COVER: The fight for apartment life

THE WESTENDER
March 19, 2009

Vancouver apartment dwellers may have come to the conclusion that fighting an eviction at the region’s Residential Tenancy Office (RTO) is more or less a rite of passage for renters nowadays, given the increasing number of tenancy disputes across the city. Many of them have been attributed to low vacancy rates, rising rents, and landlords who try to exploit an already fragile market.

But the task of banding together with neighbours and bringing a dispute to the RTO is a time-consuming and mentally exhausting process. As a result, many tenants, such as Daryn Didyk, become frustrated and move out rather than deal with the stress of putting up a fight.

“We can’t put our lives on hold for this,” Didyk says. “It seems that the longer [our landlords]... just leave us hanging here, we’re forced to move out, because the psychological trauma of not knowing if you’re going to get an eviction notice reaches a breaking point.”

Didyk, a 27-year-old health-care administrator, has been renting a one-bedroom apartment at the Berkeley, a three-storey walk-up at 990 Bute Street, for five years. The 36-suite building, near Nelson Park in the West End, was built in 1926. Dr. Satnam Singh Gandham, a Richmond-based physician, took ownership of the building in June 2008. Since then, tenants have learned of his plans to convert one-bedroom suites into two-bedroom suites, and bachelor suites into one-bedrooms. Gandham was on vacation as WE went to press, but Berkeley tenants say eviction notices seem inevitable. Didyk is among the tenants of eight separate suites who are moving out by the end of March; his neighbours have started moving out at a steady pace over the last month. By April, only 16 of the 36 suites will be occupied.

“Your housing is your stability. Look what happens when people don’t have housing — you [have] the Downtown Eastside,” says Didyk. “According to the World Health Organization, defining determinants of health include stable housing. If I go on any longer trying to fight this, it affects my mental health, my physical health.”

Didyk will move into a one-bedroom rental on Commercial Drive at the beginning of April, but the move puts him further away from work and from a neighbourhood and friends he’s come to love. “I feel as though it’s taking up the spot for someone else who lives in that [Commercial Drive] community,” he says. “I very much identify as a Westender, and I feel like I’m being displaced.”

Didyk’s neighbour, Wayne Slavin, who turns 66 next month, has been living at the Berkeley for 36 years — the longest of all current tenants. He isn’t making serious plans to move out just yet: After being forced to retire from his job at a roofing company following triple-bypass heart surgery that landed him in the hospital for three months, he would like to stay put if he can. “It’s really frustrating to not really hear from the owner of the building, and only get little snippets of information from the caretaker,” he says. “We’ve been told by the caretaker that [an eviction]’s going to happen, so make your plans.”

Berkeley tenant Dominic Schaefer, a photographer in his forties, believes renovations would still be possible in the Berkeley without resorting to evictions. “Our argument is not that we shouldn’t have to pay higher rents... It’s that we shouldn’t get our asses kicked to the curb,” he says. “What we think is happening here is they’re going for a permit to gut the place. If they do that, then you can’t fight the way [other] tenants have been fighting.”

***

One tenancy dispute that has been featured prominently in local media recently is that of the West End’s Seafield apartment building. In January, new landlords issued 73-per-cent increases to its tenants, many of whom have lived in the 14-suite building for decades, among them a 93-year-old man and his sister. The Seafield, located at 1436 Pendrell Street, was built in 1931 and purchased in July 2008 by Chris Nelson, 33, and Jason Gordon, 37, a brother-in-law duo of former investment bankers and internet-gaming executives who formed Gordon Nelson Investments three years ago. Tenants disputed the rent increase at a two-and-a-half-hour hearing, which was conducted over the phone with the RTO last Wednesday (March 11). WE met Gordon and Nelson for an interview two days later at 1133 Barclay, a heritage building around the corner from the Berkeley that is currently under renovations, prior to the arrival of new tenants. The interview took place in a newly-updated bachelor unit that will rent for $1,200 a month. According to Nelson, 21 of the 27 units in the building have been rented.

“There has been a lot of media attention on the individuals at the Seafield, and, in my opinion, it’s extremely misplaced,” says Gordon. “We’ve got [three- to] seven-thousand homeless people in this city that have true issues; they aren’t doctors, engineers, various other successful, capable people that live in the Seafield... It speaks a lot to [the Seafield tenants’] ability to shine the spotlight. And, in many cases, to liken their situation to people with drug addiction, no homes, mental illness, is, I think, ridiculous.”

Gordon says he should be able to charge what he considers market rates at the Seafield. Under section 23(1)(a) of B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act, a landlord can increase rent above the annual allowance if the current rate for a unit is significantly lower than that of similar rental units in the same geographic area. “We own the building and this is a free country,” Gordon says. He and Nelson have asked Seafield tenants to pay $1,032 per month for a bachelor unit (the current average in the building is $770), $1,815 for a one-bedroom (currently averaging $1,128), and $2,275 for a two-bedroom (currently averaging $1,344).

“In a lot of ways, we feel like what the tenants at Seafield are asking for is a subsidy,” says Nelson, who adds he and Gordon determined their new rental rates through comparison research, primarily on Craigslist. For those unable to pay market-rate rents, Nelson recommends what he calls “great” government subsidy programs like the Rental Assistance Program or Shelter Aid for Seniors. “Those are the two main programs that, based on income, based on net worth, they decide whether or not the person merits a subsidy,” he says.

Gordon attributes what he describes as the “electric energy” of the West End to the ambition of the people who live there. “If we all say the people that have lived here forever and the people that are faced with challenges, those are the only people that can rent here, then we’ll create the Downtown Eastside,” he says. “We’re a socially just country, but we’re still a very free, ambitious country... We’re not going to throw all that out. The country doesn’t want us to.”

