What becomes apparent about homelessness in working in a Vancouver shelter is that housing in this city is fucking hard to find. Many of the people I work for do part time work / have rent available / have been looking for housing, but to no avail.
Those close to me will have heard at length about my woes in finding a place this month, however this has been mostly bad luck combined with a certain level of pickiness. Still the days of finding a reasonably priced place quick are long gone. And reasonably priced in this case is $400-$500 for shared accoms. Welfare = $325 for rent, $185 = everything else. People on income assistance of any kind can quickly end up on the streets.
The very physical protests during the unvailing of the pompous 'Olympic Clock' recieved a modicum of coverage devoted to their existence: homelessness in Vancouver. Unless of course you're CTV. However, none of the stories I've read in any paper have focused on the fact that though the city is building 250 low-income units later on in False Creek, they've allowed hundreds more to be closed down.
The reason? Most of the old low-income hotels in Downtown Vancouver are being sold off since their value has doubled in the last 3 years. Others are being converted into tourist hostels.
Pivot Legal Society and COPE (a municipal political party) have been arguing since the Olympic Bid was put together that the city of Vancouver should be regulating the speed at which these buildings are being turned over and ensuring that the low-income housing market doesn't plummet (any further). A motion has been before council since October to stop low-income housing turn-overs and was tabled AGAIN last night by the NPA (another municipal political party).
In the ongoing chronicle of government deception, an author from the local blog BeyondRobson saw a wonderful tactic by NPA councilors called 'stalling'. This is where instead of cutting to the chase and having an emotional debate of an important issue like low-income housing, councilors
debated the "efficacy of an information insert in the Vancouver Courier versus a Mustel telephone survey" or enquired about "what percentage of non-emergency calls are related to off-leash dogs?" This is an age old tactic cause if you call someone on the stall, they can always reply in the same fashion as NPA councilor Suzanne "hack" Anton did: "That's not correct. The [council] agenda has a formula that it follows and it's really unfortunate we didn't get to that."
Fucking bullshit. For the record, my belief is that Vancouver councilors are glad to get rid of the low income housing in the hopes that most addicts will simply move out to suburbs like Surrey. What will actually happen is a skyrocketting of homelessness and crime. See you all in 2011.
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