Advocates decry ticketing of homeless

THE WESTENDER
July 31, 2008

With over 40,000 reported instances of people being turned away from full-capacity shelters in the Metro Vancouver region over the past year, the city’s homeless are often left with little or no choice but to sleep in parks and alleyways. Recently, a rash of ticketing by police in the city’s parks has further upset an already desperate situation for homeless people.

Police sweeps of Oppenheimer Park, in the 400 block of Powell Street, have been occurring with increasing frequency over the past three weeks. They typically happen in the early morning hours, between 4 and 6 a.m. Community advocates equate it to kicking someone when they’re already down.

“Ticketing people for sleeping outside, [when] there’s nowhere else for them to go, is unconstitutional, when people are faced with no available housing and no available shelter beds,” says Pivot Legal Society lawyer Laura Track. “People have been sleeping outside in Oppenheimer Park for months, if not years, and from what I gather from the community down there, [ticketing] is new to them.”

Wendy Pedersen, a Downtown Eastside resident and Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) organizer, agrees with Track’s assessment that the ticketing appears to be a new policing strategy. “I think this is part of a hidden agenda,” she says, “and I think [the police feel like] they need to start putting this into play if they’re going to move people out for the Olympics.”

But according to Const. Jana McGuinness of the Vancouver Police, ticketing in Oppenheimer Park isn’t new, nor does it happen regularly. “I have to stress it’s very infrequent,” she says. “You can’t camp in a park, so that by-law, from time to time, has to be enforced. If people don’t move along, which has sort of been the case [in Oppenheimer Park] over the past week — there’s a few people that have remained after they were given a couple day’s notice to head out of the park — then some by-law tickets were issued to those people.”

McGuinness says that the VPD is “doing what we’ve always done,” which includes enforcing park by-laws wherever illicit camping takes place. “From our perspective, that’s not different,” she says. “There’s reasons, too. You can’t have campfires in a park — it’s a hazard. That’s our general practice; that hasn’t changed over the years, and it’s no different with respect to people camping in Oppenheimer Park or any other park. You can't camp in a park. It's pretty clear."

But due to the fact that people sleeping in parks are often left with no other choice, Pedersen and other Downtown Eastside advocates are calling for the City to exempt Oppenheimer Park from regular park by-laws that would otherwise crack down on camping in parks. "People are very, very upset about this," says Pedersen. "People are like, 'what do we do?' They already don't know what to do, because there's no housing. And now [here's] this extra layer of harassment and poor-bashing. It's over the top. And shame on the city for not calling this an emergency in their [recently-released] Homeless Action Plan report."

Another dubious aspect of the police ticketing lies in the tickets' ambiguous consequences. "The fine is determined at a by-law hearing," says McGuinness. "Regarding paying fines, this is not something we administer."

"Isn't that strange?" says Pedersen. "People can't actually raise money to pay off their tickets and get off the record. City by-law tickets have no corresponding fees."

Pedersen likens the police ticketing in Vancouver to what happened in Atlanta in anticipation of its summer Olympics in in 1996. "People [in Atlanta] got minor tickets that ended up being an excuse police used when they needed to move people along," she says. "Once they get logged in the system as repeat homeless offenders, then they will be vulnerable to future arrests related to move people out for the Olympics."

Since Pedersen and other protesters set up camp in Oppenheimer Park on the night of July 17, there have been no further reports of tickets received in the park. The VPD has advised the Pivot Legal Society--who have publicly claimed plans to contest the tickets in court--that people will not be arrested for sleeping in parks, but they will continue to get tickets if they fail to comply with city by-laws.

PHOTO: Protesters in Oppenheimer Park. By Doug Shanks.

Environmental study points finger at the rich

THE WESTENDER
July 24, 2008

It’s not something most people would care to admit publicly, but in life, in lust, and now, in the magnitude of one’s ecological footprint, size matters.

A new study released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) last month suggests high-income Canadians have a far greater impact on global warming than everyone else, showing that individual consumer patterns — and the fact that high-income people buy and consume more — have a big impact on how individuals effect the environment.

The study, titled “Size Matters: Canada’s Ecological Footprint, By Income” reports that the wealthiest 10 per cent of Canadians create a 66 per cent larger ecological footprint than the average Canadian household. It’s the first Canadian study to link individual incomes and consumer patterns to climate change, and it argues that income inequality must be considered when making environmental policy decisions.

The study was released on the heels of the implementation of the controversial B.C. carbon tax alongside the province-wide distribution of $100 carbon-tax rebate cheques — two incentive programs that CCPA researcher Hugh Mackenzie says is just another show of market failure. Mackenzie, a Toronto-based economic consultant, co-authored the CCPA report with Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, and Hans Messinger, assistant director of Statistics Canada’s national accounts branch.

