Chak’s illustrations reveal the underbelly of facilities intentionally hidden away. “Spaces of incarceration are both nowhere and everywhere, blended into our landscapes,” she writes. “But their invisibility is no coincidence. We hide the things that we don’t want to see or that we don’t want seen.”
Vancouver’s housing crisis has never been worse. That’s not just a turn of phrase – 2014 marks the largest homeless population ever recorded in the city’s history.
The latest homeless count recorded 2,770 street homeless in Metro Vancouver. A total of 1,798 people were recorded homeless in the City of Vancouver alone, a 249% increase since the last regional count in 2011. And while the number is high, it likely underestimates the real homelessness numbers. For the past couple of years, the annual homelessness count has been conducted a week or two before the closure of the annual winter shelters, which means that the count misses the actual number of people who live on the streets for the large majority of the year.
