Carnegie Community Action Project
401 Main Street, Vancouver, V6A 2T7
(604) 839-0379
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Dear Mayor & Council,
Why should we preserve the Downtown Eastside as a low-income community?
To stop “social exclusion”
The city’s plan for the DTES is to encourage market housing and maintain low income housing. Woodward’s is a prime example. Here’s an excerpt of the description of the amenity room for Woodward’s condo owners: “Owners will have full access to an amazing array of rooftop views and amenities including a glass-flanked gym, stacked media room and glamorous lounge. Live large in the soaring double-height space. Read. Flirt. Meditate. Invite your friends to a movie or barbeque. Dine outside on the deck. Get steamy or wet. There’s even a giant hot tub (yes-in the shape of a W).” “Plus, Club W is rumoured to have the sexiest restrooms on the continent.” Where do the social housing residents of Woodward’s go for their amenities?
(These Tuesday morning paragraphs are brought to you by the Carnegie Community Action Project to help you understand why the DTES should continue to be a low-income community and not be overwhelmed with condos.)
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Carnegie Community Action Project
401 Main Street, Vancouver, V6A 2T7
(604) 602-0379
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Dear Mayor & Council,
Why should we preserve the Downtown Eastside as a low-income community?
We care about each other.
These are notes from a CCAP mapping session at a housing co-op in the DTES:
“[This community] makes us feel human and that everyone is human. Someone on the street who is ill is not someone to be afraid of. When we walk to school and see someone…we talk about the illness and not the person. It’s done something to [my children] as human beings that may not have happened if we lived somewhere else.”
“I am proud of who I am and that I grew up here. I’ve been watching my kids come up and their level of bias is so much lower than other kids. They are much less judgmental than their peers. Two of my three kids grew up not worshipping the almighty dollar.”
About the Carnegie cafeteria: “It’s the glory of the cafeteria there. Everyone stands in line. Everyone sits down together. They look like the scum of the earth but someone is leaning over cutting up someone else’s food. There are three guys in the corner and there are guitars and they have jams. Nobody is threatened by them. When my brothers come to town we go there to eat.”
“I’ll tell you my worst experience growing up here. When I was about 14 two cops stopped me one night. I was wearing a hooded jacket. They lectured me and said prostitution was illegal. I was thinking: I’m on the honour role. I’m thinking this and of people’s judgment of the area. I decided I’m going to be proud of where I live and join all the other cool people here.”
(These Tuesday morning paragraphs brought to you by the Carnegie Community Action Project to help you understand why the DTES should continue to be a low income community and not be overwhelmed with condos.)
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Carnegie Community Action Project
401 Main Street, Vancouver, V6A 2T7
(604) 839-0379
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Dear Mayor & Council
Why should we preserve the Downtown as a low-income community?
Sharing: Many DTES residents are very community-minded. Low-income people know how to share, which is the basis of community development. When you have less, you exchange more. In the DTES there is a highly developed sense of friendship, neighbourliness and community based on our practice of sharing resources. Some of our social hubs like Gallery Gachet, the DTES Women’s Centre and housing projects run as collectives. We have street parties and festivals together. We bring food to our meetings, drum together, get each other’s groceries, and share the same back yard (Oppenheimer and CRAB Parks), and living rooms (like Carnegie Centre, the DTES Neighbourhood House) and much more. There is a lot of compassion here. With sharing in the DTES nothing is expected in return except a smile. A lot of smiling happens in the DTES.
(This Tuesday morning paragraph brought to you by the Carnegie Community Action Project to help you understand why the DTES should continue to be a low-income community and not be overwhelmed with condos).
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Carnegie Community Action Project
401 Main Street, Vancouver, V6A 2T7
(604) 602-0379
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Dear Mayor & Council,
Why should we preserve the Downtown Eastside as a low-income community?