***

Ross Waring, a professional researcher, statistician, and consultant, has been living at the Seafield with his partner for 16 years. Spurred by the rash of evictions and rent increases in his neighbourhood, he recently conducted an independent study of average apartment-rental rates in buildings similar to the Seafield (built before 1940) and in the same geographic area (Vancouver’s central West End). The study compared current Seafield rents, the increased rents proposed by Gordon Nelson Investments, data from a custom analysis by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), and results from Waring’s random-sample study of more than 300 West End renters. Grouped together, the data suggests Gordon Nelson Investments’ proposed rents are significantly higher than both the average rents at similar West End buildings and the CMHC averages.

Waring says the increased rents proposed by Gordon Nelson would be acceptable only if the suites were not already occupied by long-term tenants. “When there’s an existing tenancy, there are rights on both sides, and the landlord can’t simply trample on the rights of the tenants just because they want higher rent. They have to wait for that unit to be vacant,” he says.

Waring’s neighbour, Tim Pawsey, points out that one of the biggest ironies of the Seafield case is that the situation threatens a large group of long-term tenants who look out for each other — the best kind of tenants to manage in a building, he says. “If you talk to people in the business, they will tell you that there is nothing more desirable — in many, many ways — than a stable tenancy. I think there is a type of buyer right now that’s doing this... [It] mirrors the condo-flipper. It sees this as being an opportunity to buy a rental building, kick people out, renovate, and then increase the cash flow and sell the building.”

Seafield tenants, after seven months of working together in the fight to keep their homes, will spend the next month waiting for a decision from the RTO (it is expected to be made within 30 days of the hearing).

But even victories can be bittersweet. Ten tenants of the Emerald Terrace apartment building, at 2045 Nelson Street, received a March 4 decision from the RTO that allows them to keep pets in their suites, despite pet-eviction notices issued by their landlords. The Emerald Terrace is owned by Hollyburn Properties Limited, a company notorious for ongoing conflicts with tenants, some of whom who have brought their disputes as far as the BC Supreme Court. Though Emerald Terrace tenant Andrew Simmons is happy to have won the right to stay in the building with his cats, which he had been given permission to keep by previous management, he doesn’t expect the tenants’ strained relationship with the landlords to improve.

“It doesn’t appear that there’s any improvement, because the behaviour of the building manager, as recently as last week, has been unacceptable,” says Simmons. “As for as the relationship with Hollyburn, at no time have they ever offered any kind of apology... We’ve since found out that most Hollyburn buildings have pets of one form or another, whether they’re grandfathered in previous agreements or if they have been allowed by Hollyburn managers.”

***

Spencer Herbert, NDP MLA for Vancouver-West End, has supported Emerald Terrace tenants throughout their arbitration, and has worked with Seafield and Berkeley tenants in recent months. He says B.C.’s Residential Tenancy Act needs to change in order for tenant rights to improve.

“If the government said, very clearly, through its legislation and its actions, that you cannot get away with this bullying crap, I think we would not see half as much as what we’re seeing,” Herbert says. “Certainly in Ontario, Quebec, I was looking at New York State — a whole range of people understand that in being a renter, you should be able to be respected, you’re not somebody that can get kicked around because you’re not an owner.”

Herbert has been trying to raise the issue in the BC Legislature, but with little success. “It’s got to become an election issue,” he says. “It’s very frustrating when you see people playing these games with people’s lives.”

Mayor Gregor Robertson does not expect tenancy legislation to change before the May 12 provincial election. “With the provincial election coming up, it’s doubtful any legislation will get passed before then,” he says.

As for the City of Vancouver’s role in leveraging the balance of power between tenants and landlords, Robertson says his top priority is to build more affordable housing stock. “Increasing rental-housing supply would decrease pressure on our vacancy rate, which would strengthen the position of renters in the city,” he says. “One reason that a landlord can push for massive rent increases is because renters have minimal or no alternatives.”

PHOTO: Current tenants of the Seafield, the Berkeley, and the Emerald Terrace apartments gather on the steps of the Berkeley at 990 Bute Street, where many tenants fear that receiving an eviction notice is only a matter of time. By Doug Shanks.

Davie Village attack not confirmed a hate crime by police

THE WESTENDER
March 19, 2009

Witnesses say 35-year-old Shawn Woodward, who sucker-punched 62-year-old Ritchie Dowie last Friday night (March 13) at the Fountainhead Pub on Davie Street, tried to justify his actions afterward by calling Dowie a “faggot,” but Vancouver Police have yet to call the incident a hate crime. “We are looking into that aspect, as part of keeping our mind open to any motivations,” says Const. Jana McGuinness. “It’s not the focus of the investigation, but it’s certainly an aspect we want to cover off.”

Lindsay Wincherauk, who has known Dowie for two and a half years, was at the Fountainhead when he saw his friend get punched in the head, seemingly out of the blue. “Ritchie had been playing pool with [Woodward] for about 20 minutes or so, and after the game they sort of separated,” he recalled Tuesday. “There was no confrontation whatsoever. I was just standing over at the bar, talking with some friends, and I noticed this guy just clench his fist, take his fist back, [and] punch Ritchie in the head with such force that it seemed to knock him out instantly. He fell like a board to the ground, hammering his head into the tiles by the front entranceway.”

Wincherauk and Fountainhead staff members hurried outside to follow Woodward, who left the pub immediately and walked east down Davie Street. “I... asked why he did it,” says Wincherauk. “His words, repeatedly, were ‘He’s a fag, he deserved it. The faggot touched me. I’m not a fag.’ He kept repeating it over and over again.”

At press time, Dowie, a father of two, remained in hospital in critical condition. Wincherauk says he has been told Dowie has brain damage, and if he does survive, it’s not likely he will walk again.