“If you were actually to impose taxes on carbon that were high enough to have a significant impact on people’s behaviour, they would have a devastating impact on the living standards of low- and middle-income people,” says Mackenzie. “The reason for the need for incentives to do the right thing is that the market’s not working. The reason why people are advocating carbon taxes is that the market isn’t adequately pricing the damage caused by carbon emissions. But it’s more than a little optimistic to think that you can rely exclusively on market measures to clean up a market failure. “

Mackenzie urges policy-makers to look at income disparity and its relation to greenhouse emissions when considering the future of policies like the B.C. carbon tax. “If you were to introduce environmental measures that don’t take into account the fact that the disproportionate share of the greenhouse gas emissions arise from the consumption of people at the top end of the income scale, the likelihood is that your policy’s not going to work, because there’s evidence out there that suggests that lower- and middle-income people are more price-sensitive than high-income people,” he says. “So, if you raise the price, you may produce some reduction in consumption from people at the low end of the income scale, but since they’re responsible for a disproportionately small share of it, it’s not going to have much of an impact on the overall problem. Less price-sensitive consumers will just pay the tax and carry on.”

Maureen Bader, B.C. director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, disagrees with Mackenzie’s arguments and the entire environmental premise of his study. “That’s just a classic tactic of the left, trying to stir things up; it’s a very old-fashioned, class-warfare leftist argument that doesn’t resonate here in Canada because most people in Canada fall into this middle-class group and we’re already very heavily taxed,” she says of the study. “On top of that, global temperatures have been falling since 2002 while carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise. Perhaps it’s time to jump off that global-warming bandwagon.”

According to Statistics Canada, 82 per cent of all working Canadians make an annual salary of $50,000 and under, 16 per cent make between $50,000 and $100,000, while two per cent make more than $100,000. “They say you’re in the top 10 per cent of income earners if you make over $64,500 a year,” says Bader. “To call someone who makes about $65,000 a year rich is completely misrepresenting the reality of Canadian society. Anybody who makes over $65,000 a year is only rich maybe if they live at home with their parents and their mom packs their lunch.”

But Mackenzie says right-wing organizations like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation are blind to the realities of climate change and what can be done to mitigate the problem. “If the Canadian Taxpayers Federation got its way, we would not have anything like the public revenue that we need to even begin to tackle the climate-change problem, and Canada would be resolutely continuing to do nothing,” he says. “Thanks to the success of the conservative forces who’ve campaigned against taxes, we’ve had a widely acknowledged infrastructure-funding crisis in Canada. We’re seeing the consequences of the right’s success.”

What concerns Mackenzie most about environmental policy-making is the idea that the drivers of Canada’s ecological footprint are distributed democratically. “You have to be worried about environmental taxes that are so high that you cause low- and middle-income people to consume less energy than they should be,” he says. “We don’t want people to get so spooked by a high tax on energy that they won’t turn their furnaces on.”

And despite Bader’s arguments that class and income disparities are old-fashioned, Mackenzie contends they’re more pressing now than ever. “The gap between the rich and the rest of us is really growing dramatically,” he says. “It’s being ignored because it’s inconvenient.”

Not so civil city?

THE WESTENDER
July 24, 2008

The Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA) has sought to illustrate the success of its controversial Downtown Ambassadors program by pointing out that it has received no complaints about the program. But the Pivot Legal Society, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and United Native Nations are blowing that claim out of the water by filing a human-rights complaint against the DVBIA and Project Civil City commissioner Geoff Plant.

The complaint, announced to the public last week, is to be launched via the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal. “Our complaint argues that the policies of Project Civil City and the [DVBIA], through the Downtown Ambassadors program, discriminate against those with the disability of drug addiction and have a disproportionate adverse impact on Aboriginal and disabled persons by limiting their access to public space in Vancouver,” says Pivot lawyer Laura Track. “We want the Tribunal to clarify what constitutes appropriate conduct on the part of private security guards when they’re dealing with homeless people in public space.”

The complaint arrives in the wake of numerous concerns voiced by homeless, disabled, and drug-addicted people about how Downtown Ambassadors have treated them. “The class of people we’re bringing this action on behalf of is homeless people in Vancouver — an extremely marginalized population already, and a population that really doesn’t have the capacity to be making formal complaints about the treatment that they’re facing at the hands of security guards,” says Track, adding that the Tribunal process could take at least a year. “Whatever training [Ambassadors] are receiving in terms of sensitivity in dealing with the homeless population clearly isn’t enough because of what we’re seeing happening on the streets.”

Aaron Zacharias is a mental-health peer-support worker and Downtown Eastside resident who claims to have witnessed disturbing behaviour by Downtown Ambassadors in 2001. “I saw two Ambassadors abusing a homeless man in front of the Delta Hotel on Hastings,” he claims. “[The hotel] had their sprinkler system turned on to prevent him from sleeping in their doorways, and both [the Ambassadors] were laughing their heads off. I was appalled, but felt too intimidated myself to intervene at the time.”

United Native Nations vice-president David Dennis says Aboriginals are among the most negatively impacted by the Downtown Ambassadors program and the prerogatives of Project Civil City. “It’s pretty clear to us that a clear majority of the people that are homeless in Vancouver are Aboriginal,” says Dennis. “What makes us very angry is that we see this Civil City project [and] the Ambassador program as a tool of the city to push homeless people aside.”

