Gentrification in Metro Vancouver

Corrigan is saying he lived in a Metrotown apartment in the 70s and that the building was old then. How does he define old? Most of those buildings were built in the 60s IIRC.

http://www.thetyee.ca/News/2016/08/29/Burnaby-Boom-Inev-Redev/

Also, someone is doing damage by pretending to represent the NDP in the comments section.

Since the 1980s, our governments, along with the developer and real estate sectors, have colluded in the rise in Metro Vancouver prices to levels out of the reach of most of its residents. 

In June 1980, I returned to Vancouver. Not having a job at the time, I looked for shared accomodation. One of the people who interviewed me about sharing his apartment had recently interviewed Jack Poole, the city's largest developer at the time, for research on a play about the Vancouver housing crisis at the time. Although he picked someone else as a roommate, he told me that Poole said the developers' goal was to create an executive city, where only the wealthiest could afford to live. Workers would have to commute from the suburbs. Today that goal has been accomplished, thanks, in part to assistance from government. 

In two articles in the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd describes how this has come about. Here are excerpts from the first article.

Quote:

Canada’s public guardians have failed to protect Metro Vancouver residents from forms of rule-bending and law-breaking that have been significant contributors to city housing becoming gravely unaffordable.

Two of the government departments that have let down city dwellers, basically by not doing their jobs, are Immigration Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency. Although other government departments have also sat on their hands while Metro Vancouver prices have skyrocketed, I’ll focus here on the ways Canada’s immigration and taxation departments have not fulfilled their mandates. And doubts remain they’ll do so in the future. ...

This is not just my contention. It’s the view of many scholars, including Andy Yan, David Ley, Josh Gordon, Elizabeth Murphy and Tom Davidoff; immigration lawyers such as Samuel Hyman and Richard Kurland; housing activists like Justin Fung and Evelina Xia and some opposition politicians and some journalists. These observers have recognized, one way or another, that those responsible for immigration and taxation have been encouraging their staff to look the other way while subterfuge has contributed to housing prices becoming ridiculous.

Such failures happen when politicians insist too strongly on de-regulation and “cutting red tape” and when they are more committed to making it easier for outside wealth to enter the city’s housing market than they are to protecting constituents. For the past three decades, politicians in Ottawa and Victoria have been devoted to economic globalization, relentlessly wooing foreign investment, particularly from Asia. And it’s worked, to the detriment of those hoping to own a home in Vancouver. National Bank of Canada economists estimate almost $13 billion was spent by Chinese investors on Metro Vancouver real estate in 2015 alone. That represents roughly a third of all home sales by volume. It helped cause price surges.

The critics, in various ways, charge that Canada’s immigration and tax officials have failed to catch many abusers of their systems because of underfunding, understaffing and, sometimes, simply fear. How did these two departments let down the residents of Metro? ...

The main dereliction of duty by Immigration Canada has been its refusal, until it was too late, to properly assess the Business Immigrant Program (BIP). Started in the mid-1980s, the BIP has arguably been the most crucial factor driving up Metro housing prices. UBC geographer David Ley estimates it has brought more than 400,000 well-off immigrants to Metro. The first problem with the BIP, say Ley and others, is that it had extremely low standards. It began by requiring an immigrant entrepreneur to invest only $150,000 in a business and hire one Canadian. The U.S., at the same time, was demanding business immigrants invest at least four times more money and hire at least 10 Americans. ... Justin Fung, with HALT (Housing Action for Local Taxpayers), concurs: “We’re practically giving away passports for free, and little benefit.”

In the meantime, Immigration Canada officials have not properly monitored the BIP. Their lax approach went on for decades as wealthy trans-nationals avoided being tested for compliance with even the BIP’s low standards. It turned out BIP migrants as a group paid the lowest levels of taxes in Canada. A forensic auditor for the World Bank ended up called Canada’s BIP “a massive sham. ... [Although the Conservatives ended BIP in 2014,] the federal Liberals are considering reviving a pilot program similar to the BIP. ...

It gets worse. While Canadian passports were being sold at bargain-basement prices, the Canada Revenue Agency has been ignoring another red flag — that many BIP newcomers and other owners of Metro mansions have been reporting strangely low incomes. ... Officials have not wanted to admit to the widespread phenomenon of “astronaut” fathers who leave wives and student children in expensive homes in Metro to return to their homelands to do business — without declaring their offshore assets to Canadian tax officials. ...