Woodward has been charged with one count of aggravated assault in connection with the incident, and will appear in court tomorrow (March 20). In the meantime, Dowie’s friends and supporters are speaking out against what they see as a troubling rash of anti-gay violence that continues to occur in what are widely known as gay-friendly pubs and neighbourhoods. “If we’ve got this level of violence coming down to the West End in downtown Vancouver, I’m really worried about the communities where there isn’t a strong gay presence to make people feel safe,” said Spencer Herbert, MLA for Vancouver-West End, at a press conference at the Fountainhead. “I certainly hope that the police and the Crown can work together to ensure that attacks that come from hate are prosecuted as such.”

PHOTO: Velvet Steele, Spencer Herbert, and Lindsay Wincherauk in front of the Fountainhead Pub on Davie Street. By Jackie Wong.

Designs on a community

THE WESTENDER
March 19, 2009

When Matthew Miyagawa’s friend invited him to join her at a Pecha Kucha night last year, the 31-year-old environmental biologist didn’t know what to expect. “I thought it was [a] yoga event or something,” he recalls.

Miyagawa was pleasantly surprised to discover that Pecha Kucha, which takes its name from a Japanese phrase for “the sound of conversation,” is a casual, beer-laced mixed-media event aimed at bringing together the design and architecture communities, of which Miyagawa is a part through his freelance work as a graphic designer. He is best known for founding VancouverSlop.com, a popular food blog.

“[Pecha Kucha] really left a lasting impression with me; I think it’s one of the best ongoing events in the city,” Miyagawa says. “I came home that night very inspired.”

Soon after making contact with the event organizers, Miyagawa signed himself up as a presenter at the first Pecha Kucha night of 2009, which takes place Thursday, March 26, at the Park Theatre in Cambie Village. Other scheduled presenters include Kris Krug, president and founder of Raincity Studios and Static Photography; Duane Elverum, an assistant professor of design at Emily Carr University; and Dolly Hopkins, co-founder of public-event organizers Public Dreams Society. Each presenter will bring 20 slides to use as part of a six-minute presentation, with 20 seconds to talk about each slide.

“I love how Pecha Kucha has a local focus and showcases the talent of Vancouver,” says Miyagawa. “It’s too often that we overlook the talent that we have in our own backyard.”

Pecha Kucha originated in Tokyo and has now spread to 180 cities around the world, all of which hold the event on the same evening. Vancouver design firm Cause + Affect, known for revitalizing the Vancouver Art Gallery’s youth cred by introducing the popular Fuse nights there five years ago, started hosting Pecha Kucha last year at the Vancouver Museum. Attendance has been so great that organizer Jane Cox, who founded Cause + Affect with her husband Steven, moved the event to the 500-seat Park Theatre to accommodate what are often sold-out crowds.

“We just know that this city is hungry for contemporary cultural events — stuff that is relevant to people and draws upon anybody between 20 and 40 as an audience,” says Cox. “What Pecha Kucha does is, it’s basically creating an event for people to meet up, look around at the audience, and go, ‘This is our cultural community; this is our design community.’ I think there’s a lack of events that bring people from across disciplines together.”

Cox says the presentation format lends itself well to keeping the audience — and presenters — on their toes. “It keeps what they’re saying brief and focused, and for the audience you get 12 different creatives in the city speaking about what inspires them and what they do.”

As much as Pecha Kucha functions as a who’s-who of Vancouver’s design and new-media communities, Cox says industry folk aren’t the only ones benefitting from the event. “This is an event for anyone in the city to get insight into our cultural identify, into who’s representing and shaping the future of this city,” she says. “I feel like there’s a shift in the city right now where we’re starting to create a cultural identity.”

More information on Pecha Kucha can be found at Pecha-Kucha.org. Tickets for the March 26 event are available at the door or from FestivalCinemas.ca.

PHOTO: Jane Cox, Steven Cox (behind book), Jean-Nicolas Dauwe, and Chris Allen will participate in the upcoming Pecha Kucha event. By Doug Shanks.

Opposing sides face off on proposed voting system

THE WESTENDER
March 12, 2009

The May 12 provincial election is now three months away, and voters will have more responsibility than in previous elections. They will determine the results of a referendum item that could, if passed, drastically change B.C.’s electoral process. Already used in Ireland, Malta, and Tasmania, the single-transferable vote (STV) allows voters to preferentially rank candidates on a ballot — which, supporters say, could make for fairer, more diverse representation of voters’ choices and create a more moderate, consensus-driven system of government. Opponents say the opposite would occur.

This election marks the second time British Columbians will have the chance to vote on the BC-STV referendum, which first appeared on the ballot in the 2005 provincial election. At the time, 58 per cent of voters favoured STV, but the provincial government decreed that 60 per cent support was needed in order for it to pass. Now, supporters and opponents of the STV are sharpening their campaigns in an effort to educate the public on both sides of an increasingly heated debate.

Craig Henschel is leading workshops throughout the city on the benefits of voting in favour of the STV. He was randomly selected to participate in the B.C. Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform in 2003, joining one man and one woman from every electoral district across the province (Henschel lives in the Burnaby-Willingdon constituency). The Assembly took part in an extensive educational process on alternatives to the current voting system, and, through two years of public consultation and education, decided that STV was the most favourable alternative to our current “first past the post” voting system.

By using an STV system, Henschel says, people will feel more connected to the electoral process because their vote will elect at least one MLA who represents their views. Instead of electing one MLA for Vancouver-West End, for example, five MLAs would be elected to represent a larger riding representing all of Vancouver west of Main Street. “In our current system, 50 per cent of voters don’t vote for the winner,” Henschel says. “[With STV], the numbers of voters who actually get a representative will increase from 50 per cent to 75, 80, 85, 90 per cent or higher.”

Such a process, Henschel explains, would eliminate “safe seats” for MLAs who get elected again and again, and also increase representation of candidates who garner a high number of votes but don’t win under the current system. “It’s extremely important for communities to develop as a whole, not just from one political party’s point of view,” he says. “[STV] favours consensus and more thoughtful discussion over attack ads and fear campaigns... Voters want a positive campaign; they want to vote for something, not against something.”

