar”
— are precisely who Ready to Rent BC hopes to reach, says
Colleen Kasting, the organization’s community development
manager.
“They may be working part-time, minimum wage. They
can’t make it… they’re running their lives as well as they can.
But a bit of help might be just enough to start a [ripple effect
on] other parts of their life,” Kasting says. “When people
realize they know something, and there’s value to it, they start
to believe in themselves.”
156
Tools for self-empowerment
Participating in free weekly Ready to Rent classes was
transformative for Wright. The program’s childminding
services let her leave Kandra in the care of others for the
first time. She left the course with a handbook of housing
resources, a good reference that strengthened her BC Housing
application, and fresh perspective on her living situation.
“We learned quite a bit of stuff [our landlord] is doing is
not legal. It was eye-opening,” she says. Workshops by the fire
department on what tenants can ask of landlords to safeguard
their homes from fire, and BC Hydro on how to read hydro
bills and save money, were helpful, she adds.
The course also features a section on budgeting, personal
finances, and how to form positive, collaborative relationships
with landlords, adds Kate Lambert, a Ready to Rent BC
facilitator and coordinator who ran one of the program’s first
classes.
Lambert joined Ready to Rent after working for decades
in social services in B.C. and the United Kingdom. She
was frustrated by what she describes as “revolving-door
homelessness.”
“It was just a matter of keeping people as alive as we
could keep them: feeding them, giving them a bed for the
night, making sure they didn’t freeze to death. And it doesn’t
work,” she says. “It just keeps people in that crisis mode, full
dependency with no skills and no power.”
Ready to Rent, on the other hand, provides lasting solutions
to housing problems. “We give people the tools so that they
can feel like they can do things themselves,” Lambert says.
Ready to Rent’s self-empowerment model is similar to
the self-help housing counselling model at work in tenant
advocacy groups in San Francisco.
A key difference from San Francisco’s large culture of
grassroots tenant organizing, however, is that Ready to Rent
aims to engender respectful tenancies by neither advocating
for the side of the tenant or landlord. “Our whole purpose is to
have a good, healthy tenancy,” Kasting says.
On the first day of the six-week Ready to Rent class, a
landlord visits as a guest speaker and talks about their tenant
selection process and what they expect of good tenants.
“‘Landlord empathy’ is what we call it,” Lambert says. “We’re
trying to get people to put themselves inside the head of a
landlord.”
‘This should be compulsory in Grade 12’
In the Lower Mainland, barriers to safe, secure,
and affordable rental housing that disproportionately
affect marginalized and vulnerable people persist. Ready to
Rent targets its classes to marginalized groups.
The program runs multilingual classes through the Victoria
Immigrant and Refugee Society. Approximately half of all
Ready to Rent participants are Aboriginal, living on or off
157
reserve, and according to this year’s statistics, 70 per cent are
women.
Ready to Rent plans to expand its programming up
Vancouver Island to the Cowichan Valley and Duncan. The
program will continue to look for communities interested in
running Ready to Rent courses. There’s also an appetite to run
the classes in high schools.
“People say to us, ‘This should be compulsory in Grade 12.
Kids should learn about this before they make the mistakes in
their first tenancies,’” says Lambert.
“Housing readiness is like financial literacy or health
literacy,” adds Kasting. “Housing readiness education didn’t
really exist much at all [before Ready to Rent]. Meeting the
goals we want to meet would mean there would be fewer
evictions, fewer bad tenancies because of either landlord or
tenant.”
Megan Wright expected to sit on BC Housing’s wait list
for years; she’d been told the wait might last until 2015. But
recently her family received a burst of good news.
“I got a phone call saying they were going to offer us a
townhouse,” she says. Thanks in part to a good reference from
Ready to Rent, her family is moving sooner than expected.
Wright will return to part-time work at the end of this month.
“I think everyone should take it,” she says of Ready to
Rent’s rental education course. “It was helpful to me. I’m sure
it would help a lot of people.”
False Creek South:
An Experiment
in Community?
Sky-high rents and housing prices are among Vancouver’s
most pressing and persistent challenges. The answer, experts
and developers say, is more “density” — packing more people
into every square kilometre of Vancouver.
Proposals to “densify” several areas of the city boiled over
this year into neighbourhood rebellions and even tense picket
lines.
Yet overlooked in the sparring are 6,000 Vancouverites
quietly living a “densified” life in a community created decades
ago in a moment of unprecedented, and unrepeated, alignment
of municipal, provincial and federal urban visions.
False Creek South was created 40 years ago on city-owned
land in the belief that mixed-income, green and walkable
neighbourhoods could foster a real downtown community in
the Age of Suburbs. But now city leases and federal funding
that made the project possible are ticking down to their enddates.
Still from False Creek South: An Experiment in Community; found online at
http://vimeo.com/81271469
Beginning with a special video report and continuing with
three reports, Tyee Solutions Society housing reporter David
P. Ball explores one of the country’s most audacious, if now
long-forgotten, experiments in social and urban engineering —
and finds lots to appreciate, and plenty to question, in the new
millennium.
Stars Aligned for
False Creek South
Decades ago, three levels of gov't agreed to
build something a little crazy. Funny thing: it
mostly worked. By David P. Ball
Nestled near the heart of downtown Vancouver is a
neighbourhood unlike any other in the city.
Even a cursory stroll through False Creek South — a
jumbled expanse of townhouses and low-rises bounded by the
Cambie and Granville bridges — reveals surprises: An urban
waterfall. Stones oddly embedded in every roadside wall.