And even when a national foreign-assets disclosure tax law was finally brought into effect, it has often gone unenforced. ... In the midst of Vancouver’s escalating housing crisis, in 2014, former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper chopped 262 experienced tax auditors.

One of the first people to publicly expose ongoing tax avoidance by the trans-national elite was former Richmond Mayor Greg Halsey-Brandt. In 2015 Halsey-Brandt directed Postmedia to data showing residents of one of Richmond’s most expensive neighbourhoods, where most of the population is foreign-born, were reporting poverty-level incomes — and thus putting themselves in position to pay virtually no taxes. Another revelation came in the fall of 2015 when statistician Jens von Bergmann and UBC geographer Dan Hiebert independently unveiled census statistics showing high portions of mansion owners in ritzy Vancouver neighbourhoods were declaring almost no income. The figures from von Bergmann and Hiebert showed several neighbourhoods, in which houses were selling in the $5-million to $7-million range, that were generally populated by immigrants, particularly ethnic Chinese. ...

CRA officials had admitted, in internal documents, they were not willing to devote auditors to catching these “highly sophisticated” tax-avoiding schemes by Metro Vancouver mansion owners and others. ‘They were scared,” the source said, “of being labelled racist.’”

In addition, a common real-estate scam has gone largely undetected as a direct result of the failure of Canada’s tax and immigration departments to share their information. Because of the absence of cooperation, many Metro house owners have been avoiding paying capital gains taxes. They have been falsely claiming they are residents of Canada for tax and immigration purposes when they are actually mostly living outside the country and not disclosing their foreign income.

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-canadas-public-g...

ETA: The provincial government and its close ally, the real estate industry, have been denying there is a foreign investment problem contributing to making Vancouver one of the most expensive cities to live in the world for more than a decade. 

Quote:

The B.C. Liberals’ decision, which took effect Aug. 2, to cool Metro’s market by levying a 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers amounted to a startling about-face.

It was announced just one year after B.C. Housing Minister Rich Coleman claimed his government “does not have any policy” on foreign buyers. Coleman had argued Metro prices “were pretty reasonable compared to other cities like London, Singapore, Tokyo.”

The tax was also introduced well after Cameron Muir, chief economist for the B.C. Real Estate Association, routinely dismissed polls showing Metro residents believing there was too much foreign ownership.

“The mythology,” Muir said in 2014, “is that there are hordes of investors coming in Vancouver and driving up prices.” ...

In the face of resistance from the development industry, which in recent years has donated $12 million to the B.C. Liberals and frequently dismissed critics as “xenophobic,” how did Metro get to a tax on foreign buyers?

UBC geographer David Ley,  ... who has long tracked house prices in Metro and other “gateway” cities, feels the B.C. government finally felt political pressure to react to the “collateral damage” it has been instrumental in creating by relentlessly wooing Asian-Pacific investors after Vancouver’s Expo 86 world’s fair.  ...

The Angus Reid Institute found nine of 10 city dwellers applaud it. After announcing the tax, Premier Christy Clark’s dismal approval rating jumped seven percentage points, to 34 per cent. Vancouver’s tax on foreign buyers is also catching on in Greater Toronto, where Angus Reid found three of four in that city of six million want it. ...

Why did B.C. finally feel the pressure to follow Hong Kong and Singapore, which have long had regulations to soften the deluge of East Asian capital?

The short answer is that runaway house prices have caused devastation and voter outrage.

Here is Ley’s partial list of the social costs:

“Out-migration of young, difficulty in retaining key employees, overcrowding, homelessness and couch surfing, heavy debt loads, long commutes and traffic congestion, the necessary rise of illegal suites in detached homes, and young adults remaining in the family home into their late twenties. Family reproduction is also affected as the necessity of two wage earners in a family delays or prohibits child-raising.”

At a recent SFU symposium, Mapping the Hedge City: Vancouver and Global Capital, Ley explained it was basically a handful of investigative journalists in Metro who forced the B.C. government, and Ottawa, to finally act. ...

