By Kimball Cariou, Vancouver
Vancouver's housing nightmare was back in the news during October. Just a few days after police arrested six people for the "crime" of occupying an empty building, the United Nations envoy on homelessness urged the city to use the 2010 Olympics to build more affordable housing.
The Anti-Poverty Committee, which has taken a series of militant actions to focus attention on the crisis, planned to use an Oct. 14 rally to march to a new building occupation in the Downtown Eastside. But around 3 am that morning, police arrested the occupants shortly after they began their takeover. APC activists reported that many abandoned buildings in the area had been guarded by police and private security forces that night. The APC rally turned into a demonstration at the police station to demand the release of the six squatters.
On a short trip to Vancouver later that week, Miloon Kothari, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, heard the stories of the homeless at a public forum and then toured the Downtown Eastside.
"As for the Olympics, I see these large projects as a tremendous opportunity to improve housing conditions and, if even a small percentage of the billions of dollars in Vancouver real estate was spent on affordable housing, some urgent problems could be solved," Kothari told The Province newspaper in an interview.
Last year, the United Nations declared that homelessness in Canada "is a national emergency." Kothari also went to Montreal, Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto during his tour.
"What I have seen and heard so far in Vancouver has convinced me that this dire state of homelessness in the face of so much wealth indicates that this is still a serious issue that needs continued monitoring by the UN," he said.
Kothari visited a tent city at 950 Main St., where a group called Streams for Justice has set up tents and cooking facilities for homeless people seeking shelter from the rain.
After initially threatening to evict the tent city residents on Oct. 16, police were restrained by legal action. David Eby, a lawyer for the Pivot Legal Society, is arguing in B.C. Supreme Court that the Charter rights of homeless people are violated by laws against sleeping in public places.
Housing advocates estimate that the number of homeless people in Vancouver could surpass 3,500 by 2010, when the Winter Olympics comes to town. The province and the Olympics organizing committee have pledged that 3,200 housing units will be built by that time, but there is little sign of action on this promise. There are at least a dozen city-owned sites slated for social housing where nothing is being built.
Meanwhile, the provincial government ended its latest fiscal year with a $4.1 billion surplus. Premier Gordon Campbell recently announced $41 million for housing, but even this drop in the bucket will be directed only for temporary shelters and other half-measures, rather than new social housing.