Donut-shaped enclaves and hidden corridors. A labyrinth of
swirling, cobbled streets forever closed to cars. Communal
courtyards that lead into other courtyards.
The community might seem eccentrically laid out, but few
Vancouverites know what it is that makes False Creek South
truly unique. In fact, it’s a worldwide case study in urban
planning, on land almost entirely leased from the city itself.
“It’s kind of a little oasis,” says Kathleen McKinnon,
president of the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association
(FCSNA), “but not just for the people in False Creek. It’s an
oasis for a lot of people throughout the city.
“There’s so much green space — a waterfall, the seawall, the
little boats — that are enjoyed not only by us, but by a lot of
others. We ride our bikes everywhere. When we go for walks,
we always meet several people we know.”
‘An experiment to use fewer cars’
Resident Kathleen McKinnon calls the low-rise community designed 40 years
ago “a little oasis” for people from all over the city. Photo David P. Ball.
Locals and passers-through alike praise the neighbourhood.
Many spend a passing moment in the typically quirkily named
Leg-in-Boot Square. Others gather over pints in the Wicklow
pub at Stamps Landing or chat as their kids play outside the
elementary school that serves co-op members, low-income
renters and condo owners alike.
“We were basically an experiment to use fewer cars,” says
Rider Cooey, one of the False Creek Co-operative’s first batch
of residents in 1977.
In fact, False Creek South was much more than that: a
Trudeau-era experiment in urban social engineering where
physical space and consciously contrived demographics were
intended to create a new community from scratch, in close
harmony with its unique setting.
160
But while False Creek South has been unique from the
outset, today it also epitomizes some of Vancouver’s most
urgent current crises around affordable housing, rising
inequality and bewildering urban change.
The project was built on former industrial land reclaimed
by the city. To accommodate a five-year building schedule, the
city signed land leases for each phase separately. Now, those
50-year leases are entering their home stretch: the first is set to
expire in 2022. That’s left the intentionally diverse community
looking apprehensively to the next decade.
Indeed, for the one-third of the community who own their
units, the looming expire is already causing problems. They
have found banks reluctant to finance or renew mortgages on
their properties. Other residents worry about whether the city
will renew the leases that underlie co-op and rental tenancies
as well. And everyone wonders what compromises may have
to be made in the unique community arrangement in order to
secure its future.
Their fear: will Vancouver’s 40-year experiment with a
carefully planned, mixed-income, livable neighbourhood
be able to maintain its character and diversity in the face of
development pressures? And will its long-time residents be
able to afford to stay?
The land along the south side of False Creek (purple in map) was formerly
home to early Vancouver industries, from foundries to sawmills, before
coming into city hands by the 1970s.
‘Revolutionary’
Dreamed up in a distant time when creative governments
were willing to experiment, False Creek South boasts a very
conscious blend of income levels, the largest cluster of cooperative housing in the province and the city’s only directrepresentation neighbourhood association.
“We represent buildings throughout the Creek, from
Cambie all the way to the Granville bridge,” explains
McKinnon, leaning on her balcony overlooking a vast green
lawn shared by low-rise buildings on three sides; on the fourth
side is the popular Seawall and waters of False Creek itself.
“We’re unique in that all the other neighbourhood associations
within the city are groups of interested people, sometimes with
an axe to grind on one issue or just one area.”
What made False Creek South possible was an unusually
auspicious conjunction of political stars in the mid-1970s.
Voters in British Columbia ended decades of Social Credit
rule in 1972, to sweep the New Democrats under activist
leader Dave Barrett to power in Victoria.
The next year a worldwide energy crisis hit, and reducing
fossil fuel dependency became an urgent priority. The year
1973 also saw Vancouver send The Electors’ Action Movement
(TEAM) to city hall; part of mayor Art Phillips’ vision for a
livable city was to unlock a huge tract of city-owned land
downtown on which to try something entirely new.
By 1974, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau had been
three-times elected, and was throwing federal cash at the cooperative housing model and other social experiments across
the country (like Dauphin, Manitoba’s experiment with a
guaranteed minimum income).
161
In 1975, the Greater Vancouver Regional District unveiled
its “Livable Regions Strategy” to boost high-density building,
preserve urban green space, and promote public transit.
The model that emerged was a community that deliberately
incorporated one-third of its residents in co-operatives, onethird in both subsidized and market rental housing and
one-third as condominium owners — all living together on
reclaimed industrial lands.
“It was a different time — Trudeau’s era,” said Beryl Wilson,
one of the earliest owners of a townhouse on the Seawall and
for decades editor of the community’s now-defunct weekly
newspaper. “It was so revolutionary.
“A lot of people thought it was a ghastly mistake. Some
people drove over the Granville Street bridge and said, ‘That
will be a slum in no time!’ Other people thought we were mad.
There wasn’t anything like this kind of development, and there
hasn’t been since.”
It hasn’t all been easy over the years. Businesses originally
inserted into the community — “seeded,” as one initial
architect phrased it — didn’t all take root. Many struggled
for years before eventually moving out. The limited lifespan
of many of the buildings gradually became evident, as
construction standards were revealed to be woefully
inadequate to the humid West Coast climate, and leaks took
their toll.
Nonetheless, False Creek South became an urban planning
Mecca, attracting city designers from Europe and the U.S.
eager to learn from its diversity-rich model — and from its
mistakes.
A new lease on life?
Now, as the community nears 40, its almost 6,000 residents
gaze across the Creek to a vastly changed city of glass
condominium towers and skyrocketing property values.