One of the strongest protest movements that has arisen is HALT (Housing Action for Local Taxpayers), which includes many Chinese-Canadians and is led by Justin Fung, whose parents came from East Asia. Fung, along with activist Fenella Sung, attack the self-serving “race-baiting” of real estate developers and politicians who try to silence critics by claiming it’s xenophobic to link housing prices to foreign money. “The vast majority of Canadians who want a fair shot at an affordable roof over their heads simply don’t have a racist bone in their bodies,” Fung said. “It’s never been about the Chinese people as a race, but the fact that money is flowing out of China and finding its way into Vancouver real estate.” ...

And an early factor behind the rising flood of money into Metro has been the way the B.C. government sold off the Expo 86 lands. Bypassing an offer from local buyers, Ley said Social Credit politicians sold the prime waterfront property to Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing. It was a signal for more Asian speculators to follow. Prices would take off dramatically with the arrival of Hong Kong residents fearful of China’s gaining sovereignty over their region in 1997. Left-wing community organizers responded by protesting the razing of houses and trees and increased prices caused by the influx of money from people from Hong Kong (and Taiwan), many of whom continued to work in Asia.

The rapid sell-off of Metro real estate in the past three decades has been exacerbated, Ley says, by scores of taxpayer-funded trade missions that federal and provincial politicians have proudly led to Asia

Their marketing efforts came to a head last fall, when Premier Clark included three real estate firms in what turned out to be a controversial mission to China, with Vancouver NDP MLA and housing critic David Eby describing the move as “mind-boggling.” ...

During all this time, however, the most crucial factor driving up Metro housing prices has arguably been Ottawa’s Business Immigration Program (BIP), which was initiated in the mid-1980s.

Ley estimates the BIP has brought more than 400,000 well-off immigrants to Metro. 

BIP has helped make Metro one of the most sought-after markets in the world for the $52 billion Cdn each year that Chinese buyers now spend on overseas property, Ley said. ...

National Bank of Canada economists estimate “almost $13 billion Cdn was spent by Chinese investors in Vancouver in 2015 alone. This represents roughly one-third of all home sales volume in that year.”

http://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-is-real-estate-f...

Quote:

“The new tax is nothing but the ruling party of British Columbia soliciting votes for the election held next spring. It won’t cool down the enthusiasm of foreign buyers.” — Ou Lyu, in Global Times Chinese newspaper, July 2016 ...

You only need to know two things about Metro Vancouver housing: China’s shadow still looms large, and Premier Christy Clark’s new foreign buyers property tax would take 29.8 years to cut prices to where they were just one year ago.

While the BC Liberal Party surprised all by moving to completely reverse its position and impose a 15-per-cent tax on foreign buyers purchasing Metro Vancouver residential property, little has changed.

First, comparing July sales to August — when the tax started — shows that with a tiny 0.1 per cent drop in the benchmark price for detached houses last month, it would take an unbelievable 29.8 years just to get back to the prices of 12 months ago! ...

That’s because prices jumped 35.8 per cent in the previous year — going to an outrageously expensive $1.58 million. While sales have slowed down since the tax, prices remain high. ...

And the volume of houses changing hands this August after the BC Liberal intervention was still only 3.5 per cent below the 10-year average for that month, though sales were down 26 per cent from August 2015. The situation is so bad, even a major banker is deeply troubled. “This city, this province is experiencing a full-scale affordability crisis. This housing market in Vancouver is simply exhausted. Affordability is a major issue,” CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal said this month.

Second, thinking the tax has stopped the enormous impact of foreign buyers on Metro Vancouver housing prices is to live in a fool’s paradise. After Clark’s tax announcement, China’s largest international property portal — Juwai.com — saw an 8.3 per cent increase of inquiries for Vancouver homes under $1 million. Juwai.com helped generate $14.9 billion in sales leads for homes in Canada in 2015 by partnering with Canadian developers and agents. ...