David Schreck does not foresee positive change from a referendum that comes out in favour of STV. He is a former North Vancouver-Lonsdale NDP MLA, and is currently the secretary treasurer of the No STV-BC Campaign Society, the official publicly-funded opposition group aimed at educating people to vote against STV.

“Proponents of STV are kind of like snake-oil salesmen,” Schreck says. “They would have you believe that it cures all that ails you, but if you go to the places where STV is used, you’ll find it’s politics as usual... It would be naïve in the extreme to think that by changing how we vote, it would change anything about politics, other than making it worse.”

Schreck is concerned about what he sees as a complicated counting system for votes. “Some of the proponents claim computers could do this, but they don’t use computerized voting or machines in the places where [STV is] used,” he says. “I think the system where whoever gets the most votes wins is easy to understand, and matches what most British Columbians think is a fair vote.”

Schreck’s personal website, StrategicThoughts.com, contains a number of articles criticizing what he says are false claims about the potential success of BC-STV. NoSTV.org features information on “STV realities” and a schedule of community forums.

SFU public-policy professor Kennedy Stewart rebuffs Schreck’s concern that a more crowded ballot under the STV system would confuse voters. “If you can make a shopping list, you can figure out STV,” he says. “I despise politicians who think people are too stupid to figure this out. People in this province are smart — they just don’t have enough control over their governments.”

More information on the Citizens’ Assembly and STV supporters can be found at STV.ca.

Complaint launched against police

THE WESTENDER
March 12, 2009

Use of physical restraint by police officers has fallen under increased public scrutiny this year, following new revelations that have emerged from the second stage of the Braidwood Inquiry investigating the Tasering death of Robert Dziekanski. But use of physical restraint in non-public spaces is the subject of a formal complaint launched against the Vancouver Police Department by Pivot Legal Society lawyer Douglas King. The complaint letter, dated March 2, 2009, includes accounts of three complainants who came to Pivot over the past year seeking help on how to deal with what they allege was misuse of force by police officers while they were detained at the Vancouver Jail.

One of the complainants, Bobbi O’Shea, agreed to be publicly identified in the complaint, and wrote an affidavit detailing her experience in a Vancouver jail cell on March 27, 2008.

The 38-year-old woman, who moved to Vancouver from Toronto in 1990, was using crack cocaine at the time of her arrest. “I have an anxiety disorder, and when I smoke crack, it intensifies it. I did one hit of crack — like, five bucks’ worth... and then I flipped out,” she recalled in an interview with WE. “I ran down the street, tried to jump in a car... and I was looking for the police to come, because I was so freaked out... The police came, and normally in that situation what they would do is they would take me to the hospital, give me Ativan [a medication used to treat anxiety], and calm me down. In this case, they took me to jail.”

When O’Shea was in the jail cell, she asked the male police officer supervising her to look away because she wanted to use the toilet. “I explained to [him], the male cop who kept peeking in, that I have sexual abuse issues, especially with authority,” she said. “I was also sexually abused as a child by five different men... so I told the police, ‘Can you stop looking in at me? I feel really uncomfortable.’”

A conflict ensued, and O’Shea was placed in what is called the ‘Hobble’ restraint device, which binds a prisoner’s ankles to a door. A strap attached to the Hobble device is run under the door and tied to something else outside. “They were pulling... hard on my legs,” O’Shea recalled. “My friend came to pick me up after, and he’s seen the marks on my ankles. He couldn’t believe it.”

O’Shea came to Pivot with the complaint in January of this year as part of a larger effort to get her life back on track. She has been homeless since June 2008, and is currently working to get into supportive housing. She has been clean from drugs for nine weeks. “I’m trying to pull myself out of this,” she says. “I really want to get it out there... so that it never happens to me again, or anybody else.”

O’Shea will attend the March 18 Vancouver Police Board meeting with Pivot lawyer Douglas King, who is scheduled to speak about the complaint.

“I think it’s really tied to what the issue is with the Diziekanski trial,” says King. “It’s all about the use of pain to affect compliance... The issue is, is it appropriate for them to inflict pain? For me, the perfect example of why it’s not okay is because you have situations like what happened to Dziekanski, where he was killed as a result. And that’s the worst possible scenario, where somebody is killed and they didn’t really constitute a threat to anybody.”

King is particularly concerned with pieces of VPD policy 31.03, which includes provisions for restraining people with devices such as the Hobble or BodyCuff, in addition to handcuffs or plastic straps. “To me, it raises a concern about the level of oversight of officer conduct in the jail system,” he says. “They certainly have less accountability than cops on the street, because there’s other people on the street that can witness officer behaviour when they’re out in public.”

Shona McGlashan, executive director of the Vancouver Police Board, says the timeline for processing complaints depend on the urgency of the complaint and the workload of officers. “We haven’t had a complaint about these particular restraints before, not on a policy level,” she says.

Photo by Doug Shanks.

Homeless shelters to remain open

THE WESTENDER
March 12, 2009

Five homeless shelters opened in December 2008 by Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Homeless Emergency Action Team (HEAT) will remain open for at least three more months, following the provincial government’s announcement this week that it has extended funding. The shelters — at 1435 Granville Street; 1442 Howe Street; 201 Central Street; 51-B West Cordova Street; and First United Church, at Hastings and Gore — will continue to offer “low-barrier” shelter (meaning pets and personal possessions are allowed inside) and food service past the original March 31 end date of the three-month trial.

The shelters occupy City-owned land. Their operation was originally funded through a joint arrangement between municipal and provincial governments, and the Streetohome Foundation, a community-based initiative that raised $500,000 in private donations to help fund the HEAT shelters. According to the latest published statistics from the Metro Vancouver Extreme Weather Response program, the five shelters operating through HEAT had a total of 28,916 overnight stays since opening in December, with 770 instances of turn-aways due to lack of space or other reasons. Meanwhile, Vancouver Police reports show a decrease in calls for police service due to street disorder in December 2008 (1,315 calls) and January 2009 (1,216 calls). Both months showed lower numbers from the same time one year earlier (December 2007, 1,576 calls; January 2008, 1,673 calls).