The actions taken by Downtown Ambassadors to ask street people to ‘move along’ when they’ve taken a rest in an alleyway or on a curb worries Vancouver Public Space Network spokesperson Josh Paterson. “Having private security guards there to single certain people out — it’s not everybody that they’re telling to move along, it’s certain kinds of people that they’re telling to move along. We think that that diminishes public space, because one of the important qualities of public space is that it’s supposed to be for everybody,” he says. “That’s what this complaint is saying. It’s saying that it is targeting specific people on numerous different grounds, and a lot of them happen to be Aboriginal. And they may not be doing that on purpose. I don’t know whether they’re doing that on purpose or not. It doesn’t matter whether they’re doing it on purpose.”

Meanwhile, the DVBIA is confident that the Downtown Ambassador program will be, in the association’s own words, “vindicated” in the face of the human-rights complaint. “We have not seen the complaint, but plan to review the documents with our legal counsel once we receive them,” said DVBIA executive director Charles Gauthier, in a press release.

The DVBIA refused further comment, but concluded its press release with a vote of confidence for the program: “The DVBIA is confident its well-respected, eight-year-old program will pass the test of scrutiny.”

PHOTO: United Native Nations vice president Dave Dennis. By Doug Shanks.

Expansion of Downtown Ambassadors program draws praise, criticism

THE WESTENDER
July 17, 2008

The city’s controversial Downtown Ambassador program is expanding outside the downtown core. Patrollers in bright-red jackets will soon also be found in Cambie Village, on South Granville, and on Fraser Street.

The Downtown Ambassador program is co-managed by Genesis Security and is the brainchild of the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association (DVBIA), which introduced the program in 1998. While Ambassadors have no power to enforce the law or lay a hand on the people they deal with, they are trained to monitor streets for crime and emergencies, act as resource persons for tourists, and offer a general safety presence in an effort to reduce street disorder.

“The Ambassadors are trained in relationship-building,” says NPA councillor Kim Capri, who supports the program’s expansion. “Their role is a street concierge. They have no enforcement capacities — they rely 100 per cent on their interpersonal skills to problem-solve. They’ll link people to social services, and, when necessary, they’ll call police regarding criminal matters.

“This isn’t a job police want to do. Unless the taxpayers want to pay for it, it isn’t something [police] can do.”

The Ambassador program’s expansion in six BIA areas — Cambie Village, Fraser Street/South Hill, Gastown, South Granville, the West End, and Yaletown — follows a decision by Vancouver City Council to enter a one-year, sole-source contract with the DVBIA. The Ambassador program is one of the most visible parts of Project Civil City, an initiative sparked by Mayor Sam Sullivan that uses the 2010 Olympics as a catalyst to reduce public disorder and address homelessness.

Though the decision to fund and support the Ambassador program expansion comes from city council, not all members are in favour of the idea.

“Do you think it’s appropriate for public resources to be spent on tourists with special needs?” asked COPE councillor David Cadman at the City Services and Budgets Committee meeting at City Hall last week, where the program’s expansion was discussed. “You asked the question, ‘Where are the cops?,’” he said, addressing the concerns of Annette O’Shea, executive director of the Yaletown BIA, who spoke at the meeting. “In the first term of this council, only one NPA councillor voted to add the 50 police that were recommended by the police. All the rest voted against it. The year after that, where there was again the recommendation to add more police, the majority of this council said only 17 would be added. This year, when the issue came forward, the council voted unanimously to add 96 police and 22 civilians, but those will take time to bring on, and will be brought on mostly in [2009 and 2010], so the recommendations and the [requests] for police have not been supported by the majority of this council. And that’s why you don’t have the policing services that you need.”

The Vancouver Police Department (VPD) has spoken publicly in support of the Downtown Ambassadors, whose work includes scanning license plates for stolen vehicles, tracking criminal activity, and filing reports to the City. But like other critics of the program, the Vancouver Policeman’s Union has also questioned the City’s expenditure of public funds on private security.

Vision Vancouver mayoral candidate Gregor Robertson is an outspoken critic of the effectiveness of both the Downtown Ambassador program and Project Civil City. “We’re downloading the cost of public safety onto these business areas, onto the BIAs, because there are inadequate police resources,” he says. “I think the idea that they’re just friendly ambassadors in the neighbourhood or business district is out the window. There’s no report to date that demonstrates value for money.”

City council approved a $237,000 budget in April to fund this summer’s introduction of a 24-hour Ambassador presence in the downtown core. Since many Ambassadors position themselves by the cruise-ship stations to help tourists during the day, their duties will likely shift during the wee hours of the morning.

“Almost everyone realizes this is filling a gap that should be filled by police,” says Robertson. “It’s a band-aid. It isn’t what was intended when the Ambassador program started 10 years ago, but as public safety has eroded and more serious crime and homelessness has skyrocketed, the Ambassadors end up being a stop-gap solution.”

If Robertson wins the November election, he’s not likely to keep Project Civil City in its current incarnation, but he says he’s keen to advocate for a change in focus that will look more closely at the roots of the crime and disorder the Ambassador program attempts to address. “It’s a lot easier as a politician to say ‘Forget it, it’s done. I’ll scrap the program on day one, damn the torpedoes.’ But that’s not how I approach things,” he says. “This one’s important to do right. Obviously, business owners are seeing the need for ambassadors. Obviously, there’s some merit to what the ambassadors do personally, and the support that they give to those businesses. But again, it puts a band-aid on, and you’re not addressing the cause of the disease. Maybe it’s serving a purpose in terms of protection or a sense of civility, but when it is draining resources, when it’s obscuring the bigger problem and detracting from addressing the problems, then we have to do something.”