The reasons why Chinese buyers are flocking here is obvious, says Jawai.com president Matthew Moore. “Canada is seen as safe, stable, tolerant and sophisticated. Canada draws buyers in with its good schools and universities, stable and diverse economy, strong rule of law, outright ownership of real estate, and lack of restrictions on foreign ownership,” Moore told online publication BetterDwelling.com in July.

http://www.thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/13/BC-Foreign-Buyers-Tax-Fails/

Out of Control: SRO hotel survey finds that market real estate development and low-welfare rates are to blame for record homelessness in the Downtown Eastside

Homelessness in the DTES is a humanitarian crisis. For the first time in recorded history, the number of homeless people in the community escalated to over 1000 in 2016. This means 1 person out of every 18 in the Downtown Eastside is homeless. A major reason for this crisis is the ongoing loss of SRO hotel rooms from the stock of rentals available to people on welfare disability, and pension. Not coincidentally, alongside homeless number, rents in privately owned SRO hotels are also at a record high.

quote:

CCAP’s Hotel Report is conducted each year to monitor rent and gentrification in the DTES. In 2016, CCAP surveyed 84 privately owned and operated single SRO hotels. Rent information was gathered from 68 of these hotels with 3,170 rooms or 95% of the rooms in all the privately owned and operated hotels.

The 2016 report found that the average lowest rent has increased to $548, leaving people on welfare with $62 or approximately $2 a day for necessities after rent is paid. CCAP also found 10 SRO hotels with rents above $1,000, with one hotel, the Georgia Manor, renting rooms for  $1,600 / month.

UN report lays bare the waste of treating homes as commodities

The UN special rapporteur for housing, Leilani Farha, will highlight the devastating human rights impact of society’s tendency to view houses as financial commodities rather than homes for people, in her report to the UN this week.

Farha, who has been UN special rapporteur for housing and human rights since May 2014, has published a hard-hitting report [pdf], which she presents to the UN in Geneva on 1 March. It details the shift in recent years that has seen massive amounts of global capital invested in housing as a commodity, particularly as security for financial instruments that are traded on global markets and as a means of accumulating wealth. As a result, she says, homes are often left empty – even in areas where housing is scarce.

“Shops are closing, restaurants are closing,” Farha has told the Guardian, in an exclusive interview. “You see immediately a loss of vibrancy.”

Farha wants governments around the world to act. She is calling for them to redefine their relationship with private investors and international financial institutions, and reform the governance of financial markets, in order to reclaim housing as a social good, “and thus ensure the human right to a place to live in security and dignity”. Here are some of the report’s key findings.....

10 years later: new homeless camp, same site, same problem

Homeless activists set up a new encampment in Downtown Vancouver today. The camp is on the same site where a homeless camp was held exactly 10 years ago. And despite City promises that homelessness would be over by now, it's worse than ever.

The camp is located on a vacant City of Vancouver lot by the American Hotel in the 900 block of Main Street.

Camp supporter Maria Wallstam said the camp is a reaction to the growing number of homeless people in the city and the skyrocketing death toll on the streets. More than 3,600 people were noted in the most recent homelessness count....

The Supreme Court of BC has denied the City of Vancouver an injunction to remove a homeless camp from Main Street city-owned lot that has been vacant for 20 years because it does not meet the requirement for an injunction that the City of Vancouver would suffer irreprable harm if no injunction was granted. The homeless were successful in arguing that their safety would be jepardized if they were forced to leave the lot. 

The city argued that it needed the lot to build social housing - the "social housing" in which developers get increased market price densification in return for adding 30% low-income housing that then is   designated "100% social housing"  (described in the previous post), as well as elimination of developers' responsibility to pay for nearby parks, childcare facilities, etc. instead of the average taxpayer. 

The obvious urgency of developing this "social housing" by the City's developer friends and thus remove the homeless camp is so clear when the City has left the lot vacant for 20 years!

The province’s top court has slapped down an attempt by the city of Vancouver to remove the people living in a tent city at 950 Main Street. Located on a city-owned lot just a few blocks away from Science World, the so-called “Ten Year Tent City” (the name commemorates the ten years since a previous tent city was located at this site) has been home to a few dozen homeless since late April. The city argues that the camp is preventing development of a 26-unit affordable housing complex planned for that very site. ...

But the BC Supreme Court found the city failed to prove that “irreparable harm” would occur if the injunction was not granted.

Caitlin Shane with the Pivot Legal Society supported the camp’s residents and says she’s surprised and encouraged by the court’s decision. “It was really, really encouraging to see the BC Supreme Court directly asking to hear from people who live at the site to hear their stories. The judge was compassionate, and she was willing to listen, and that seems to have made all the difference,” she says. Shane expects the city of Vancouver to file another injunction against the camp, next time bolstered by stronger evidence.

“In the meantime, people will continue to be homeless, people will continue to rely on tent cities for health and safety, and people on the ground will continue to do their best to support them,” she adds.