“We’ve got almost a 30 per cent drop in [police] calls, and it’s not just [because of] snow,” says Vision Vancouver councillor and HEAT member Kerry Jang. “It mimics or corroborates what the Downtown Ambassadors were finding.”

Jang says he would like to soon see the creation of a youth-dedicated shelter, given the numbers of street youth using the Granville and Howe Street shelters. But with regard to long-term plans, he would like to focus efforts on finding resources to build more permanent housing. “We’re very cognizant about it being a temporary measure,” he says of the shelter initiative. “We don’t want the shelters to become permanent.”

But finding housing for the thousands of people who are homeless in the city is not as simple as building rooms — a reality Reverend Ric Matthews learned first-hand through his work at First United Church, the first shelter that opened under HEAT. He sees three primary groups that emerge from homeless populations: people who, once provided with affordable housing, are capable of sustaining it; people who need supportive housing; and those who are not ready for supportive housing. Of the third group, Matthews says shelters are not the solution.

Nevertheless, First United, despite its unconventional provision of sleeping arrangements in which guests slept on church pews, was one of the most popular shelters during the three-month trial, accommodating as many as 330 people on one night in late January. “We know that we’ve managed to make a connection — it’s a better place than being just out in the bush or in the streets,” says Rev. Matthews. “It’s not ideal, and we certainly aren’t pretending that it is.”

Rev. Matthews objects to mooted proposals to move shelters outside of the Downtown Eastside. “The reality is, I think, 90 per cent of the people who are struggling on the streets of the Downtown Eastside are struggling with a sense of alienation: alienation from self, family, community,” he says. “To create ways in which these folks... are moved into another anonymous space is not helpful.”

After all, Rev. Matthews points out, the street-entrenched population in the Downtown Eastside is a visible outcome of social, economic, and familial hardship. “What we’ve seen in the Downtown Eastside... it’s the consequence of how we live our mainstream-society lives,” he says. “Folks in the Downtown Eastside are the visible face of the marginalized people in the ordinary, suburban homes and schools and communities.”

As yet, there is no word on whether any HEAT shelters will remain open past the current extension period.

PHOTO: East Hastings Street. By Doug Shanks.

Campaigning for internet freedom

THE WESTENDER
March 5, 2009

A 27-year-old Vancouver man has rallied nearly 3,500 people across the country to write letters to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to call for a stop to what he calls “discriminatory” bandwidth throttling by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Telus and Bell Canada.

Steve Anderson, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in communications from SFU, wrote his thesis on the history of the internet, during which time he started the Campaign for Democratic Media and the Save Our Net Coalition, both Vancouver-based advocacy organizations that work to gather citizen support for what Anderson calls a “neutral internet” — one free of bandwidth throttling by major telecommunications companies. Anderson has been collecting letters and citizen comments to use as evidence for a CRTC hearing on net neutrality, scheduled for July 6 this year in Gatineau, Quebec.

“I like to compare it to the telephone,” says Anderson of the net-neutrality debate. “The value of it is we can reach each other and we don’t have a telephone company saying, ‘No, you can’t access this person.’ The key point for me is, who’s deciding how the internet works and how it’s going to be regulated? Is it the big [telecoms] regulating our internet use, or is it going to be us?”

Craig McTaggart, director of broadband policy for Telus Communications, maintains that big ISPs such as Telus are just working in the best interest of internet users. “The problem with a strict neutrality mandate is that ISPs might be prevented from offering service plans designed to meet these varied needs,” he says. “Imagine if ISPs could offer different flavours of internet access on which your particular, preferred use of the internet were enhanced. Telus thinks that ISPs should not be prevented from trying to meet the needs of different kinds of users in different ways. The important thing is that users should be in control.”

If the telecommunications companies get their way, however, Anderson fears a two-tiered internet system will take the place of what we have now, creating an undemocratic playing field. “If you have a lot of money, you can afford a fast lane to the internet,” he predicts, “and if you don’t have a lot of money, then you’re stuck on a slow lane that’s very unreliable.”

Anderson says slow, unreliable connections will play out most tangibly when people use communications services such as Skype, which allows users in different countries to talk to each other in real time, much like a long-distance phone call but without the associated costs.

Still, McTaggart contends the open internet that Anderson and his colleagues are rallying to save never existed in the first place. “It has never actually been the case that all internet content and applications were ‘equal,’ or if it was, it was at a time when the public wasn’t allowed to use the internet,” he says. “Just as in the offline world, those with the means to invest more in online content and applications can make them perform better than others.”

Anderson continues to collect citizen feedback on the net-neutrality debate in advance of the CRTC hearing through the Save Our Net Coalition website (SaveOurNet.ca). In doing so, he hopes to give people a platform to articulate their vision for the future of internet use in Canada. “The value of the internet is us, connecting to each other. Ultimately, it should be us who decide how that medium is constructed,” he says. “No one would use the internet if it was just Telus providing us with access to nothing. It’s us providing access to each other.”

Are city's poor being exploited by 'poverty pimps?'

THE WESTENDER
March 5, 2009

Canada’s poorest neighbourhood was the focus of extensive mainstream-media coverage last month as people scrambled to respond to the idea of appointing a Downtown Eastside czar to help improve the area, as suggested by B.C. housing minister Rich Coleman and Vancouver Police chief Jim Chu. Phrases including “poverty industry,” “poverty pimp,” and “povertarians” were bandied about to describe organizations which critics say make money off the backs of the poor.