Charles Gauthier, executive director of the DVBIA, argues that the Ambassadors provide public services unmatched by anything else in the city. “Because the Ambassadors are providing a service in terms of reporting deficiencies in the public realm, greeting visitors, assisting people that are basically homeless and disadvantaged, I would argue, why shouldn’t they be funded by the general public?” he says. “We’re providing a civic service which is not being replicated by any other agency. If anything, we’re acting very complementary to the city services that are currently available and to the Vancouver Police Department... and there’s no duplication.”

Gauthier is proud of his Ambassador program’s success. “The general public, over the course of the last eight years, has a good grasp of the Downtown Ambassadors and what they do. It’s a recognizable brand,” he says. “There hasn’t been a complaint launched with any of the public organizations. The [British Columbia Civil Liberties Association] hasn’t launched any complaints about the program with any of the agencies out there. It doesn’t mean that they are supportive of the program, but again, we don’t enforce laws. If we don’t enforce any laws, we’re not going to generate any complaints about the misuse of authority.”

A City staff report is expected to go before council in September to recommend additional funding for the BIAs currently using the Ambassador program, as well as other potential participants.

PHOTO: Downtown ambassador helps someone find his way. By Doug Shanks.

Design panel sends architect back to drawing board

THE WESTENDER
July 10, 2008

A July 2 urban design panel meeting at City Hall shut down a proposal for a controversial high-rise development next to a West End heritage house, but the ruling doesn’t mean the end to future development on the site. “The project got collapsed within a 10-minute discussion,” recalls West End Residents Association president Brent Granby, who attended the meeting. “It was a pretty decisive consensus. The design professionals re-iterated what [the residents] were saying.”

Granby is part of a group of West End residents concerned about the future of the 1245 Harwood site, currently occupied by a yellow heritage house built in 1903. The house was converted to a series of rental suites in the 1930s, and now continues to be occupied by tenants. The largest-known tulip tree in Vancouver stands in the front garden, a relic as old as the house itself. The house’s former owner contacted Vancouver architect Bing Thom in the last years of her life when she was dying of cancer — she had followed Thom’s work for years and entrusted his architecture firm to save the house from demolition.

Thom and his team at Bing Thom Architects came up with a plan for an 18-storey, 40-unit condominium high-rise with three levels of underground parking to go up beside the house. If the plan had gone forward, the house would have needed to be jacked up and moved a few metres to the east to accommodate its new neighbour.

“For us, it’s kind of a labour of love,” Bing Thom says of the project. “We do very few condo projects. We don’t usually do projects just for commercial gain.” Some of Thom’s better-known architectural projects include the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts and the recent re-design of the Sunset Community Centre.

But what Thom saw as a good deed received strong criticism from neighbours, even before the project went before the urban design panel. “This is what we would have to live with: a wall of glass right there,” says Joel Oger, gesturing out the window of his Jervis Street apartment overlooking the Harwood site. “If we’re talking about having space for people to rent in the city, I’m for it totally, but if that’s to become another white-elephant entity like this, how is that helping the people of this community have an affordable place to live? The [Bing Thom] apartments will be more than a million dollars each. Nobody is going to be able to live there.”

Oger’s neighbour Don Richardson agrees. “EcoDensity, affordability, these things are going down the drain with that [development],” he says. “Residents in the [heritage] house will be uprooted. It’s becoming like Whistler.”

Even though the original 18-storey plan for a new condominium high-rise was defeated by the urban design panel, Bing Thom Architects will return to the drawing board to drum up new possibilities for the site. One reason for the original plan’s large size was that it received a 45,000-square-foot bonus density for preserving the heritage house, which currently cannot be transferred to another site. Project architect Dan Du says the next plan may be a more modest proposal. “The message we got from the director of planning [at the urban design panel] was they’ll be looking for a smaller building,” he says. “Obviously the [urban design panel] result was disappointing, but they set the rules. Whether it’s us or someone else down the road, there will be a development on that site.”

Michael Geller is optimistic that Bing Thom Architects will be able to come up with a more site-appropriate proposal. Geller is an architect, an adjunct faculty member at SFU, and an NPA candidate for city council. “I can usually tell a Bing Thom building just by looking at it,” Geller says. “It usually has a very contemporary expression. I can appreciate that may not have been completely complimentary to the heritage building.”

Geller’s advice to Bing mirrors advice that he remembers from an old architecture instructor: if you have to make a mistake, make a feature of it. “I think what Bing needs to do now is take the comments from the urban design panel and the comments he received from meetings with neighbours and use his brilliance to create something exceptional,” he says, referring to architect Richard Henriquez’s apartment building next to the Sylvia Hotel on Beach Avenue, which takes design cues from the heritage hotel. “It was very controversial,” Geller says of that project, recalling the building’s construction in the mid ‘80s when he was part of the urban design panel and development permit board.