Back in October, the top court granted the city an injunction against a similar camp at 58 East Hastings. Shane says many of the people removed from that site are now living at 950 Main Street.

“This is not a long-term solution, it’s more of a matter of harm reduction. This is a situation that people have indicated works best for them now.” The city says it is “concerned by the implications of the Court’s decision”, and is reviewing its options.

http://www.news1130.com/2017/05/17/bc-supreme-court-denies-city-injuncti...

The 2017 federal Liberals budget's housing funding plan will only deal with a small fraction of the housing problem that has been building across Canada, and especially in Vancouver and Toronto, for the last two decades under Liberal and Conservative governments. 

Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau made housing “the largest single commitment in Budget 2017,” making a start on an 11-year, $11.2-billion spending plan for “a variety of initiatives designed to build, renew and repair Canada's stock of affordable housing, and help ensure that Canadians have affordable housing that meets their needs.” ...

The budget proposes to spend $2.1 billion over the next 11 years “to expand and extend funding for the Homeless Partnering Strategy beyond 2018-19,” with the highest single year’s spending planned for 2021-22 (likely after the next election) at $237 million. Another $202 million over the same 11 years is budgeted to cover the cost of making more federal properties available to affordable housing providers “at low or no cost.” 

Homeless commitment a fraction of need

But the spending pales in comparison to what cities and homelessness advocates across Canada have called on Ottawa to spend. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities had urged Morneau to commit $350 million annually to the government’s Homelessness Partnering Strategy, not the $54 million it got in its first year.

For its part, the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, a non-profit, non-partisan research institute, has estimated that a National Housing Strategy would need something closer to $43.7 billion to put an end to homelessness in Canada — about four times Morneau’s commitment.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2017/03/22/Housing-Commitment-Budget/

 

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The following article further illustrates that the housing situation across the country is severe and the lack of sufficient government funding for affordable housing is a major contributor to the problem. 

It was not until after the 1960s that, in Canada, "homeless" came to mean the "unhoused" versus those simply living in poor-quality housing. Previously, the "homeless" was a general term applied mostly to transient men with no family ties, such as the migrant workers who travelled by freight hopping during the Great Depression.

Homelessness remained a minor concern as long as extremely cheap accommodation was available in 'skid row' rooming houses or flophouses located in the poorest parts of most major cities. Even the most destitute could find some form of housing, even if its quality was abysmal.

At the end of the Second World War in 1946, the federal government created the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) to make mortgages and home ownership more accessible to people and organizations. The surplus generated by the CMHC was used in the 1980s to fund non-profit, Aboriginal, and rent supplement housing.

However, following changes to Canada's National Housing Act housing act in 1996 to give the CMHC "more flexibility", it was able to directly fund social housing and its role in supporting new and existing affordable housing diminished. Today the CMHC still exists, and its annual surpluses ($7.6 billion in 2006) raises questions as to why some of this money cannot be spent on new housing initiatives.

About 20,000 social housing units were created every year following the 1973 amendments to the National Housing Act. Starting in the mid-1980s, the federal government initiated a series of cuts in funding for national housing programs. While accurate statistics on the homeless population are hard to gather, it is the general consensus that from the 1980s onwards the number of homeless increased considerably.

Despite Canada's economy this trend continued, and perhaps even accelerated in the 1990s. For example, in Toronto admissions to homeless shelters increased by 75% between 1988 and 1998. After 1993 the national affordable housing program initiated in 1973 was cut and Canada's focus in addressing homelessness in the 1990s was to create more homeless shelters and emergency services A decade later in 2003 the federal government resumed spending on housing investment at $2.03 billion, a 25% decline from 1993 levels of $1.98 billion when adjusted for inflation (Laird 2007:15).

On December 19, 2006 Prime Minister Harper announced social policies with $526 million of funding to tackle poverty and homelessness in Canada. The Homelessness Partnering Strategy received $270 million and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation received $246 million to refurbish and renovate affordable housing, as well as to improve access for homeless people to various services and supports such as health and substance abuse treatment programs. Activists protested at Human Resources and Social Services Minister Diane Finley's offices in Ottawa.

The first Canadian national report card on homelessness was compiled by the Canadian Homelessness Research Network (CHRN) and the National Alliance to End Homelessness in 2013.