Thia Walter, the 66-year-old founder of peer support group Life Is Not Enough Society (L.I.N.E.S.) and the mother of a heroin user, credits herself with coining the term “poverty pimp” when she started working in the Downtown Eastside 20 years ago. “A lot of people are making a lot of money off of the misery of the poor, and very little of it is actually in any way improving the quality of life for those that are in poverty,” she says. “The poverty pimp is someone who finds some form of profit or payback from using the poor.”

Walter says it is “very difficult to name names in this instance,” and is reluctant to specifically call out those she classifies as poverty pimps in the Downtown Eastside. She does praise First United Church, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), and Pivot Legal Society for their work in providing shelter, food, drug education, and legal advocacy to Downtown Eastside residents. But some services, she says, are unnecessary. “They merely maintain the day-to-day survival [of residents] instead of providing any kind of an increase [in their quality of life]. And none of them will ever speak up in terms of improving the welfare rates or incentives for working... That’s what makes me angry, and that’s when I classify people as poverty pimps.”

Pastor Gloria Kieler has been working as an activist, teacher, and pastor in the neighbourhood for 25 years. In contrast to Walter, who supports harm-reduction approaches such as Insite for dealing with drug addiction, Kieler is an outspoken critic of such initiatives, and has lobbied for more detox and recovery facilities for decades. “We need hundreds of beds for both detox and recovery,” she says. “If a fraction of the money spent on [the 2010 Olympics] was spent on treatment, this situation would have been vastly changed down here long ago, and many lives would have been saved.”

Though Kieler does not use terms like “poverty pimp” or “poverty industry” herself, she says others use them to express frustration with resources invested in the Downtown Eastside that seem to yield few results. “Many working down here seem to be blind to the fact that most addicts want to get better and back to a healthy life, and most can’t do it while living down here,” she says.

Nevertheless, hundreds of Downtown Eastside residents remain in the neighbourhood due to the lack of means to live elsewhere. Wendy Pedersen of the Carnegie Community Action Project works to build pride among those who stay. “If people really want to get at the root of the problem, they have to stop the [government] cuts and reverse the cuts... and build a functional social safety net and functional programs, so that people don’t even need to fall into the safety net,” she says. “I think a lot of the services that people are providing [are] excellent... A lot of them come from low-income people organizing themselves to provide those services because there’s a void, and that void is about systemic cuts that really shook up this neighbourhood and everywhere across the province in 2001, when the province cut their core social programs.”

Al Arsenault, a documentary maker and former Downtown Eastside beat cop, is tired of seeing what he calls band-aid solutions, such as harm-reduction approaches to drug addiction. “There must be some political will to change the harm-reduction status quo that has neglected detox and treatment,” he says. As for the possible existence of a poverty industry in the Downtown Eastside, Arsenault says it’s made up of organizations that fail to help people recover from their addictions. “Some are profit driven, some don’t see the big picture and merely want to help. Both are, wittingly or unwittingly, in the poverty industry, as they fail to help the addict climb out of the pit of addiction.”

John Richardson, executive director and co-founder of the Pivot Legal Society, counters that the biggest players in the so-called poverty industry of the Downtown Eastside are the police officers who patrol its streets, not social and health service providers in the area. “Many of the crimes that people are charged with in the Downtown Eastside are poverty crimes: vending on a sidewalk, possession of an illicit narcotic,” he says. “If we’re going to be looking at the term ‘poverty industry,’ I think the growth of policing needs to be examined. What is needed is a lot of healing, and the kind of punitive model that the police operate from doesn’t address that.”

Richardson says recent media coverage of the Downtown Eastside’s many difficulties is a push to shape public opinion on social policy. “It’s such an obvious agenda driving it, which is to clean up the Downtown Eastside before the Olympics,” he says.

Real help, Richardson says, comes from individuals who are ready to help themselves. “I think people in the Downtown Eastside are used to being treated harshly and negatively... Many of them have huge self-image problems already, and have a lot of self-esteem problems, and it’s hard to lift themselves out of that,” he says. “Ultimately, people can only help themselves, and it’s important to give them the confidence and self-respect to take those steps themselves... It’s not a healthy community in many ways, but it gets you nowhere to blame the people.”

PHOTO: Critics charge that widespread homelessness and drug addiction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside — the poorest neighbourhood in Canada — could be more effectively addressed if people’s livelihoods weren’t dependent on those problems continuing to exist. By Doug Shanks.

A woman's place is in the City

THE WESTENDER
March 5, 2009

Seventy-five per cent of the City of Vancouver’s workforce is male — a statistic COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth was shocked to discover. “I thought that the City was a place where women could get a break and work in all kinds of areas,” she says. “You get a classic division at the City: You have a higher number of women in secretarial divisions, and you have a high number of men in the outside workers or in the police force. Those are the jobs that... tend to be higher paid, [and] there tends to be a bias towards hiring men. There’s both the unconscious and then the conscious [in hiring processes] that is perhaps not articulated.”

As for elected positions in municipal government, four of 10 current city councillors are female, and there has never been a female mayor in Vancouver’s history. “You can’t say we’re progressing at all,” says Woodsworth. “Things are going to change if we have a more educated population.”

The City of Vancouver will recognize International Women’s Day (March 8) starting Monday, March 9, with a public event in the council chamber lobby called “Increasing Women’s Civic Involvement: Best Practices and Actions.” It runs from 3:30-6:00 p.m., and will mark the official launch of the City of Vancouver’s Women’s Advisory Committee, which Woodsworth and former COPE councillor Anne Roberts started in 2005 during the last months of former mayor Larry Campbell’s council term. “If you don’t look at your programs with a social lens, as well as a sustainability lens — the triple bottom line is social, economic, and sustainability — then you can’t build a city that’s a Vancouver for everyone,” Woodsworth says.