The land beneath their buildings still belongs to the City of
Vancouver. And the simmering question is whether the city
will let them keep it, once their leases start to expire, in as little
as nine years. The community has overcome its share of other
hurdles already. For years it had to pay for its own transit
service. Owners and co-op members alike were hard hit by
water leaks that beset many buildings of their era. At times
parts of the community lived under tarps, and many owners
were forced to re-mortgage their homes to pay their share
of the millions of dollars in repair costs. What little federal
funding the project still receives will dry up by 2019.
162
A Hippie-Era-Urban
Experiment Hits 40
Eccentric False Creek South nailed one goal:
creating real community in Vancouver’s core.
By David P. Ball
It’s a good bet that few of the drivers and bus-riders streaming
over the Granville or Cambie bridges in Vancouver spare much
thought for the stretch of low-rise buildings, pathways, courtyards
and green spaces that fill in much of the south shore of False Creek
between the two overpasses. They should.
Created nearly 40 years ago in a rare alignment of federal,
provincial and municipal leadership, the False Creek South
community was, and remains, unique in more ways than one.
“One of the goals,” recalls architect Michael Geller, who
worked on the project for the Canada Mortgage and Housing
Corporation in the early 1970s, “was to get a population mix
that would replicate the population of Metro Vancouver.”
An early convert to that goal was Monty Wood, another
young architect who worked at the firm designing False Creek
South’s layout. One of the leaders of the project, he recalls, was
senior architect Jos Verbauwhede.
Wood remembers the Belgian-born Verbauwhede as “a
very odd man and a bit of a mystic, a mystic rationalist. A
geomancer, that’s what he called himself. He believed land had
healthy nodes and unhealthy nodes, and there was a geometry
that fitted to that.”
Leg-In-Boot Square is one of False Creek South’s more eccentric features.
Named for an earlier era’s severed-foot mystery in 1887, the eliptical ‘square’s
fountain points to the Lions mountain peaks, a view almost obscured by condo
towers since the 1970s
When Verbauwhede worked, sketching ideas on paper with
felt markers “like Picasso with a long paintbrush just going at
it,” Wood says, “it came out as an architectural expression, not
in blocks but in these little walled cocoons with gradients of
privacy and semi-public areas. It was very organic.”
One day Verbauwhede returned to the office after a long
weekend and unfurled a design 20 feet long and nearly as
high as a person. It was unrolled, “courtyard after courtyard,
cluster by cluster,” Wood remembers. “There was a rationale
for it: streets should be short, then you should have a bend.
He wanted to make it as uncomfortable for automobiles as
possible. To some extent, he succeeded.”
Wood and eight architect friends were so enthused they
hatched a plan to move into the community, in a building of
their own design.
“To see that we could do something quite different and
relatively unique in Vancouver — that was compact, socially
progressive, taking tired industrial areas and suddenly making
them fabulous — I thought, ‘I wouldn’t want to miss this,’” he
says.
As the project neared completion in 1977, Wood had a fight
with his girlfriend and drove down to the construction site
with a sleeping bag and his dog. Camping out in his unfinished
building, he was awakened around midnight by a boisterous
party at a completed condo: newly occupied by Vancouver’s
then-mayor, Art Phillips.
“It was supposed to be a real community,” he says, “not a
suburban monoculture, but a mixed-use, mixed-income, mixedages. It was supposed to reflect the ‘normal’ demographics of
Canada, as opposed to Kerrisdale or the Downtown Eastside.
It had a real feeling of being ours. We were a little village unto
ourselves.”
Thousands of joggers, cyclists and strolling tourists enjoy the False Creek
South Seawall daily.
A green space at its heart
The centrepiece of False Creek South is sprawling Charleson
Park, noisy with duck ponds and an artificial waterfall, but
also offering quiet forest walking paths and stunning views of
Vancouver’s downtown skyline and iconic mountain backdrop.
The ample green space, splitting the community into two
sizeable clusters, was designed to compensate for what at the
time was an untested population density for the city. Today,
many residents describe the park as a highlight of life in the
Creek, a place where children can safely play, adults can
chat about community business on their strolls, and other
Vancouverites can get a glimpse of what an urban setting
planned for quality of life, not cars and freeways, looks like.
Charleson Park is flanked on both sides by the 170 units
of the False Creek Co-operative Housing Association —
Vancouver’s largest housing co-op — roughly evenly divided
to east and west. One of its first residents was Ana Maddox,
who moved there in 1977 after immigrating from the former
Yugoslavia.
Maddox was attracted to the forward-looking vision of what
at the time was a muddy, post-industrial wasteland beside a
polluted harbour. She walked with me along a raised berm
which mutes the noise from 6th Ave. and the railway tracks that
run beside it. When she arrived, it was nothing more than a pile
of fill excavated to dig the neighbourhood’s foundations, dotted
with spindly saplings. Today, they have grown into a quiet pine
forest where crowds of dog-walkers amble daily.
about living in a small town, but I’d never done it. A little voice
inside me said, ‘There’s your small town, where you’ll know
your neighbours and be part of a community.’”
Soon, Wilson was brainstorming social ideas over her back
fence: evening “salon” discussion groups on environmental and
equality themes, held in neighbours’ suites; a local kids’ bicycle
festival; a childcare co-operative. Eventually she hatched the
idea of launching a newspaper just for the neighbourhood. The
Creek lasted several decades, issuing its last edition in 2002.