While the look of the new Harwood building will be essential to how it will fit in with the neighbourhood, affordability is perhaps a tougher nut to crack. Neighbours see the development slated to go up beside the heritage house as more salt in the already-gaping wound of scarce rental units in the West End.

“I don’t know how we’re going to go forward if every time you build something it’s going to be a million dollars,” says Granby. “It’s going to be a catastrophe. Everyone’s going to have to move outside the city and that’s not the original vision [for Vancouver]. That’s what this next election is going to entail.

PHOTO: Bing Thom and a maquette of the building his firm designed for the 1245 Harwood site. By Doug Shanks.

Putting the law in renters’ back pockets

THE WESTENDER
July 10, 2008

Vancouver tenants who’ve fought unfair evictions at the Residential Tenancy Office have been known to steel themselves with thick binders of legalese on tenant rights, but what could be volumes of material has been distilled into a foldable, business card-sized document fit for a carrying in a wallet.The Pivot Legal Society, a Downtown Eastside legal advocacy group, has printed 5,000 copies of its pocket-sized tenant rights cards and started distributing them in the community last week. The cards are inspired by Pivot’s hugely successful police rights cards which outline, among other things, a person’s rights to remain silent and to seek legal aid. Seventy-five thousand police right cards have been printed and distributed across Canada since their 2002 inception.

The tenant rights cards are aimed at helping Downtown Eastside renters in their interactions with landlords, given the constant struggle with illegal evictions that many face in the neighbourhood. “It’s an ongoing issue,” says Pivot lawyer David Eby. “Since I started here at Pivot three years ago, I’ve been personally involved in hundreds of illegal eviction attempts. They’ve been primarily where the entire building has received an illegal eviction notice.” But the number of illegal evictions happening in the Downtown Eastside is hard to track — few Downtown Eastside renters have the social, educational, and monetary resources to fight eviction notices with the Residential Tenancy Branch like West End residents have in recent months.

“The challenge with the Downtown Eastside is many people down here have the attitude of ‘Well, I never got a kick I didn’t deserve,’” says Eby. “That feeling of ‘this is just another crappy thing happening to me in a long line of crappy things that have happened to me’ — it’s hard to get past that.”

The empowering language on the tenant rights cards are part of Pivot’s larger aims to strengthen the confidence of Downtown Eastside residents. “This and many of the other things that we do in terms of building esteem in the community — the [Hope in Shadows] calendar project and the book project, combined with the popular legal education tools, are all aimed at giving people the sense that they do have some worth, that they do have some value as citizens in Vancouver, and that they can challenge some of these more egregious violations of their rights,” says Eby.

“Tenants insisting on their rights is one of the ways that we can resist some of the worst aspects of the gentrification that’s taking place in one of Vancouver’s poorer neighbourhoods.”

The tenant rights cards also come with a warning. Though the cards outline tenants’ rights regarding issues like evictions, maintenance, privacy, and discrimination, the warning states that though most landlords won’t illegally evict a tenant who complains, some will. Also, the Vancouver Police Boad has no policy to specifically deal with rental issues. The Vancouver Police Board’s Terry la Liberte, chair of the service and policy complaint review committee, wrote a letter to Pivot stating, “None of the polled police departments [in Victoria, New Westminster, and Abbotsford] intervene in landlord tenant disputes except to maintain the peace and advise the parties of their rights under the Residential Tenancy Act.” This leaves the Residential Tenancy Board in charge of most tenant-landlord disputes — and in the Downtown Eastside, few eviction cases even make it to that stage.

“The only answer [to successfully fighting a Downtown Eastside eviction] is that if someone in the Downtown Eastside is lucky enough to find an advocate who’s going to help them,” says Eby. “Without it, they’re cooked.”

PHOTO: The Pivot Legal Society's David Eby and Downtown Eastside residents. By Doug Shanks.

COVER No Vacancy: coping with the city’s growing rental crisis

THE WESTENDER
July 3, 2008



Moving out of one’s home rarely happens without some disruption, but for West End resident Janice Johnston, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Johnston, who was grieving the recent death of her husband and had just started a new job, received an eviction notice from her landlord requiring her to vacate her apartment for renovations to her suite. “It was an extremely stressful time and there was no refuge in my home,” she recalls. “There is a protocol to follow at the Residential Tenancy Office (RTO), but you can’t just phone up and ask what that is. It’s impossible to get through on a phone line and e-mails go unanswered for days, and even weeks — loads of confusing paperwork. Not matters easy to deal with at the best of times, but especially while making funeral arrangements and training for a new job.”

Johnston was a tenant of the Bay Tower apartments at 1461 Harwood Street when West Vancouver-based Hollyburn Properties, notorious for mass evictions, took ownership of the building in 2005. In September 2006, she and other tenants started receiving floor-by-floor eviction notices from the new owners stating that empty suites were required for large-scale renovations. The tenants disagreed with Hollyburn’s assessment and saw the proposed renovations — like bathroom fixture upgrades and new window coverings — as cosmetic. Bay Tower tenants were offered the chance to return to their suites post-renovation, but with rental increases that many couldn’t afford. (WE reported on a similar situation that unfolded this April at the Glenmore, another Hollyburn-owned building in the West End.)

