Category Archive: News

Vision Vancouver plans to eliminate the City’s definition of Social Housing

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Social Housing Alliance holds a Vigil outside a Vision Vancouver fundraiser to mourn the loss of social and affordable housing in Vancouver, February 28th, 2014.

The definition of social housing has been the focus of the low-income caucus currently participating in the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process (LAP). While a definition of social housing seems simple, it will actually play a crucial role in debates over the DTES Local Area Plan (LAP) in the coming weeks.

This week – on March 12th – Vancouver city staff will present a final draft of the LAP for the Downtown Eastside to city council. The Vision-led City Council will be using this opportunity to strike the definition of low cost housing and social housing in the City’s bylaws, and replace both with a new definition of social housing.

Book Review | Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police

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Elizabeth Comack’s Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police unflinchingly describes disturbing police behaviours toward Indigenous peoples that enforce the racial order so embedded in the structure of Canadian society. With all the impartiality of her academic training, wielding her analytical tools with impassive rigour and precision, Elizabeth Comack documents the violent, and, too often, murderous, ways in which Canadian police forces establish “Peace, Order, and Good Government.”

Evictions across the street from City Hall



DJ Larkin, lawyer at Pivot Legal Society speaking at press conference at 506 W.7th this morning

Today Pivot Legal and the Social Housing Alliance and low-income tenants condemned the City of Vancouver for failing to prevent the mass eviction currently underway down the street from City hall, at Cambie and West 7th avenue. “Vision was elected on a promise to end homelessness,” said Herb Varley of the Social Housing Alliance. “Despite this the City turns a blind eye to the continued haemorrhaging of the low-income housing stock.”