A small town
To ensure a mix of working, middle, and upper-middle class
occupants, one-third of its units were to be resident-owned
condominiums. Beryl Wilson, at the time a modestly paid
university employee, moved into one in 1979.
It seemed like “a crazy idea” to many, Wilson recalled. The
condos were not cheap. Newspaper editorials and opposition
city councillors scoffed at the blatant experiment in social
engineering. But the moment she saw the emerging community,
Wilson was intrigued.
“What it looked like to me was a small town,” she says,
pouring two cups of coffee in her small kitchen which opens
onto an expansive common courtyard. “I’d always been curious
Inspired by its small-town quality, Beryl Wilson was one of the first to move to
False Creek South. Photo by David P. Ball.
“It really was a funny, unique little newspaper,” she chuckles
as she leafs through a small stack of yellowed issues fished out
of storage. “People used to say they liked it because it gave
them a sense of community. That was its real value. It made
people feel that they knew each other.”
The community that unfolded often crossed the lines
of owner, renter and co-op member. Wilson met Maureen
Powers early on and the two became fast friends. Powers
left the community but later returned to live in a co-op unit.
She still marvels at the audacity of the insight that building a
community meant marginalizing the automobile.
“It was based on getting people out of their cars,” Powers
says. “They anticipated a certain percentage of people just
would not have a car. There’s transit right outside the door,
why would you need a car? That was forward thinking a long
time ago.”
Beating the predictions
Rider Cooey was another original co-op member. They were
pioneers of sorts. Nothing was established, and residents had
to figure out how to make their own community decisions,
set up internal rent subsidies for low-income residents,
create a governance structure that would last the life of
the neighbourhood. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing
Corporation provided funding and early training to set up
committees and manage the finances, but Cooey was struck by
both the level of democratic empowerment and responsibilities
of co-op life.
He takes pride in having defied the initial “great hostility”
to False Creek South’s progressive vision and eccentric design.
166
“There were hostile editorials,” he says. “It was predicted to fail
because it was too dense. They thought people can’t live at that
level of density. They compared us to rats in mazes.”
“I’ve raised two batches of kids here,” Cooey adds, sitting at
his kitchen table surrounded by children’s drawings. “It’s been
a wonderful place to raise kids — the waterfall, the beach, the
rocky creek, the muddy stream, the small and big pond — it’s
all totally artificial, but it works perfectly as a little bit of nature
in the city right outside our door.”
While the handful of different co-ops in False Creek South
form the largest concentration of that housing form in the
province, a key intention of the community plan was that onethird of its residents would be low-income renters. A number of
nonprofit societies took responsibility for running several rental
complexes, or ‘enclaves’ as locals call them.
Wilma DeVito moved into the first of several False Creek
rental suites in 1986 and now lives in the largest such enclave,
Vancoeverden Court. Minutes from the waterfront and
surrounded by green space, it’s affordable housing unlike
almost any other. Operated by the New Chelsea Society, the
blue-painted complex features staggered balconies, semiprivate backyards, and Verbauwhede’s snowflake-like nested
courtyards. We meet in one of these.
“I don’t like high-rises,” DeVito says, waving to the
condominium towers lining the north shore of False Creek. “I
wouldn’t live in one. This is perfect with three floors. It feels
secure.”
167
Like many renters here, DeVito feels a strong sense of
ownership and belonging, even though she’s neither condoowner nor co-op member. “The nature of the dwellings —
where some people own, some rent, some are in co-ops — it’s
a real mix of accommodation, from kids to 90-year-olds,” she
says, where renters have a sense of ‘home’ in the community
too.
A high-risk project
Not all has been perfect in False Creek South: more on that
in tomorrow’s report. And not everything has worked out as
Verbauwhede or the project’s political godfathers planned.
The bustling plaza designed to give a feel of European café
life never materialized, scuttled by residents who complained
about noise and city planners who doubted there was enough
business to keep most shops afloat.
The project was designed to match the city’s mix of incomes; it still comes
close.
Still, some joked that the vision of a liveable neighbourhood
has worked perhaps a little too well: Few have wanted to leave,
regardless of their changing income levels, mobility needs, or
departed children. Even in the rental buildings, DeVito seldom
sees moving trucks or people leaving.
One early enthusiast who no longer lives in False Creek
South is Monty Wood. He was forced to move out recently
when he was unable to refinance his condo: banks were
spooked by the uncertainty hanging over the project’s future
tenure on land the city leased to residents four decades ago…
until 2036.
Before it was housing, south False Creek was the site of decaying industries.
The City of Vancouver acquired the ‘brownfield’ site, and leased it in stages to
the various project.
Train tracks stills snaked past downtown, and B.C.
Place had yet to be built when the first buildings
began going up at False South Creek. (Photo: False
Creek South Neighbourhood Association.)
For years, early residents lived with continuing construction.
(Photo: Ray Galbraith.)
168
Quirky architecture distinguishes the largest
concentration of co-op housing in British Columbia.
Even after kids have grown up and gone, many older residents linger. ‘No one
wants to leave.’
169
Courtyards lead to further courtyards in a pattern that’s been
compared to snowflakes.
To Help Vulnerable
Renters, Boost
Second Life for
False Creek South?
A deal that made Vancouver's urban housing
experiment possible now clouds its future.
By David P. Ball
Since its founding in the 1970s, False Creek South’s residents
have quietly enjoyed the community’s waterfall, its duck ponds
and cloistered courtyards, its green expanse of lawn in Charleson
Square, its view of the changing skyline of downtown between
the Granville and Cambie bridges.
