Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim has announced a plan to freeze supportive housing development in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). The plan is part of a wider set of policy changes targeting the DTES and spearheaded by Sim’s ABC Vancouver party.
Homelessness
On Dec. 18, Vancouver City Council approved the demolition of the Dunsmuir Hotel, a single-room occupancy building with 167 units at the corner of Dunsmuir and Richards Street. The decision marks yet another feather in the cap of property developer Holborn Properties, with plans for a large-scale residential redevelopment of the site.
We call on the Mayor, Council, and city staff to stop the decampment of Hastings and to instead redirect public resources to creating, maintaining, and preserving the affordability of dignified, non-carceral forms of permanent housing for encampment residents.
This is about context. And in the current context where there is no housing for unhoused people, calls to clean up the streets mean violence – displacement, dispossession, banishment, death.