Johnston tried to fight her eviction at the RTO in Burnaby, but her dispute resolution officer ruled her eviction reasonable because the landlord was planning to refinish the floors. “By then, it was January and [the officer] ruled that two weeks from the day of the ruling was sufficient notice to move out. I panicked,” she says. “That’s when I called [Vancouver-Burrard MLA] Lorne Mayencourt. His solution was to email the RTO. By the time they answered my email, I would have been out on the street.”

Johnston counted herself lucky to find a new apartment in so short a time, but she had to pay higher rent and, even worse, give up her dog of 13 years because the new building didn’t allow pets. The events have left her reeling. “There is no security at all,” she says of her current housing situation. “I could be evicted tomorrow from my new place for the same reasons.”

Johnston is like thousands of tenants across B.C. who are struggling with the effects of a province-wide rental crisis. The problem is of particular concern in Vancouver’s West End, which has a higher concentration of renters than any other area in Canada. Across the province, one-third of all households rent, whereas 82 per cent of households in the West End are occupied by renters. Limited rental stocks that continue to erode due to condo conversions and a glut of renters in the market have caused rents to skyrocket. According to a June 2008 report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives called “Affordable EcoDensity: Making Affordable Housing a Core Principle of Vancouver’s EcoDensity Charter,” standard rent on Vancouver’s West Side was $2,200 per month at the end of 2007, up 50 per cent from 2004, and more than double the rates of 2000.

“The majority of households in Vancouver are tenants. Everyone is being squeezed and a lot are nervous,” says Martha Lewis, executive director for the Tenant Resource Advisory Centre (TRAC). She’s seen many renters move out of the city, fed up with the lack of affordable places to live. “A lot of people just leave Vancouver. They go further out and commute longer,” she says. “If you’re a tenant and you’re in a lower-paying job, it’s hardly worth it to do the commute. We are aware that some of the restaurants and employers who pay lower wages are having difficulty in getting workers in Vancouver.”

Heather (last name witheld at her request), has kept her downtown office job despite being evicted from her Bay Tower apartment two years ago. She has since purchased a small place in White Rock. Although Heather has successfully ‘broken out’ of the renter’s market by buying a place of her own, she’s far less happy in her new neighbourhood. Like many single renters who had lived in Vancouver for years, Heather was pushed out of the rental market because it was no longer affordable. “I miss Vancouver terribly but I won’t move back because I can’t afford rent anywhere I’d like to live,” she wrote in an email. “I’ve gained 40 pounds in two years of this stress. And I’m miserable. But I am very thankful I have a home that is clean and safe — more than for many [others], now.”

What was once an easy walk to work for Heather is now a grueling commute. “I have lost contact with so many friends because I’m too tired to visit them in the city on weekends,” Heather wrote. “What happened to the Vancouver we all knew and loved for the last 30 years? These big companies are completely taking over, and the days of affording a modest apartment in Vancouver are gone. It is a tragedy for many people.”

The Vancouver of the late 1970s is indeed a thing of the past, but recent history shows how drastically the market has changed in only the last decade. John Calveley runs AMS Rentsline, a telephone and online rental service for landlords and tenants originally designed to help UBC students find affordable housing. The 10-year-old service is now the busiest it’s ever been, with tenants snatching up housing faster than Calveley and his team can take rental ads off the website. “Last summer, we had almost triple the amount of people visiting the website, and we just couldn’t keep any [housing] ads on the site,” Calveley says. “Landlords post ads, two days later, they want me to take it off the site.” As affordable student housing becomes increasingly difficult to obtain, Calveley says he’s seeing more students in shared units. Martha Lewis sees a similar trend through TRAC, where she’s finding more people sharing smaller spaces, or students choosing to stay in their parents’ homes.

As Vancouver’s rental market becomes increasingly polarized, highlighting vast disparities of wealth in the city, some renters have unified in their fight against unfair evictions and the protection of tenants’ rights. Stephen Hammond is a human rights consultant who volunteers with Renters at Risk, a tenants’ rights advocacy group borne out of the Bay Towers controversy of 2005.

Hammond, who has been renting his apartment on Chilco Street for 11 years, has spent considerable time in educating renters about their rights and how they’re being threatened by changes in the Residential Tenancy Act (RTA) — a provincial legislation designed to protect both landlords and renters. “When [the province] brought in the changes [to the RTA in 2002] which allowed for a three to four per cent [annual rent increase] plus [the] Consumer Price Index, Lorne Mayencourt was the only person in legislature who said, ‘Point of order, I don’t think you registered my ‘yay’ on that vote,” says Hammond. “This is the guy who’s supposed to look after renters. Housing is a gigantic issue throughout the province. I’m tired of hearing my provincial government, with their brochures and their ads saying housing matters, when in fact the Residential Tenancy Act loopholes are creating homelessness.” Hammond added that the $6.00 hourly provincial training wage and $8.00 minimum wage is also holding people back from keeping pace with market fluctuations. In addition, he says higher rental rates are causing people to spend less on local businesses than they might if they weren’t so squeezed for cash. “If you’ve got a restaurant or a theatre or a grocery store, if you’ve got more of your customers who have to spend more on rent, they’re not spending it on you.”

