“Uplifting” Council motion town hall
by Devin O’Leary
If you’ve been following the Carnegie Housing Project (CHP) for the last several months, you might be pretty plugged into the “Uplifting the DTES” motion ordeal. If not, then I’m glad you’re reading this! Either way, this message is for you!
Back in November, CHP partnered up with some other neighbourhood groups including the SRO Collaborative and Heart of the City Festival to host a panel to discuss this city council motion. We even got the author, Councilor Rebecca Bligh to come! Community leaders like Phoenix Winter, Kathy Shimizu, Norm Leech, and our own Jean Swanson talked about the low-income community's struggle to get special zoning rules for the DTES back in 2014. These rules virtually exclude condos and require social housing in the central Oppenheimer District, as well as require social housing across most of the DTES to rent ⅓ of the units at shelter rate ($500/mo). The impact of these rules has been to limit land speculation and make it easier for non-profits and the government to build social housing.
The “Uplifting” motion proposes some ideas that might serve low-income DTES residents, but a couple lines mention changing these protective rules to allow developers to build 30-storey expensive towers in the DTES. This would increase land values and make it much harder for nonprofits to compete with for-profit developers and build social housing.
A bunch of groups are nervous about this, so we’re going around talking to residents and allies about how this motion could change the neighbourhood and what we can do to make sure the DTES stays for the people, not profit.
The next step for organizing around this is talking with each other at a town hall that we are hosting on Thursday, January 30th at 6pm in the Carnegie Theatre. This is where we can give updates about what the city is up to and share ideas about what we want to do in response. This is BIG. If anyone was around in 2014 for the DTES local area plan, which required a massive organizing effort, you know what it takes to go toe to toe with the city and their developer buddies. AND, maybe we can get some good things out of it, like a more urgent push from government to fund good housing for people on fixed incomes and the thousands of unhoused people in Vancouver.