Unknown to most other Vancouverites, the nearly 6,000
people living in a dozen housing co-ops mixed in equal
proportion with condo owners and subsidized renters — all on
once-industrial city-leased land — was a conscious experiment
in neighbourhood-scale urban design, since studied and
applauded by planners and architects from around the world.
It hasn’t all been a cake-walk for the occupants of the aging
low-rise complexes curled around car-unfriendly streets, but
community satisfaction seems high. Now though, False Creek
South’s residents are getting a different type of jitters.
As the entire city wrestles with stubbornly skyrocketing
housing costs and development pressures, the expiry dates of
the series of city land leases that made the project possible are
coming into sight.
When they do, absent other agreements, use of the land,
now worth many times its 1970s value, goes back to the city.
The first lease expires in 2022, with others following it.
Nine years might seem like a long time to most people,
but in urban planning terms it’s almost the blink of an eye.
And unfortunately for False Creek residents, when it comes to
financing and mortgages, banks see it the same way.
Soaring towers across False Creek suggest the temptation facing city hall to
call an end to a low-rise vision of urban community. Photo: David P. Ball.
“People started talking about how they couldn’t sell,
because the banks wouldn’t give them a mortgage on a
unit with only 25 years left,” explains Kathleen McKinnon,
president of the False Creek South Neighbourhood
Association, who lives in one of the Creek’s few condos on
freehold (owned) land. “They couldn’t get loans to repair their
buildings.”
Architect Monty Wood worked for the firm commissioned
to build the community. He helped design a row of waterfront
condos and when they were done, he purchased one of
them — as did eight architect friends. He moved out recently
after a bank turned down a loan application because of the
impending end of the city’s land lease.
The problem, he believes, was that in the 1970s there was
little legal experience with selling real estate on leased land.
“They had to invent stuff,” Wood said over coffee. “They
thought, ‘That’s good enough.’
171
community dollars. Some of that was defrayed by the remains
of federal funding committed at the project’s inception. But
that fund is running out within the decade. And borrowing for
new repairs is hampered by uncertainty over the co-ops’ land
tenure.
“It’s an urgent issue,” said Rider Cooey, one of False Creek
Co-op’s original members. “As the countdown to lease end
approaches, it will become harder and harder to borrow
money for maintenance issues, and harder and harder for
condo owners to get people to buy in if there may not be lease
renewal or — if there is — that circumstances may change for
the worse and it gets more expensive.”
“We had all been promised at the beginning, ‘Don’t worry
about the end of the lease. All your property values are going
to hold up because there’s going to be a buy-out clause.’ The
intention was to maintain the property value. But 35 years
later, it’s turned out that’s not the case.”
It’s not only condo owners, who make up a third of the
community, who are anxious. In the community’s co-ops, the
largest cluster of the form in British Columbia, were among
the first to raise an alarm about the staggered expiries of False
Creek’s patchwork of leases.
Like many British Columbia building owner’s, the coops were hit hard by the ‘leaky condo’ problem of previous
decades, and forced to spend years under tarps and millions of
False Creek South’s planners didn’t count on so many residents developing
different needs as they age. Photo: David P. Ball.
Another problem could be put down to the experiment’s
very success. Nobody wants to leave and make space for
newcomers. Many of the young families who moved in
originally have shrunk as children moved away, but parents
remain in suites larger than they need — in part because
there’s nowhere in the neighbourhood for them to down-size.
Equally worrying is the lack of accessible housing for seniors.
“The future is the same big question mark for everybody
who lives here,” said Beryl Wilson, founder and editor of the
community’s newspaper The Creek, which stopped printing in
2002.
The best use of city land?
From the City of Vancouver’s standpoint, the termination of
the area’s leases over a period of more than a decade starting
in 2022 pits preserving an internationally recognized design
project that is already providing a substantial chunk of lowcost rental and co-op living, against an opportunity to leverage
the (now) high-value waterfront real estate it owns along
south False Creek into making greater inroads on its affordable
housing objectives.
“Here we are 30 or 40 years later and the leases are starting
to stare us down,” Kent Munro, Vancouver’s assistant
planning director, told Tyee Solutions Society. “We want to
ensure in the long term for the city’s supply of affordable
housing, that the people living in it are the ones most in need.
“The leases coming up are an opportunity to have a rethink
of that.”
172
But while the loss of False Creek South’s affordable housing
stock would set the city back from its goals, the fact that it’s
such an “idyllic little niche,” Monty Wood fears, may lower
its priority at city hall. “It doesn’t gain a lot of sympathy from
the rest of the residents of the municipality,” he worries. “Why
should one per cent of the population of Vancouver be handed
another silver platter?”
Although city staff say that planning for the Creek’s future
won’t start until sometime in 2014 — when resources are
hopefully freed up from increasingly contentious community
plans under way elsewhere — they say they have met with
residents.
Residents themselves, under the aegis of their
neighbourhood association, have formed a “Re*plan”
committee to preemptively pitch solutions to the lease issue.
The community has even hired its own architects and planners
to develop ideas for dealing with the impending funding, lease
and aging crises — effectively kickstarting its own planning
conversation without waiting for the city.
Although many residents have raised the spectre of
development pressure from the astronomical property
values surrounding the Creek, Councillor Andrea Reimer,
stickhandling the matter at city hall, insisted the survival of
the False Creek South project is paramount.
Sure, prices have “gone substantially up” across the water
in Yaletown, she admitted, “but the point of owning that big
chunk of land wasn’t to make a lot of money off of it as a city.
It was to ensure the long-term stability of the community.