Social innovation: The Downtown Eastside has a lot to offer. Because low-income people have lived, worked and played together in the DTES for 100 years, we’ve learned a lot. We are not marginalized here. We are the majority, about 75% of the population. Because there are so many of us, we have been able to create things that work especially for us. We worked for 7 years to get the Carnegie Community Centre when some at city hall thought funding a community centre for a low income neighbourhood would be like “pouring money down a rat-hole.” We built award-winning social housing projects like the Four Sisters, and North America’s first safe injection site. We stopped a freeway through our neighbourhood. We camped out for months to get CRAB Park. Then we had to file a Human Rights complaint so people with disabilities could get access to it. The On to Ottawa Trek, which began the fight for an eight hour day and unemployment insurance, started in the Downtown Eastside. We’re proud of these accomplishments and, given the right conditions, we could do much more. Because we are the majority we can elect representatives to lobby for our unique needs. The DTES has had a hand in shaping cutting edge social policy for the region and country.
(This Tuesday morning paragraph is brought to you by the Carnegie Community Action Project to help you understand why the DTES should continue to be a low income community and not be overwhelmed with condos).
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Carnegie Community Action Project
Request for Letters to Development Permit Board
May 10, 2008
Dear friend,
Please join us to oppose a significant proposal for condos covering 6 lots at 58 W. Hastings in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. We literally need hundreds of Vancouver residents to write a letter AND sign up to speak at the Development Permit Hearing to make an impact. The hearing is on June 23. It is essential that our letters are in by Friday, May 16 so the Planning Department can reference them in the report that will be submitted to the DP Board who will make the decision. Your letter does not have to be long or profound. A few sentences to object will do just fine. Elaborating is good too. Feel free to use the information below or take a look at CCAP’s letter posted at: http://ccapvancouver.wordpress.com, to understand more the impact of this development on our community.
Background:
The Concord Pacific development at 58 W. Hastings must be stopped. The rapid gentrification of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) is overwhelming the low-income residents of this neighborhood, who make up 75% of its population. The current rate of new development, in which new condos outstrip social housing 3 to 1, is a grave threat to the neighborhood. The feverish planning, approval and construction of market condos is a destructive force accompanied by massive aftershocks to this community. Rising real estate prices are already resulting in increased rents, conversions and closures of residential hotels (SRO’s), creating a constant flow of displacement and evictions of low-income residents, and consequent homelessness. Condo construction will be accompanied by a flood of upscale amenities catering to the new residents of the area, which will further marginalize the low-income residents who have make this neighborhood home for many years.
Unlike people with significant resources, whose lives may be marked by independence and mobility, people living in poverty form communities of interdependence, located in a specific geographical area, and embedded in rich neighborly networks of support and assistance. The community of low-income residents who currently call the DTES home should not be displaced from their neighborhood and relocated somewhere else for the sake of condo development. This is their home, and they should be able to live here. Poverty is not grounds for displacement.
Condo construction in the DTES must be halted until a community vision is formulated, planned and implemented. Like putting up a tent in a windstorm, rooting and securing housing for low-income people in a community experiencing the hurricane of condo development and massive gentrification is impossible. Residents need time to determine their own community vision and support the implementation of that vision, before the green light is given to condo developers. What is at stake is the existence of a vibrant, amazing community of people.
The cessation of condo development for the sake of this community can begin here and now, with the rejection of a development permit to Concord Pacific for the 58 West Hastings site.
We believe there is an opening at City Hall to support a temporary halt to condo development until social housing is in place. On Thursday, May 1 at the Planning and Environment City Council meeting, Cameron Gray, Director of the City’s Housing Centre said the surge of condos in the DTES is “like a hurricane and is going twice as fast as predicted [and] we need to address the rapidity of change in order to stay on track with the Downtown Eastside Housing Plan.” He also said that a strong mechanism to control condo development “could signal to the Province that no market housing will be built and landowners/developers may be off to Victoria to get more housing here.” And he said: “its time to do a community visioning because groups are more united and able to do it and because of the rapidity of change.” At the same meeting, Councilor Anton of the NPA stated “we have the horrendous challenge of 4000 more units” in terms of securing replacement housing in the area and that “as long as the SRO’s are in private hands, they are in jeopardy.” Councilor Anton said she was “very encouraged by the [visioning] work in the DTES.”
Please write your letters by Friday, May 17 to:
Alison.higginson@vancouver.ca
The Chair, Development Permit Board
c/o Alison Higginson, Project Facilitator, Development Services
453 West 12th Avenue
Vancouver BC
V5Y 1V4
Please bcc your email letter to: wpedersen@look.ca or send us a quick note to let us know that you wrote a letter.
