Past Victories panel

by Max Campbell

When someone wants to change the DTES for the worse, they sometimes tell a certain story. They say that we are helpless and hopeless, and what we need is someone who will come in and fix things up for us. Don’t make me laugh. Have these people spent even one hour getting to know life around here? If they did, they would know... we are people who make things happen!

On Nov 2, we got to talk a bit about some of the things we made happen. In the Carnegie Theatre, a legendary group of activists and community leaders gathered to talk about our victories. Let’s learn from what we’ve already won, and keep winning.

First up, we had Wendy Pedersen, longtime DTES resident and the head of the SRO Collaborative. Starting in 2008, she was doing research into rising rents and loss of units in SROs. Pedersen and the SRO-C realized we needed SRO vacancy control to keep rents from rising. To get that, they needed someone on the inside of City Hall, so they helped get Jean Swanson elected. Swanson passed SRO vacancy control, which went to the courts and then the province, and this year it officially became law in Vancouver!

Next up was Ann Livingston, a founder of VANDU. She talked about how we got Insite, North America’s first legal injection site. At first it wasn’t legal---never ask permission!---but they fought to get it legalized. After it became legal, there were still battles and court cases to be fought. Stephen Harper’s government tried to target Insite. But we won a Supreme Court Victory and the idea of Insite is spreading.

We also heard from Libby Davies, longtime MP and a member of DERA back in the day.

She spoke about the battle to save Carnegie. DERA was determined that Carnegie be a community centre for public use. It took 6 years to convince the city to put aside money to buy the building, and the pivotal meeting took place right here at Carnegie.

Next was Chris Livingstone, a member of the Woodward squat back in the 2000s and at AFD today. He reminds us that just surviving is a victory. At AFD right now they store belongings of 500 people who are on the streets and give food Mondays to Fridays.

Then there was Phoenix Winter, former president of Carnegie’s board, member of CCAP and of the local area planning committee. It was important that when the city was drawing up a local area plan for the DTES, we got community members on the team. We made sure that the planners heard what we had to say, and didn’t just write down what they wanted to hear. In the end, we got the restrictions on condos in the Oppenheimer District, which has helped 22 social housing projects take off since then.

This short list doesn’t include every victory we won here. I also didn’t get to mention the late Sid Chow Tan, whose video we watched together.

Keep learning about DTES victories, and we can keep winning them!