The November rain seems less bearable on Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

On Pender Street, a group of homeless people huddle with their overflowing shopping carts under store canopies. The empty faces on the benches in Pigeon Park stare blankly as rain pours down their make-shift plastic coats. Behind them, clusters of tall, luxury condos glow with the warmth of couch-side lamps and cable TV.

Welcome to Vancouver: home to Canada’s richest and poorest citizens. With the 2010 winter Olympics quickly approaching, many predict that gap is about to get even wider.

A main concern is the rapid decrease in low-income housing and increase in condo construction. Condos continue to sprout up on the graves of concert venues, grocery stores and downtown houses while the price of rent skyrockets into a bracket attainable only by middle-to-high income earners.

These are the conditions that led to Anti-Poverty Committee‘s (APC) occupation of the North Star Hotel last month. The group organized a squat in the abandoned hotel under the slogan “buy it or guard it” in an attempt to demand the city create more low-income housing.

Letter-writing campaigns and other passive attempts at changing this trend weren’t working, they decided. Civil disobedience was in order.

According to a report recently released by the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit organization devoted to providing legal assistance to Vancouver’s poor, between June 2003 and June 2005, Vancouver’s downtown core alone lost 514 low-income units. That number is on the rise as east side hotels are knocked down one by one.

“It’s a general consensus in this group that housing is the biggest problem in this city,” said Thomas Malenfant, one of the APC members who holed himself up on the top floor of the North Star. “They kept all the poor here [in the downtown eastside] all these years and all of a sudden these yuppies want their condos. It’s disgusting.”

Malenfant echoes the widespread fear that the homeless will be displaced from the downtown eastside in 2010 in order to present an artificially clean and shiny image of Vancouver to the world’s watching eye. That, coupled with the funneling of funds from creating homes to promoting the games, sparked the APC’s second mantra: Homes Not Games.

The phrase was painted on a giant banner and hung out the window during the North Star squat. The image appeared on the cover of newspapers across the city the next day. The media paid attention. Hundreds of Vancouverites turned up to voice support. The stunt was a success.

“We could hear the crowd half a block away from within the barricades. That brought me up on a high, to know there were people giving a shit,” Malenfant remembered.

A week later, the APC made their second move. On October 31, they plastered the city with posters asking the public to meet at Pigeon Park and bus to city hall where they would hold a protest. But behind the scenes, the group released a press release to the media: there would be a second occupation. This time, they took over a building on Cambie Street that was slated to be demolished by the city. Their demand was the city turn the building into women’s emergency housing instead of a pile of rubble.

The occupation got just as much media attention. Malenfant wasn’t a squatter in the building this time, but was still arrested for attempting to get supplies to his fellow activists barricaded inside.

“The first time around, the police were diplomatic,” he said. “But they escalate tactics as we escalate tactics.”

He admitted the consequences of civil disobedience can be frightening, but not deterring.

“I’m a human being,” he said. “I have fear, but there comes a time when we have to suck up what the system gives you. People are going to jail. People are going to get their heads kicked in by cops. We’re fighting an uphill war.”

Although an Inner-City Inclusive Commitment Statement was signed by all levels of government in an attempt to ensure the games don’t adversely affect the homeless, no steps have been taken so far.

Earlier this month, after a meeting of the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC), Jean Swanson, a representative of the Carnegie Action project, told the Vancouver Sun she isn’t sure her group will participate in the so-called planning of sustainability. “The hotels are falling left, right and centre,” she said. “The Olympic commitments are already broken. It’s like Vancouver got these games under false pretenses.”

Malenfant said this is just the beginning. The group plans to increase their actions and make themselves heard until the poor are made a priority. “There comes a point where talking is just talking. This is a war,” he said, adding with a wry grin, “We’re not running out of buildings before 2010.”