City-Wide Housing March
Saturday Oct 10th
Meet 955 E Hastings
NOON, 12PM

March for housing justice
Vancouver, Unceded Coast Salish territories

Organized by the VANDU Tuesday Housing Cttee
With the support of the BC Social Housing Alliance

The housing crisis has never been worse in Vancouver, across the Lower Mainland, and throughout the unceded Coast Salish Territories of British Columbia. The number of people displaced, living on the streets and in shelters has never been higher.

People across the city continue to be evicted and displaced by rising rents, renovictions and demolitions of existing affordable housing. Indigenous people, racialized communities, recent immigrants, single mothers and people on fixed income are the hardest hit.

To make matters worse, tens of thousands of nonprofits and co-ops will lose their funding in the next decade, and yet politicians at all levels of government are only committing to pro-market policies that will deepen the crisis.

The federal government cut their regular social housing programs in 1993. Ten years later, in 2002, the BC Liberals ended the long-shrinking regular provincially funded social housing program in BC. In the winter of 2014, BC’s minister of housing finally declared “we don’t build social housing.” Developer-backed city halls are meanwhile pursuing aggressive gentrification agendas that only serve to accelerate the displacement.

To build social housing for the over 100,000 people facing homelessness in BC, we need tax-based housing programs organized by the provincial, federal and city governments. We need to join together, across the city, lower mainland and the province to say no more. We need to act now. On the eve of the federal elections let’s assemble to demand a national housing strategy that addresses the root causes of the housing crisis.

The Demands that Unite Us:

• Adequate, healthy, and secure living conditions;

• Address the root causes of poverty through rent control and a national anti-poverty plan;

• Build homes not jails, end the criminalization of poverty:

• Follow a real definition of social housing at rates affordable for low-income people and pensioners:

• End Housing Racism and all forms of tenancy discrimination, including discrimination based on mental health, addictions, citizen status, gender identity and other forms of landlord discrimination

• End housing racism and all forms of tenancy discrimination, including discrimination based on mental health, addictions, physical or cognitive dis/ability, citizenship status, gender identity, source of income, and other forms of landlord discrimination

• Yes to Municipal Rent Control, No to Renovictions: withhold construction and renovation permits for landlords who renovict

We acknowledge that this event takes place on Unceded Coast Salish Territory

OCT 10 MARCH ENDORSED BY
BC Social Housing Alliance, Raise the Rates BC, Pivot Legal, BC Poverty Reduction Coalition, SUAV, Streams of Justice, SOLID (Victoria), Committee to End Homelessness (Victoria), Rising Tide, ACORN (Burnaby), ACORN (New Westminster), Together Against Poverty Society (Victoria), Radical Desi, Action Committee of People with DisAbilities (VIctoria), SocialCoast, DTES Street Market, Jacob’s Well, The Mainlander, Megaphone, No One is Illegal, Carnegie Community Action Project, EIDGE, Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society, UBC Medical Undergraduate Society, BC Association of People on Methadone, BC/Yukon Association of Drug War Survivors (Abbotsford), Drug Users Resource Centre, Coalition of Progressive Electors, Grassroots Women, Chinatown Concern Group, Gallery Gachet, Urban Subjects, International League of People’s Struggles, Sanctuary Health, Migrante BC, Chinatown Action Group, Aboriginal Front Door, Chinatown Concern Group, The Talon, Vancouver Cop Watch, Grandview Woodland Area Council, Grandview Woodland Calvary Baptist Church

City-Wide Housing March on facebook