173
away, but it sneaks up on you. As anxious as they are, we are too.
“We’re anxious and eager to roll up our sleeves and address
these issues, to get this work done well in advance of the
leases coming up.”
Residents rise up
Councillor Andrea Reimer: ‘the point wasn’t to make a lot of money as a city.’
Photo: David P. Ball.
“The challenge down there is going to be, without federal or
provincial dollars, being able to renew the co-op housing, the
low-end-of-market rental housing, the quite a bit of supportive
housing down there. We have to figure out how to renew the
buildings that are there. That is going to create some pressure
on that land base.”
Reimer stepped in as city council’s point person for the
neighbourhood because her Vision Vancouver colleague,
Councillor Geoff Meggs, is a resident there.
Meggs, Reimer and Munro all say they are impressed by
Re*plan, and the neighbourhood association’s foresight in
taking inventory and pitching solutions with time to go before
the end of their leases.
“It’s great they’re raising the flag on this,” Munro said. “On
one hand 10 to 15 years, to some people, can feel a long way
The residents have brainstormed a number of proposals,
chief among them to consolidate the multiple leases into a
single umbrella leaseholder. They’ve also taken inspiration
from a land trust agreement between the BC Cooperative
Housing Federation and the city: that kind of arrangement
would also create a governance structure for the community
to make more of its own planning decisions. But the idea is
largely untested in Canada.
Residents would also like to see their renewed leases run
longer than the original batch 40 years ago. Monty Wood cited
European leases which last 99 years or, in some cases, even
for 999 years. Longer terms, he argues, would boost a sense
of ownership amongst residents, promote longevity, and help
ease future uncertainty about many leases coming to a close at
different times.
At a community meeting this summer, residents packed
a common room off False Creek’s Sitka Square to discuss
the Re*plan committee’s suggestions for surviving the lease
expiries. While differences were apparent among leasehold
condo owners, co-operative members and the small minority
of the Creek’s strata owners who are on private land — styled
“freeholders” — most residents in attendance said they would
support greater density.
That willingness stands in contrast to the numerous protests
and resistance elsewhere to city hall’s densification proposals.
“This place can absorb some density,” Wood explained.
“The first design, as wacky and ingenious as it is, turned out
not to be perfect. It does need a tune-up after 35 years.”
For instance, building on undeveloped land along 6th Ave.
or near the Olympic Village Canada Line station could both
help fund renovations on existing buildings, and perhaps
provide accessible retirement housing for longtime Creek
residents who want to stay in the neighbourhood they have
built and cherished for decades.
“It’s not often we have residents coming forward asking
for density, if you look at the other plans!” the city’s Kent
Munro said, with a laugh. “When they raised that in our early
meetings and discussions, I was intrigued.
“It’s an interesting sort of eyes-wide-open view of planning,
right? They’re realists. Nobody’s going in thinking this area
is going to change drastically. We want to find a way, and
they do, to address these issues, to maybe accommodate
some growth, but to keep the essential character of the
neighbourhood the way it is.”
But rumours of some older units being demolished to make
way for such density has some residents anxious. Some nonmarket renters, who are not members of the neighbourhood
association under its original mandate, feel left out of the
discussions over their future.
174
“We’ve heard rumours of this place being pulled down and
something else going up, at some point in time, not anytime
soon I don’t think,” said Wilma DeVito, a longtime renter in
the Vancoeverden Court affordable housing complex.
“Hopefully not. If it’s more than three stories high, it’ll
change too much. Anytime there’s a tower, there’s more
isolation I think.
“I definitely care about what happens,” DeVito says. “I
feel… not that I own it, but I certainly feel I belong. You don’t
feel that anywhere else; we’re all part of this island.”
So, if the city supports False Creek’s survival, can’t it simply
renew the leases outright and avoid the uncertainty?
“In my mind, it’s definitely more a question of how?”
Reimer said. “In a day and age like this, when there is no
money from other levels of government, it’s so imperative
that we’re able to hold onto the significant but still insufficient
resources that we have to be able to support more affordable
housing in the city.
“We’re fighting so hard to build more — it would be odd
to give up that opportunity in an area like this where we have
had such good success.”
Neighbourhood Association president Kathleen McKinnon
is “hopeful” about city negotiations, but said the key question
is how to ensure the Creek remains an affordable place to live
for its residents in all the housing formats, considering the
property values nearby.
“There’s any number of possibilities of what the city
could do,” McKinnon said. “They could decide to tear some
buildings down. Even if we get lease extensions, what’s it
going to cost to stay?”
But beyond False Creek South’s clusters and enclaves,
some are already expressing reservations about how City Hall
might handle False Creek South’s lease renewal. Architect
Bill McCreery — who ran unsuccessfully for city council
in 2011 under the Non-Partisan Association banner — was
instrumental in overseeing the neighbourhood’s development
in the 1970s as a member of False Creek’s planning committee.
At the time, he was elected to Vancouver Parks Board
under Mayor Art Phillips’ since-defunct municipal party,
The Electors’ Action Movement (TEAM), which aborted the
city’s downtown freeway plans in favour of a vision of “more
humane, more people-oriented” development, he told Tyee
Solutions Society.
Now, as 2014 elections loom, McCreery has resurrected
TEAM and vowed to campaign against Vision Vancouver’s
development model, which he fears could ruin his forebear’s
False Creek legacy.
“I find whole thing quite scary,” he said. “I share (Reimer)’s
concern about (affordable housing), but what I don’t share is
the way they go about doing it.
“Essentially, it tends to be heavy-handed and inappropriate.