Sharon Isaak is one of the founding members of Renters at Risk (RentersatRisk.ca) and was one of a handful of Bay Tower tenants who appealed their case to the B.C. Supreme Court. After an extensive court battle, Isaak won her apartment back. “When your home is under siege and you don’t know what’s going on, it shakes you to the core like no other experience does. It’s a stress that few very people can live with and fight,” she says, adding that her saving grace was tenants banding together. “If you want to get to know your neighbours, get evicted!” she jokes.

Thanks to her Bay Tower experience, Isaak now recognizes the importance of provincial and municipal legislation for preserving the affordability of rentals in Vancouver. “What I want, and what Renters at Risk wants, is for the government to look at the court cases and look at the decisions that were written, and to implement the right of first refusal to protect tenants, because the legislation is not being interpreted correctly by the Residential Tenancy Branch,” she says.

“And that’s the lasting message that I’m taking out of all my eviction battles. We walked the walk, we got the results, and now we would like our results to be incorporated in the legislation because the courts have spoken. They have the power to fix this. They have the power to fix this by the election if they want.”

While the Residential Tenancy Act falls under provincial jurisdiction, Isaak says the upcoming November civic elections will be pivotal in securing an adequate supply of affordable rental stock going into the Olympics.

Vision Vancouver councillor and West End resident Tim Stevenson agrees. “All these things come down to political decisions,” he says. “That’s why it will be so important as to who’s elected in November 2008, because if you get a pro-development council — and the NPA is a pro-development party and has been traditionally — if you get enough of those people elected within the NPA, then I think there’s every likelihood [high-end condo developments instead of more dedicated rental units] will go ahead.”

For Stevenson, there’s nothing more important than housing on his political agenda. “The vacancy rate is less than half a percent. The normal ebb and flow of the market is failing because you don’t have supply and demand, you just have demand,” he says. “For me, this is the number one issue: housing, affordable housing, not just in the West End and the Downtown Eastside but the city. We’ve got a real crisis.”

Stevenson’s motion on heritage building protection, which touches on affordable rent protection, returns as a report to city council Tuesday, July 8th at City Hall (453 W. 12th), 2 p.m.

PHOTO: Vision Vancouver councillor Tim Stevenson. By Doug Shanks.

City green-lights condo against community objections

THE WESTENDER
June 26, 2008

Despite 200 protest letters and 40 people speaking out against it at a development permit board hearing Monday (June 23), a 160-unDD condominium project at 58 West Hastings Street — in the heart of the Downtown Eastside — was given the green light by City staff.

The decision follows angry criticism from community advocates, who say the site should be used for much-needed social housing in the area instead of luxury condos that Downtown Eastside residents couldn’t possibly afford.

Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) organizer Wendy Pedersen has been leading the charge of community members speaking out against the development, which is to be called the Greenwich. CCAP is one of 45 community groups and politicians against the condo project, including Lord Strathcona Elementary School, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and the Fairview Baptist Church. Pedersen and her peers have been working to get the project’s development company, Concord Pacific, on the side of residents for the past month and a half, with little success. Their best result of repeated efforts to meet with Concord Pacific developers was a closed-door meeting last week with company CEO Terence Hui. Attendees weren’t allowed to take notes.

“[Hui] has three different agendas he has to deal with day to day,” says VANDU president Richard Utendale, who went to Hui’s meeting. “That’s social benefits, responsibility to the community as a developer, and responsibility to his company. At the end of the day, what’s best for his company is gonna win.”

Utendale noted that Hui also needs to maintain a reputation as one of Vancouver’s top property developers. “He needs to be concerned about his reputation in the development community,” he says. “But if you really believe in social housing and if you really believe something can be done about that, then stand up and say something about it.”

Despite a number of phone calls and e-mails to Concord Pacific developers over the last three weeks, WE did not receive a response by press time.

Now that City staff have granted Concord Pacific and architectural firm Busby Perkins + Will the go-ahead on the project, CCAP and other Downtown Eastside advocacy groups will continue the push for social housing on the site instead of the ground-level retail space and condominium units in the works. “We lost [at the development permit board hearing], but I think people in our group have the fantasy to break through the system,” says Pedersen. “We’re resolute that we want 100 per cent social housing on that site.”

Work Less Party mayoral candidate Betty Krawzcyk is a vocal supporter of CCAP’s initiatives, and is disgusted that the development currently slated for 58 West Hastings is named after an historic bohemian neighbourhood in New York City. “It should be named the Blair Witch Project, because it’s a horror show,” she says. “The bohemian village in New York was not a place where people lived in abject poverty. There were a lot of young people there. You did not have this intense problem with drug addiction. I think they are really over-reaching their comparison there.”

Grant Murray, VP of Sales for Concord Pacific, says the name is inspired by New York’s Greenwich Village. “It’s a flavour of the different people that will be there,” he says. “It takes a bit of the New York atmosphere with the stone buildings.”

Peter Busby, managing director of Busby, Perkins + Will, argued at Monday’s hearing that the Greenwich condominium units will be suitable for people entering the real-estate market. “This is affordable housing,” he said. “This is something first-time buyers can get hold of.”

