Low-wage housing squeeze

By Matthew Burrows, The Georgia Straight, July 13, 2006

Pre-Olympic Vancouver is about to be hit by a wave of gentrification, according to a Pivot Legal Society lawyer, and Woodward's* is the “beachhead”.
“I think Woodward's will do more damage to the area than any perceived benefit the core-need housing units inside bring,” David Eby told the Georgia Straight on July 7.
Standing on West Hastings Street, Eby described the fate of the 100-block strip that he said is fast losing ground-level commercial storefront space and low-income housing units for welfare recipients. “I think, ultimately, this area will change dramatically,” Eby said. “I hope our efforts will make for positive change. There is lots of room for positive change, but also for the negative. Woodward's is the beachhead for all subsequent development down here.”
Eby was only called to the bar in March 2005 but he is already point man for the six-year-old society's biggest campaign to date: housing. Pivot has been lambasted by Vancouver police Chief Jamie Graham, who described it as a “political activist group” in 2005. The organization that promises to stand up for the disenfranchised has made more headlines for its police-watchdog activities than anything else over the past two years. But Pivot executive director John Richardson insists that housing ”along with policing, sex work, and addiction ”has been one of Pivot's four pillars throughout its existence.
“The policing one definitely got a bit more splash,” Richardson told the Straight in a phone interview. “But we put a lot of energy into housing. We went to court over that Woodward's thing [the 2002 squat] several times.”
Richardson said the 2010 Olympics put a squeeze on existing affordable, low-income housing in the area. Eby also noted stagnant welfare rates, building renovations, and increased enforcement of city bylaws by the Vancouver Police Department as contributing factors. The list of hotels in danger is growing, he said, and some clients he represents as legal counsel in arbitration hearings have already been displaced.
“Some who are more together, who don't have addiction issues and can take care of themselves, have moved to Surrey and New Westminster,” Eby said. “Others are still in the neighbourhood, still retain me, but I have no contact with them at all.”
Eby confirmed that some of his clients have already wound up on the streets. “Dunsmuir International Student House, the old Salvation Army, used to be housing,” he said. “Marble Arch, with 148 units, used to rent to people on low incomes. St. Helen's Hotel on Granville was renovated, so we lost another 100 rooms there. We're about to lose the Hildon Hotel [on West Cordova Street] to renovations; it's 50 or 60 units. I could go on.”
In its latest newsletter, the Pivot Post, Pivot claims that almost 300 low-income people have lost their homes since June 2005 and that 514 low-income housing units were lost between June 2003 and June 2005.
According to Eby, the City of Vancouver 2005 survey of low-income housing in the downtown did not factor in increased rents.
“In 2005, they didn't count the student conversions or the rent increases,” he said. “We set an arbitrary amount of $380 a month [to determine affordability]. When we took that into account, the City of Vancouver actually lost 514 rooms over that survey period. But the City of Vancouver survey said they'd gained 99 low-income housing spaces.”
Richardson said Pivot has collected 140 affidavits from “people with a housing crisis or who are homeless” to go into a housing report this fall.
Pivot also plans to form Pivot Legal Cooperative ”an entity separate from the legal society that will offer legal services on a sliding-fee scale” and move its offices into a new building on the 600-block of East Hastings at Heatley Avenue, formerly a welfare office.

* Woodwards, a former department store located in Downtown Eastside, sat empty for many years and was occupied by squatters in 2002. Many, along with other groups in DTES, demanded low-income housing be built in its place. The building was demolished in 2006 to make way for a new apartment
complex, with only a fraction for low-income people to be provided. The rest for middle-class professional (yuppies).