Causes

Why people become homeless is a complex question and the answers are as unique as each individual's history. People become homeless by many different paths; however, the most common reasons are "inability to pay rent (63%), conflict or abuse (36%), alcohol or drug use problems(10%)". Other factors can include mental disorders, foster care exits, exiting from jail or hospitalization, immigration, rising housing costs and decreased rent controls, federal and provincial downloading of housing programs, and low social assistance rates.

While the causes are complex, the solutions to homelessness may be simple: "Homelessness may not be only a housing problem, but it is always a housing problem; housing is necessary, although sometimes not sufficient, to solve the problem of homelessness." Policy changes are often criticized for punishing the poor instead of trying to solve the underlying problem.

Lack of low-income housing

While in 1966 30,000 new low-income housing units had been built across Canada, this had fallen to 7,000 in 1999. In the city of Calgary, with one of the most acute housing shortages, only 16 new units of rental housing were built in 1996.

Deinstitutionalization

The 1950s and 1960s also saw an international movement towards deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, moving them out of asylums and other facilities, and releasing them into the community. Studies found that the vast majority of those who had been placed in asylums could be healthy and productive members of society if placed in the community and provided with the proper care and medication.

Thus over these decades the number of people confined to mental institutions fell dramatically from just under 70,000 to about 20,000. However, while great savings were made by shutting down empty institutions much of this money was absorbed by general government funds, and did not make it into community care.

No assurances were made that those discharged had access to and were taking the medication they needed. While some of those discharged did integrate with the community, a significant number, estimated at around 75%, did not. Many of these individuals became homeless. Today up to 40% of homeless have some sort of mental illness.

Justice system and homelessness

In a paper published in 2010, York University professor, Stephen Gaetz, argued that, "[p]risoners who are sentenced or who are awaiting trial often lose their jobs and housing, and without support, wind up in homeless shelters and drop-ins upon release . . . When prisoners become homeless, their chances of reoffending increase."

In 2005 Alberta initiated a three-year program offering an "alternative to sending people to jail or helping them when they are released." Alberta's Pathways to Housing program, which includes about $7 million in provincial money, has been helping homeless Calgarians who have been in and out of the corrections system due to unpaid tickets for petty crimes.

Poverty in Canada

Poverty remains prevalent with certain groups in Canada. The measurement of poverty has been a challenge as there is no official government measure. Some groups, like the Canadian Council on Social Development and the National Anti-Poverty Organization, believe the low-income cut off published by Statistics Canada is applicable as a poverty measure regardless of whether its intent or designation is to be one. They have argued, that as it stands, the LICO is the best measure available that accurately measures a relative poverty rate. The LICO fell to a near-record low of 9.5% in 2006, down from a recent high of 16.7% in 1994. 

In the 2005 census, 702,650 Canadians were considered to be at-risk for homelessness in that they spent more than 50 per cent of their household income on shelter. Lack of income security combined with the lack of affordable housing creates the problem of "hidden" homelessness. The "hidden homeless" may actually fall back and forth between homelessness and being housed, making the problem of homelessness much larger than that identified in street or shelter counts.

Cuts to Social Assistance (welfare)

In the late 1990s, under Finance Minister Paul Martin, large cuts were made to transfer payments to Canada's provinces. At the same time, Canada removed a long-standing requirement of each province and territory to provide a livable rate of social assistance to all those in need. This led to a series of cuts to welfare rates and tightened eligibility rules, with many provinces competing with each other to offer the lowest assistance so those in need would leave. Alberta even offered bus tickets for welfare recipients to leave the province. In 2002, B.C.'s newly elected Liberal government introduced welfare reforms which in the coming years removed tens of thousands from that province's welfare rolls. All of this has had the effect of leaving thousands of people without the means to pay for even the most modest accommodation, resulting in many Canadians having no home and thus relying on homeless shelters or else sleeping outside

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Canada

In Maple Ridge, a temporary homeless shelter has been closed and shelter residents have been "hit with pipes, run off the roads with their bicycles. Smoke bombs thrown into the shelter to flush people out" with a vigilante group play a role in fostering this. The shelter manager fears for her safety. The Mayor went into hiding when informed of threats against her because of her support for the shelter. CBC's The Current podcast url below in addition to its written report below provides more information on this horrific situation.