According to Concord Pacific’s website, condominium units at the Greenwich currently range in price from $300,000 to more than $500,000.

PHOTO: Carnegie Community Action Project superstar Wendy Pedersen. By Doug Shanks.

Dr. Peter Centre hopes to serve as model for safe-injection facilities

THE WESTENDER
June 18, 2008

Controversy surrounding the future of Insite, the Downtown Eastside facility that offers supervised injection for drug users, has sparked renewed interest in the West End’s Dr. Peter Centre, Canada’s only HIV/AIDS health program and care residence that also includes an in-house safe-injection service.

Compared to the lingering debate surrounding the Supreme Court ruling in late May
granting Insite’s continued operation as a dedicated safe-injection site, life at the Dr. Peter Centre has retained its relative calm. While Insite tenuously operates under an exemption of federal drug law, the Dr. Peter Centre never needed such an exemption, according to the centre’s executive director, Maxine Davis.

“We decided to not pursue requesting a Section 56 exemption approach that Insite is using,
because the Section 56 exemption, we felt, our nurses were not contravening,” Davis says, with
regard to introducing the safe-injection program at the centre six years ago, a year before Insite
opened its doors in 2003. “[The nurses] were doing everything reasonably possible to not
contravene that act, and, therefore, that Section 56 exemption was not required.”

That’s because the Dr. Peter Centre’s safe-injection room (called the ‘harm reduction room’) is part of a larger spectrum of care under the ‘comfort care’ model developed by Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, a B.C. doctor famous for publicly documenting his battle with AIDS in the early 1990s. The Dr. Peter Centre was named for him. “That supervised-injection service is just a very small part of what we do in a greater health-care context,” says Davis.

The centre, located in a contemporary four-storey building behind St. Paul’s Hospital, at Comox and Thurlow, features a day health program and a 24-hour care residence for people with HIV/AIDS.

The main and second floors service members in the day health program, which includes 300
participants who can access daily meal service, music and art therapy, computers, laundry facilities, showers, and the harm-reduction room. The third and fourth floors house those in the 24-hour resident care program, who are also able to use safe-injection services without using the harm reduction room. Services are provided using Dr. Peter’s comfort care objectives, which focus on respecting individual dignities while recognizing a broad spectrum of health and quality-of-life issues — a model that aims to push out the despair, isolation and fear experienced by many HIV/AIDS sufferers.

“In our residence, the vast majority of the people who live there have an intersect of HIV, mental
illness, addiction,” says Davis. “In the residence, the nurses meet their obligations by providing
[safe-injection] service in a person’s private room. And, indeed, if you look at the [College of
Registered Nurses of British Columbia] ruling, those are obligations for registered nurses
throughout the province.”

Registered nurses were the first to suggest the provision of safe-injection services at the Dr. Peter Centre. “The nurses came to me and said, ‘Maxine, we think what we are doing is unethical. We are giving people clean needles and sending them outside to inject,’” recalls Davis. “Because of that, they risk overdosing and dying, and what we observe as nurses is preventable infections: They rush their injections outside in bushes, they don’t want to be embarrassed by people seeing them, they come back into the centre with ripped veins and skin, and they end up with infections that are preventable and they end up in hospital. As nurses, we find that unacceptable when we know what we can do to prevent that.”

Davis added that the single biggest contributing factor to the risk of death by overdose is injecting alone. Davis and the nurses presented the issue to the College of Registered Nurses of British Columbia, whose practice standards are regulated by the Health Professions Act. The College ruled that it was in the scope of nursing practice to supervise injections for the purposes of preventing illness and promoting health. “From a federal/criminal law perspective — the Canadian Drug and Substances Act, the nurses were not contravening that act,” says Davis. “They were never touching, injecting, or providing the drugs.”

Despite the harm-reduction approach being chastised in many communities, Davis maintains that West End neighbours have welcomed the Dr. Peter Centre’s programming with open arms. “When we started the [safe-injection] service in 2002, we were public about it,” Davis says. “It was not our intention to hide what we were doing, and we also wanted to make sure that our clients didn’t feel that they were in a situation that everyone else didn’t know what they were doing. I was really impressed by both the neighbourhood and by the public response. I had people call me and convey to me how much they respected the position the organization’s taken.”

In an organization in which 15 per cent of funding comes from donor revenue, Davis was careful to keep all donors informed of the centre’s news. She recalls worrying about potential negative
reactions when the harm-reduction room was introduced, but was pleasantly surprised to discover an influx of support. “I never had one donor call me to say, ‘Forget it, I’m not supporting you anymore.’ Indeed, it was the opposite,” says Davis. “We had people calling and saying, ‘We really admire the decision you’ve made.’”

The recent Insite ruling gives Davis hope that the Dr. Peter model can gain momentum in other
communities. “I feel that the [Insite] court decision validates the approach that the Dr. Peter Centre is taking,” she says. “I feel that it opens the door for other communities to take a similar approach as the Dr. Peter Centre is taking. One of the comments Judge Pitfield made [in the Insite judgment] was that there is no question that death and disease is reduced as a result of people having supervision of qualified health-care professionals.”