Events: Housing - People's Stop Work & Evictions

Dear friends,

While the City of Vancouver is putting $100 million dollars
into the hands of private developers for the Olympic village,
the City has at the same time given permission to shut down
some of the precious social housing and affordable rental
housing units in the City.

Many of the units in the Little Mountain Housing Complex (LMHC)
have been boarded up, to intimidate the remaining tenants into
moving out. While thousands in Vancouver are homeless, more
than 200 homes now sit empty at Little Mountain.

224 homes will be destroyed years before the reconstruction begins.
A new development is about to begin on the site of 4545 Prince Albert
and 4550 Fraser Street; tenants of 126 low-end market rental units are
about to lose their homes.

The city of Vancouver's Rate-of-Change bylaw, which requires
one-to-one replacement of any rental housing converted or demolished,
does not require owners to rent to their former tenants, and cannot prevent
the new rent from being beyond the means of the former tenants.

Furthermore, the by-law excludes rental apartments in commercially-zoned
areas such as the 4500 block of Fraser Street, where 78 of the 126 units
to be redeveloped are slated for demolition.

What does this all mean? It means our friends and neighbours living in
these 350 units of housing are either being forced out of their familiar homes,
or in danger of becoming homeless.

On Wednesday Nov. 12, from 10-11am, please join us at Main Street
and 36th Avenue, to issue a people's "stop work order". We need to
protest the scandalous situation at LMHC and support the remaining
tenants.

On Thursday Nov. 13, from 10-11am, please join us at Fraser Street
and 29th Avenue, to support the Fraser Street tenants in the protest titled
"Getting Ready to Be Homeless".

David Chudnovsky - MLA, Vancouver Kensington