To sign up to speak at the hearing on Monday June 23, call:
Lorna Harvey
Assistant to the Development Permit Board Development Services 604. 873-7469
Sincerely,
Carnegie Community Action Project [CCAP]
Streams of Justice
Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House [DTES NH]
EMERGENCY COMMUNITY CONSULTATION
58 WEST HASTINGS
RAW DATA
In light of a neglected community consultation on behalf of the city for the proposed site of 58 West Hastings, local DTES community organizations found it urgent to hold a consultation on site with local community members on April 22, 2008. We asked three questions and invited participants to share their thoughts. The three questions were 1) Whose housing should be on this site? 2) What do we need on this site? 3) How do we create our own DTES plan?
APRIL 22. 2008
CARNEGIE COMMUNITY ACTION PROJECT
604.839.0379
WHOSE HOUSING SHOULD BE ON THIS SITE?
- This site MUST be housing for current residents of the DTES- Period.
- Urgent housing now for all homeless- no condos!
- Any new development to have 25% social housing
- Our community- DTES is a reflection of the dark side of society soul
- House the homeless
- No rich bastards around here – stay on west and north Vancouver
- Our DTES community: we are one.
- Non profits and housing co-ops
- Affordable social housing
- Low income
- Gold bless the people who need low income housing
- Pentioner’s on welfare
- Housing for people with disabilities in the DTES
- Social housing on this site- for those who most need it-the homeless. Take housing out of the economic system. A basic need.
- Equal rights for poor and rich alike
- Seniors group and services for first nations healing and spiritual well being
- This is our community
- Victims of the holocaste
- This is a community! Stop destroying it- build social housing for the people that live and love here.
- Recreation facility
- Stop the displacement, house the homeless! (with low income good housing)
- Access for handicapped
- Public childcare
- Make it a co-op. 30% minimum social housing
- Home sweet home
- Do the rich really need a place to hide?
- Low cost rental, of course
- Low rental housing!
- DTES for low income only!
- Homes for the homeless!
- Women with children (with support)
- Use all 4 pillars of treatment – not just enforcement
- The downtown eastside has a long history. It is a strong community of caring people. We need housing to protect this low-income neighbourhood- the soul of Vancouver.
- People first, profit later…get rental board back. Greed is the problem.
- Would you remain passive if about 40% of your community was at risk of being displaced? Give it a think…and support DTES residents.
- Lack of money and public politics is no excuse for greed to upsurge our DTES community.
- Homes for the resident
WHAT DO WE NEED ON THIS SITE?
- Cant have change without turmoil but why should people suffer from inflated real estate market?
- Mixed housing – kids, family, pets!
- Grocery store
- Stop construction! Support
- Advocate
- Residence for the people here
- Community based green industry
- Moratorium on this site until proper consultation- other sites too
- Neighbourhood below low income housing
- Residence for the people here
- Non-profits housing and co-ops
- Tired of living outside
- Enough and leave us what we have left
- Go back to DTES housing plan
- Income and welfare
- Community to organize itself all together
- On site support workers
- Start the whole process over wince we’ve been left out
- Housing for the homeless
- Social housing with health on main floor
- Stop planning to do with development
- Use 3 pillars-not just enforcement
- Wrap around services
- Homes for all
- Artists space
- Low income housing
- Homes for people on the streets
- Food bank
- Some housing for special needs
- Shelter and housing
- Community gathering space
- Rentalmans
- Homes for residents- 75% low income
- Continuum of care
- Free laundry Facilities
HOW CAN WE CREATE OUR OWN DTES PLAN?
- Ask the community
- Local residents final approval
- Fairness and equal rights for housing
- Leave us our heritage
- Free the homeless
- Help us keep our community
- No sharing toilets
- Create mixed housing
- Developers- go away- leave
- Listen to the people here
- Safe and affordable single rooms
- Low rates!
- No PST, No GST
- More health resources
- United we stand
- Rooms with bathrooms and kitchens
- Special needs included
- Proper funding
- No city
- Planning and engineering office in the DTES
- No condos!
- Homes for us who are in the community
- Jobs for the DTES residents
- Low rental homes
- Community Gardens!
- Council needs to be informed about the DTES
- We need jobs