That does indeed give the residents, and the rest of the city, a
good deal to be concerned about. Certainly their track record
is that they start plunking in high-rises out of scale and context
… It’s complete overkill around density.”
175
Most of False Creek South’s residents express pride in living
in such a rare example of creative urban design. But as they
struggle to secure its affordable future, most doubt it will ever
be replicated.
For Monty Wood, the 1970s era of visionary urban planning
is over. Certainly, he argues, it hasn’t been attempted again on
this scale. But while the glass towers reaching skyward across
the Creek are proof of the booming success of Vancouver’s
real estate industry, he muses, for all its flaws the south shore
remains a testament to the “social success” of a long-ago
experiment to design for equality, diversity and green living.
In fact, the Re*plan committee’s demographic research
showed that, following the founding vision of an equal income
mix matching the city’s mix, False Creek South today retains
its economic diversity.
For her part, Beryl Wilson has a guarded view born of a long
life. “Things change over 30 years,” she said, placing her stack
of yellowing The Creek newspaper clippings back onto a chair.
“And you’re no longer pioneers, you’re no longer newcomers.
“It would be lovely if [False Creek South] continued, but I
wouldn’t bet on it. Who knows how politicians will think 20
years from now?”
‘Inspiring’ Shipping
Container Housing
Set to Multiply
Five months after launching its prototype,
Atira aims for a seven-storey recycled tower.
By David P. Ball
Five months after doors opened, tenants from a variety of backgrounds fill
Atira Women’s Resource Society’s 12 shipping-container dwellings at 502
Alexander Street. Photo: David P. Ball.
Two women chop vegetables at a large central table in a tight
common kitchen, chatting as they gently drop celery and red
peppers into a central bowl, destined for snacks during upcoming
community programs. A stream of younger women move in and
out of the space from the other rooms at Imouto Housing for
Young Women, talking happily with each other.
“What a beautiful place it is!” Gayle, one of the snackpreparers tells me. “I love the opportunity for community with
the other women, because we have so much in common.”
Mostly, however, Gayle (who only provided her first
name) loves having her own home. She says she had been
“traveling around a lot,” staying with friends or nannying her
granddaughter. In late November, she moved into a corrugated
metal shipping container on the adjacent Atira-owned
property.
Operated by Atira Women’s Resource Society, the 12
shipping containers stacked three-storeys high at 502
Alexander Street in Vancouver are finally full of tenants five
months after opening their doors on Sept. 1. At 280 to 290
square feet, each suite is a self-contained home with wood
laminate flooring, a separate entrance, and its own bathroom
and — best of all, three tenants told me — a European-style
combined washer-dryer machine. In each unit, a full container
wall has been replaced by a giant window, many with perfect
views of the harbour or the complex’s central courtyard
garden.
“I love that it’s my own space,” Gayle says, laughing
heartily. “Just walking in through your door; [your
neighbours] invite you over for tea.”
Across the Imouto kitchen table, Ahjahla Nelson chimes
in. She used to live in co-operative housing, but gave up her
apartment for a friend and moved here in October.
“When I saw the container home, I’d been thinking of a
trailer or treehouse or something,” she recalls. “It was like
a dream come true. Being able to enter your place from the
outside has a real home-feeling to it. It just felt like it was built
for me.”
Media attention may have dropped away since Atira did
a flurry of interviews about the then-empty containers last
August. But as they’ve filled with tenants — six units for
older women who serve as “intergenerational mentors” to
six younger women — the windows have become cluttered
with knick-knacks and personal decorations, and the common
kitchen at neighbouring Imouto is getting busier, even though
each container has its own kitchen space.
Community, it seems, is forming.
“It’s really in its infancy,” says Atira CEO Janice Abbott
over coffee in a nearby Downtown Eastside café. “It’s been
interesting to see this little community of women come
together around this new, unique kind of construction. They
feel really proud to live there. It’ll be interesting in a year from
177
now to see how that community develops, but it’s inspiring to
watch it.”
Abbott always had faith the exquisitely-staged,
architecturally-repurposed containers would prove “how
liveable small spaces can be,” she says.
“Even though I was a believer in the beginning, the
containers look a hundred times better than I ever imagined
they could,” she says. “They’re really beautiful.”
In addition to the 12 container suites, the $3.3-million
construction paid for 19 other non-market rental units, plus a
heritage restoration of the Imouto building. The project was
built on a city-owned lot in partnership with Canada Mortgage
& Housing Corporation and BC Hydro.
With the suites quickly filled, Atira intends to submit a
rezoning application by the end of January for a property it
already owns in Strathcona. But the organization plans to go a
step further: a seven-storey-high shipping container housing
complex, with its requisite elevator and a new design.
The site at the corner of Hawks and Hastings streets has
the same square-footage as the one where the pilot project
sits, but it’s a different shape and the new structure aims for
twice the height of the first, all requiring a new architectural
plan. Unlike the bachelor-suite prototypes at Imouto, the new
family-oriented project will transform shipping containers into
a mix of one and two-bedroom units.
One challenge will be securing the necessary land rezoning
from light-industrial to residential, for which Atira will
submit its application by “the end of the month,” Abbott
178
says. Another will be to scale down the $82,500 per-unit costs.
Abbott says the pilot version spared no expense with some
of its “premium elements” — the fixtures, countertops and so
on — because she wanted the units “to show well” as the first
container housing in Canada.
