Tent city moving again
Homeless advocates storm city hall to raise awareness
Only a few tent city residents packing up their belongings at 950 Main Street will be heading to shelters, which several campers described as having unsafe and undesirable conditions.
Nobody was saying where they will go next with their air mattresses and sleeping bags stuffed into plastic bags, along with personal items that gave their surroundings of tents and tarps a feeling of home.
“No (paint) brush at all. I have no time to grab a brush. I paint with five fingers, each one has a different colour. I start with a mountain first and then see what is lacking,” said tent city resident Varouj Mouralian, 62, describing his paintings done in oil and placed on each side of a friend’s tent.
“Don’t have a wall to put it on, so we’ve put it here,” said Mouralian, who had lived in several single-room occupancy hotels before moving to this tent city some months ago.
Earlier this week, the B.C. Supreme Court granted an injunction to evict the homeless campers to the Lum’a Native Housing Society, which holds a lease on the 950 Main Street property from the City of Vancouver and intends to build a social housing project there. The injunction comes into effect Wednesday at noon.
“Lots of people have lots of horror stories about shelters. And plus, also me being in a relationship, couples can’t (be) together. It’s girls on one side and boys on another. They monitor us, so it’s like we’re children again,” said Joyce Jackson, 38. “I’m pretty sure it’s maybe only two people from here that are going to shelters.”
She and her spouse, Cory Davis, moved from another tent city at 58 West Hastings when the city got an injunction to evict campers from that site in late 2016.
“We were promised housing if we went to a shelter, so we went to New Fountain (shelter on West Cordova), but we didn’t like it there. There were (overdoses) every night. Food was weeks old. We had to sleep in the same room with four or five other people. Sometimes we didn’t get to sleep.”
Now, “we’re still fighting,” said Jackson. In her last move, she lost “all our clothing and my grandmother’s ashes. There was a breakin in the storage at the shelter.”
This time, she is taking along “colouring books and felts. We like to colour. It keeps the stress down.”
“Here, you’re not going to get robbed,” said Dennis DeGuerre, 70, sitting in a makeshift kitchen across from his tent. “There are no fights. I can sleep and not worry that when I wake up, my boots are going to be gone.”
At City Hall, activists interrupted a regular council meeting, repeatedly chanting: “Our homes can’t wait! Our homes can’t wait.”
Aiyanas Ormond, a staff member with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, said: “We’re here as a delegation from the Downtown Eastside, in the midst of the worst housing and homelessness crisis that we’ve ever faced.”
They called on City Hall to “stop displacing tent cities,” commit to 100 per cent social housing at the 105 Keefer Street site in Chinatown where council recently rejected a condo rezoning application, fund social housing at another site at 58 West Hastings Street, and enforce standards of maintenance for private single-room occupancy hotels.
The group occupied the council floor and took the seats of councillors. Longtime activist Jean Swanson of the Carnegie Community Action Project sat in the mayor’s chair, while other member of the group took turns sharing their concerns with the media. The city suspended the live online broadcast of the session, displaying a “Council is in recess” message.
Ormond said it has been a few years since activists stormed City Hall and interrupted a council meeting, but the housing situation now is “getting to a boiling point.”
Other advocates raised concern that as higher levels of government have stepped away from building social housing, cities are increasingly using litigation as a way of tackling homelessness.
Court injunctions are being “used as a way of moving the homeless along so that they are less visible, less of a public nuisance,” said housing justice lawyer D.J. Larkin at Pivot Legal Society.
“I’m aware of at least seven injunctions in the last three years. That’s just what I am aware of. It’s significant. One of the main frustrations is that this has a lot to do with the province needing to provide housing that is safe to go to, that is more than overnight shelter.”