On Saturday April 18th, our members and supporters organized the Kennedy Stewart Squat in the Downtown Eastside to provide emergency shelter for unhoused and underhoused residents seeking space during the COVID-19 global health pandemic. It has been heartening to receive support for the squat in our community and our member organizations. The squat was also supported by Vancouver School Board commissioners, following cities in Ontario, Massachusetts, Arkansas and elsewhere that have used schools for emergency shelter during the coronavirus pandemic.
Class Struggle in Chinatown: Ethnic Tourism, Planned Gentrification, and Organizing for Tenant Power
Gentrification is alive and well in Vancouver Chinatown. This article gives an update on the current situation in Chinatown, how city planners are pursuing an ethnic tourism gentrification strategy, and what we can learn from the recent tenant organizing victory at Solheim Place.
What lies ahead for 58 and the people of the Downtown Eastside? If history has been any lesson, the vision of 58 West Hastings was born and fought for in the streets. Its future cannot be won otherwise.
Now that tenants’ demands have reached Vancouver City Hall with Councillor Swanson’s motion, Protecting Tenants from Renovictions and Aggressive Buy-Outs, corporate real estate interests will do their best to sway city politicians against strengthening rent control.
It’s the end of “Gregor’s decade.” Are we standing at the possible threshold of a new era in Vancouver municipal politics? Mainlander Editor Andrei Mihailiuk sits down with COPE Council candidate Anne Roberts to talk ward systems, movement journalism and how the Coalition of Progressive Electors has evolved.
Organizers from the Our Homes Can’t Wait Coalition (OHCW) and homeless residents of the Downtown Eastside have occupied the empty lot at 58 West Hastings. The occupiers at 58 West Hastings will hold a press conference at 4PM. The Coalition has issued the following statement:
The various iterations of the “Escaping Vancouver” narrative share a core unexamined underpinning: the idea that I, a hard-working, usually white, middle class person, did everything right, became successful, and yet am still unable to afford to live in the city of my choice. We must challenge the embedded privilege that characterizes what might be termed “middle class self-help advocacy”—the tendency to rely on individualized solutions to collective social problems.