Placing a gender lens on City policy work is essential for moving toward more equality in municipal government, says Woodsworth, adding that the odds of gaining the party support and financial backing necessary for any successful political campaign tend to stack against women. “Women, if they’re working full-time... [earn] 70 cents to the dollar that men earn. You need to have money to run... and there’s only one party [the NDP] that has an affirmative-action plan at the provincial and federal level which actually encourages women to run, provides them with some financial help to run.”

Meanwhile, the skills necessary to navigate the social bonfire of public office tend to favour men, says Woodsworth. “You need to be able to put up with the kind of aggressiveness, the competitiveness, and the... personal sparring,” she says. “[Men have] played football, they’ve played ice hockey, they’ve grown up encouraged to participate in very competitive sports, whereas women — in the past, traditionally, we’ve been encouraged to work in more cooperative ways, to be the caregivers.”

The well-respected Canadian Women Voters Congress will address issues of gender equality in government through the 10th annual installment of its Women’s Campaign School, a three-day training course that runs March 27-29. Described as a “pan-partisan” initiative, the Campaign School aims to help women engage successfully in all levels of politics. Previous participants of the school include NPA councillor Suzanne Anton, NDP MLA Jenn McGinn, and Vision Vancouver park board commissioners Sarah Blyth and Constance Barnes. More information on the course can be found at WomensCampaignSchool.org.

PHOTO: City councillor Ellen Woodsworth in her office, which features a poster of Strathcona activist Mary Lee Chan. By Doug Shanks.

Multi-use arts space closed by City

THE WESTENDER
February 26, 2009

Independent art and music venues in Vancouver are the Siberian tigers of the city’s entertainment scene: they flourish in the wild for some time, but soon succumb to a ruthless Darwinism in which only a few survive. The Sweatshop is the latest causality in a quickly diminishing stock of indie music spaces in the city, and the reasons for its February 15 closure continue to elude owner Malice Liveit, who owned, operated, and promoted events at the venue for almost three years.

“It is a major shame that a city with such an amazing art and music community [has] so many spaces being closed or shut down,” Liveit says. “In the last year alone, we had over 150 shows without one violent or disruptive incident, and we get shut down while so many other venues with a history of violence continue on.”

The Sweatshop, located at East Hastings and Victoria, functioned as an indoor skateboard park, a retail skate shop, an art gallery, and a music venue. Indie-rock pioneer Calvin Johnson (founder of bands such as Beat Happening and Dub Narcotic Sound System) was scheduled to perform there at the end of May, but those and other events have been derailed as a result of this month’s closing.

“Over the past year, City staff would walk through [the venue] and give us a list of improvements or items to be done. We would get those done,” says Liveit. “This time around, it was more a list of complaints and very few reasons as to why or what were the issues. They just wanted to shut it down, no matter what we did to work with them.”

Liveit is working to arrange a meeting with Chief License Inspector Barb Windsor in order to gain clarity on the situation. WE’s calls to Windsor were not returned by press time.

Vancouver Park Board commissioner Sarah Blyth can see potential difficulties in getting proper zoning for a mixed-use facility like the Sweatshop. Blyth is a founding member of the Vancouver Skateboard Coalition, and operated an indoor skate park in the early 1990s that was eventually shut down by the City. “It’s hard to get a place zoned properly for recreational use,” she says. “You can’t just go into a warehouse and turn it into a skate park, because it’s not zoned for that properly.”

Blyth has seen a relaxation on citywide skateboarding bans through the years, but she says more work is needed to provide sufficient skateboarding venues. “We have actually expanded our skateboard parks from, like, one to six in the past 10 years, so that’s quite bit. But we still need an indoor facility for young people,” she says. “There [is] a lack of it, even more so now that the Sweatshop is not around.”

“The Sweatshop was a true mash-up,” says Liveit. “It was a space that provided a platform for... everything from art openings in the art gallery to noise shows and skate competitions. We were part of the community.” 

Stranded apartment tenants reach settlement

THE WESTENDER
February 26, 2009

A long-awaited decision from the Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) arrived into the hands of Downtown Eastside Residents Association (DERA) advocates February 12. Twenty-eight former tenants of 2131 Pandora Street in East Vancouver were awarded a total of about $170,000 for loss of belongings and aggravated damages, as the result of having less than an hour to gather what they could and evacuate their apartments as the building’s roof collapsed during a rainstorm in October 2007.

Most of the tenants were relocated to hotels paid for by an emergency social services team, a joint project of the province and City of Vancouver. BC Housing later relocated those who were eligible for supportive housing, but other low-income tenants slipped through the cracks. One couple, for lack of anywhere else to go, lived in their car for six months. The incident marked another black spot on brothers Pal and Gurdyal Sahota’s already notorious history of mismanaging the eastside buildings they own; the four-day hearing on the Pandora case, which took place at the Burnaby Residential Tenancy Office in August and September, solidified their public perception as two of the city’s most notorious landlords.

“DERA was good enough to get us a month’s rent back and a damage deposit back,” recalls 66-year-old Frank Sowers, who was sharing a two-bedroom suite on the building’s third floor when the roof collapsed. “It was a really bad disaster. Everything was covered with mould. Anything you tried to retrieve out of there — there was mould on everything... The carpets — if you’ve ever smelled water-logged carpets, you know what it’s like.”

Sowers shared the suite with a roommate who, like himself, has a physical disability that made tasks such as bailing water out of the suite difficult. They had already been dealing with problems caused by the leaky roof a year before it collapsed. The RTB decision mentions that people started warning the Sahotas about the problematic roof as early as 1994. “We went through a lot of stress,” Sowers says. “You’re yelling at each other and under pressure all the time. I went to the doctor about my lungs [because of] the black mould.”

BC Housing was eventually able to help relocate Sowers and his roommate in late December 2007, but the two-month gap between being forced out of the Pandora building and finding stable housing was extremely stressful.