“There were a bunch of cost premiums associated with
building the first,” she says. “The square-foot costs are really
high, they really are, but what costs money in any unit are the
kitchen cabinets, the plumbing, the fixtures, the bathrooms…
it’s going to take a few projects to figure out.
“If you’re building small units, and each of them has a
kitchen, bathroom, and front door, your square-foot cost goes
up,” she adds. “But the cost per unit is really low.”
Happily contained
Climbing the stairs beside the current three-storey container
complex at Imouto, the blue and orange corrugated metal is
icy to the touch. A bitter wind sweeps in from the port to the
north.
A smiling woman with curly white hair and round blue
glasses opens her door, and I’m greeted by an enveloping
warmth and a slight scent of roses. Susan Edwards beckons me
to sit at her small kitchen table as the CBC hourly news jingle
chimes in the background, where a mattress is pushed neatly
against the wall-length window.
From steel box to home: former CBC Radio host Susan Edwards was the first
to move into the completed shipping container project. Now she’s seen as a
mentor to younger women in the complex. Photo: David P. Ball.
In the four years since she moved to Vancouver, where her
daughter lives, Edwards has moved five times for a variety of
reasons all-too-common among the city’s renters.
“It’s been just incredibly difficult to find a place to live,” she
said. “I went through the experience of renoviction, I saw it
happen to a lot of neighbours too… then I saw a TV item about
[Atira's container project], and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, look at
that!’”
Edwards was the first tenant to move into the pilot project
in September. Her unit looks out over Burrard Inlet and the
North Shore mountains. She has mingled photos of her family
with goalie Robert Luongo on the wall beside her entrance. A
quiet, rhythmic churning sound emanates from the corner of
the home.
“Listen to that magic washing machine!” she says excitedly.
“You put your clothes in and they come out dry. How could
anything be more efficient?! The space is amazing.”
179
broadcasting, but not the anxiety.
Although Edwards doesn’t consider herself a mentor to
the younger women in the enclave, she attends communal
gatherings and has formed a bond with some of the other
tenants.
During the holidays, she painted a portrait of the block
and had Christmas cards printed with the image. One card is
addressed to the young women in the Imouto community, and
sits in the main building across the courtyard.
“You have much to teach all of us,” Edwards wrote them,
“and beautiful spirits that I sense in your presence. May the
year ahead be one of blossoms and sunshine, so your music
will be heard.”
Joining us in the unit is the manager of Atira’s
intergeneration mentorship program, Jennifer Kleinsteuber,
who argues that Edwards is plays a vital role in the
community. Many of the younger residents have struggled
with addiction, mental health and poverty, but are seeking a
new life.
“One woman told me, ‘I get to have a safe place to be so I
can make some positive changes in my life,” Kleinsteuber says.
“She came here, and it was like a fresh start in life. She’s just
flourishing, she’s blooming.”
The radio is always on, she tells me, harkening back to
her work years ago as co-host of CBC Radio’s morning show
in Saint John, New Brunswick. She misses the excitement of
Atira’s intergeneration mentorship program coordinator Jennifer
Kleinsteuber inside a soon-to-be-occupied suite. Misgivings about housing
women in ‘crates’ evaporated amid ‘amazement at how beautiful these looked
on the outside and on the inside,’ she says. Photo: David P. Ball.
As an artist, Edwards is fascinated by architecture and design
and believes this kind of housing — using recycled containers as
the structure to lower costs — could be replicated “everywhere.”
“It’s amazing to do housing of this kind,” she said. “I wish I
could promote that angle of things. The program is developing
here, it will take time. It’s a really interesting work-inprogress.”
‘A sort of protection’
With its ever-expanding collection of properties in
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Atira is not without its
detractors. So it’s no surprise some people scoffed at the optics
of the project.
“There was a lot of hesitation about housing women in
shipping crates,” Kleinsteuber admits. “But I didn’t have the
same kind of emotional reaction as a lot of people. I read about
how they are doing student residences in the Netherlands,
and in the U.S. people are making studios out of shipping
containers. In the end, there was amazement at how beautiful
these looked on the outside and on the inside.”
Other tenants like Gayle developed a keen interest in the
raised-bed gardens in the courtyard between the containers,
which were the source of herbs and seasonings for the
community’s turkey suppers over the holidays.
“I have ideas in my head about things to do,” she says. “The
mentoring really interests me.”
But even more so the gardening, she adds with a broad
smile. “I’m really a foodie; I’m into food security and food
sovereignty. [There are] so many things we could do right at
this location.”
Describing herself as a poet who likes “to look deeper into
things,” Ahjahla Nelson pauses from chopping vegetables
across the table to philosophize about container living.
180
“What does it mean to be contained?” she muses. “Will it
contain who you are, your emotions? I see [this project] as a
sort of protection.”
When she was accepted into the new Imouto container
suites, her “heart was really happy” to finally live “someplace
I could call my home, that surrounded me.”
“I’ve been in 16 different foster homes; you learn to get
along with each other and help each other out. I felt like I
really fit in here,” she adds. “It’s a little contained community.”

Finding Home: Affordable Housing Solutions for Greater Vancouver

Transcription

Similar documents

Eservus – September 2016

fright nights! - Discover Canada Tours

Welcome To - Virtual Tour

vdsf brochure 2016

Nanaimo Regional District Letter to the Honorable Mary Polak Re

4448 skyline drive

The Blanc - Westeck Windows and Doors

is delighted to announce that the brilliant Marie-Louise

business - Klein Group, Royal LePage City Centre

Did you know that Kidsbooks in Vancouver was the first bookstore in