The podcast at the url at the url at the bottom of the post mentions Ivan Drury, an activist from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, who has helped organize a tent city in response to the closing the shelter but also faces intimidation himself. The city has now started legal action to seek an injunction to remove the tent city. Drury notes that their are 70 tent cities across BC because of the housing crisis now. 

Why haven't the police arrested anyone when threats and physical intimidation against the shelter resident, the shelter manager and the mayor have become the new normal in Maple Ridge?

I think its time to start organizing and publicizing across the province and Canada against what is happening in Maple Ridge, because if the vigilante types get away with this, it will almost certainly spread elsewhere.

Last month, Maple Ridge Mayor Nicole Read went into hiding after the RCMP warned her there was a credible threat to her safety. They have not disclosed whether the threat is related to this issue, but the mayor has been the target of anger from Maple Ridge residents who take issue with her support of the homeless in her community. 

The closing of a temporary homeless shelter in Maple Ridge, B.C., has heated up a contentious debate over how to address homelessness and addiction in the community. 

The shelter was set up in an old mattress store as a stop-gap measure while the municipal and provincial governments tried to come up with a longer term solution.  The shelter manager says the conditions are not adequate.

'I don't know how people can turn their backs on the most vulnerable members of their own community.'- Ash, shelter manager

"You can see the walls don't go to the ceiling. There's not really anywhere to have deep conversation. There's nowhere to call your dad. Or to cry. Let your guard down," says Ash, the shelter's manager.

"Every day. It's awful. I wouldn't do it, I couldn't do it. It's terrible." 

Ash — whose last name we have agreed to withhold because he fears for his safety — says that residents of the shelter have been attacked.

"Cars have been keyed. People hit with pipes, run off the roads with their bicycles. Smoke bombs thrown into the shelter to flush people out," he says.

"I think it's been disgusting. I don't know how people can turn their backs on the most vulnerable members of their own community."  

But other residents of Maple Ridge say they are fed up with the drug use they associate with shelters like these. 

'Every day we are cleaning up needles, drug packets.'- Maple Ridge resident Ramona Stimpfl

Ramona Stimpfl's condominium is located between the homeless shelter and a tent city that sprang up last month in a nearby city park. 

"Every day we are cleaning up needles, drug packets," she points out. 

Maple Ridge is a community of more than 75,000 people about an hour's drive east of Vancouver. The numbers of homeless is increasing across Metro Vancouver. A recent count showed a 30 per cent increase over the numbers in 2014. 

The problem is complicated by the high cost of housing, lack of addiction treatment spaces and treatment for the mentally ill, not to mention the opioid crisis that has gripped the region.

Eva Bardonnex is one of the people living in a tent city. 

She first found herself homeless in January 2015. When the house she was living in was sold, she had nowhere to go and ended up living at the river.  She found housing after living at another tent city camp in Maple Ridge, but was kicked out two months ago after being accused of having too many visitors and not going to counselling. 

Bardonnex is homeless once again, but she says the tent city is better than living at the river. 

"At the end of the day we don't go to the community and ask if we locate a cancer facility in their backyard. They need housing and health-care supports," says Read. 

"As a human being, I've never backed away from these issues — may not be politically expedient. At the end of the day, I have to put my head on the pillow instead of being concerned about being re-elected." 

"At the end of the day we don't go to the community and ask if we locate a cancer facility in their backyard. They need housing and health-care supports," says the Mayor Nicole Read. 

"As a human being, I've never backed away from these issues — may not be politically expedient. At the end of the day, I have to put my head on the pillow instead of being concerned about being re-elected." 

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-may-31-2017-1.4138091...

Vancouver Housing Crisis ‘Worse on Virtually Every Level,’ Says Former UN Investigator

It’s been 10 years since Miloon Kothari, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, visited Vancouver. He was back in town last week to receive an honourary Doctorate of Laws from Simon Fraser University.

While in town, Kothari attended a rally in support of residents of the Balmoral Hotel. Residents of the single-residence occupancy hotel were recently ordered to leave after the City of Vancouver found it a risk of collapse. He also stopped by the tent city at 950 Main St.

Having helped coordinate Kothari’s site visits back in 2007, I was pleased to interview him during this trip and hear his reflections on the housing situation in Vancouver today. Below are edited excerpts from that conversation.....