“Anna Hunter deserves a lot of credit,” says Sowers, referring to a DERA legal advocate who represented the Pandora tenants at the RTB hearing. “If anything, [the Pandora case] puts it out there as a public record that [the Sahotas] are repeatedly abusing the Residential Tenancy Act,” Hunter says. “I hope it puts pressure not just on the Sahotas to clean up their act, but also on the City and on welfare and on other bodies who come in contact with them, to force them to start complying with at least the minimum requirements in the legislation.” (The RTB decision shows that the manager of the Pandora building had previously been fined by the City of Vancouver for breaching the Standards of Maintenance bylaw.)

Vancouver-Hastings MLA Shane Simpson is now working to ensure that former Pandora tenants will be able to keep the money they’ll be receiving from the RTB decision. “A number of these people were on assistance, and we’re looking now at clarifications to ensure that people won’t have that money clawed back, because they clearly will be able to use it in the ongoing process of restoring and rebuilding their lives,” says Simpson. “In regard to the building, it continues to be vacant... I’ll be looking to the City to take action to make sure the building is secure, and if Mr. Sahota isn’t going to deal with it in a timely fashion, then the building should probably be demolished at Mr. Sahota’s cost.”

As for stronger enforcement of the City’s Standards of Maintenance bylaw, Simpson contends it’s a matter of political will. “I’m very hopeful that... the City will respond differently than the previous council did in terms of obliging property owners to keep their buildings in good repair,” he says. Councillor Tim Stevenson’s December 2008 motion to ask City staff to more strongly enforce the bylaw is something Simpson hopes will help prevent future cases like the Pandora. “If you have people who are on marginal income, the choices are much more limited than somebody who has a greater income,” he says. “For those folks, they have particular anxiety about complaining, because they’re worried that they don’t have other choices. They feel hamstrung... We need to make sure that those folks, who are the most vulnerable in a very challenging housing market, have protection.”

PHOTO: Downtown Eastside Residents Association legal advocate Anna Hunter at the 2131 Pandora site. By Doug Shanks.

The right to a civilised drink

THE WESTENDER
February 26, 2009

Vancouver’s reputation as “No-Fun City” looked like it might finally change at the start of what turned out to be a marathon city council meeting last Thursday (February 19), when City staff brought forward a long-awaited proposal to extend liquor-service hours in licensed restaurants to 1 a.m. But after going through an 18-person speaker list, council did not vote on the recommendation, instead calling for another briefing with City staff. Until then, many of Vancouver’s licensed restaurants will continue to turn out its patrons at midnight, and those looking for a night on the town away from the phalanxes of thorn-motif tattoos on the Granville club strip will stay frustrated.

“Right now, the closing times of midnight don’t give the opportunity for people who are in their late twenties and thirties to go out and enjoy themselves,” said David Duprey, owner of Main Street’s Grace Gallery and Narrows restaurant, who spoke at the council meeting in favour of extending liquor-service hours. “Nobody over the age of 25 wants to go down to Granville Street... We need people to be able to enjoy themselves, to socialize, to meet other people, to feel comfortable... so we can be the city we need to be. Otherwise, a lot of those people are going to start looking for somewhere else to go.”

Duprey, 40, counts himself among many people who left Vancouver in their early twenties in search of a more vibrant city scene elsewhere. Kalin Harvey, who also spoke at the meeting, sees similar patterns of migration among his twenty- and thirty-something friends. “So many people have moved away,” he says. “Why is this city making it so hard to have that kind of [creative] excellence develop within Vancouver?”

Harvey, frustrated by Vancouver’s no-fun reputation, joined forces last spring with Greg McMullen to start an informal community group called Pro Fun City. The group advocates for more liberal municipal-policy positions on liquor licensing and entertainment. By the end of the first week of establishing a Pro Fun Vancouver group on Facebook, more than 1,000 people had joined. “We knew we’d touched a nerve,” recalls McMullen. “That’s when we decided to get actively involved in the [city] licensing reviews that have been happening over the past year.”

McMullen, now based in Copenhagen, Denmark, on exchange from law school at UBC, says Copenhagen’s similarity to Vancouver — both are dense cities with similar climates and top marks for livability — disappears when it comes to nightlife. “The streets are full of people talking, laughing, and drinking — alcohol is allowed almost everywhere — at all hours of the night,” he says. “Somehow, the people living in the apartments and condos above don’t complain. They live with it, because they know the nightlife makes their lives richer. If they want peace and quiet, they move out of the densely populated core.”

And a city with a vibrant entertainment culture, says McMullen, is crucial to attracting and maintaining its creative class. “A fun city is an innovative, exciting, and prosperous city. A boring city loses its creatives to more fun cities, and loses the economic benefits they bring,” he says. “People who drive [creative] industries... they need a variety of local restaurants and bars, live music and galleries, or they’ll move to other cities to get them.”

Still, resistance to the newly proposed liquor-service hours was expressed at the council meeting by addictions researchers and concerned citizens. Tim Stockwell, director of the Centre for Addictions Research of BC, did not speak at the meeting, but he gave a public lecture at SFU’s downtown campus Monday (February 23) on worldwide patterns of alcohol-related harm around late-night drinking. “That rhetoric of needing to be modern, sophisticated, fun, European, is run all the time,” he said in an interview with WE. “Usually what happens when hours are extended, instead of finding sophisticated... people who have been drinking a few Chardonnays all night, you find incredibly drunk young people throwing up and fighting each other and urinating in public. It’s not very sophisticated or what the Europeans would like either.”

Stockwell says we’re “a long way” from extremes in prohibition or overly liberal liquor licensing. To him, the most important issue in licensing policy is balancing the rights of consumers, residents, and business owners.

At the council meeting, 12 people spoke in favour of the staff proposal to extend liquor service hours at restaurants until 1 a.m., while six people spoke in opposition.

PHOTO: Kalin Harvey (far right) and friends from Pro Fun City. By Doug Shanks.