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Housing
The Olympics cause displacement
While everyone focuses on the desperation of homelessness, the much more revealing and more difficult problem, displacement, spreads as the Olympics draws near
By Reed Eurchuk
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A June 2007 paper by the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions [COHRE] called "Fair Play for Housing Rights: Mega-Events, Olympic Games and Housing Rights," analyzed the impact on housing of the Olympics and other tourist events.
In every city they looked at, they found massive evictions and /or displacement due to inflating housing prices (whether for sale or for rent). In Seoul, according to this report, 720,000 people were forcibly evicted from their homes. In Barcelona, "housing became so unaffordable as a result of the Olympic Games that low-income earners were forced to leave the city." In Atlanta, police issued 9,000 arrest citations to homeless people (mostly African-Americans) as part of an Olympics-inspired campaign to "clean the streets," and approximately 30,000 people were displaced by Olympics-related gentrification and development.
"COHRE estimates that over 1.25 million people already have been displaced due to Olympics-related urban redevelopment," states the report. Vancouver is already seeing huge displacement from the inner city area. According to the report, "most Olympic Host Cities undertake massive redevelopment of their inner city areas." "Even if the Olympic venues are not located nearby," it goes on, "the need to improve the overall 'look' of the city and to provide a wider range of facilities can lead to an intensification or hastening of pre-existing 'redevelopment plans.'" For the poor and low-income residents who happen to live in the areas targeted for redevelopment, this revitalisation often results in forced evictions or displacement.
So far Vancouver is well on its way to fulfilling both the Barcelona and the Atlanta scenarios. The housing market displaces people from Vancouver daily. People look for housing and find it unavailable and unaffordable, so they move to Surrey, or Langley, or Calgary. This is the "displacement" mentioned above. Meanwhile, Mayor Sullivan's (un)Civil City Initiative and the hiring of ex-law man, ex-Liberal Attorney General Geoff Plant, sends a clear signal that some form of the Atlanta solution may be coming our way. BC Housing Minister Rich Coleman's recent statement that the "eventual answer" may be "sending homeless [people] to other parts of BC" also suggests some form of the Atlanta solution remains a possibility. At this time the path of mass evictions does not appear on the horizon, but there is still some time before the spectacle begins.
Homelessness is a symptom of a deeper problem. Locally, a recent debate focused on the relationship between the Olympics and the rise in homelessness in Vancouver. The Anti-Poverty Committee claimed a causal relationship between the Olympics, evictions and homelessness. Since this is municipal "let's beat on the APC" month in Vancouver, the local corporate media piggy-piled on. I heard Jim Green challenging them to "show us the beef" on the local CBC morning show. The papers have been quoting PIVOT lawyer David Eby to the effect that he does not know of any evictions directly caused by the Olympics. By focusing on a single symptom of Vancouver's housing problem-homelessness-the debate avoids getting to the root of the problem.
City policy wonks and contracted types, NGOs and even "radical" critics like the APC, all agree that the problem confronting Vancouver is homelessness. City reports such as the "Homelessness Action Plan" and the "Homelessness Funding Model" focus solely on homelessness.
But even the NGO reports, like PIVOT's "Cracks in the Foundation," and the Inner City Housing Table's "Report of the Inner-City Inclusive Housing Table," while adopting a broader perspective, still contextualize the problem firmly as one of homelessness.
Ken Dobell's report to the City, which features a caricature of a homeless person on the cover-he kind of looks like Santa Claus after a five day binge-is typical. Dobell and co-author Donald Fairbairn list a litany of causes of the "homelessness problem": the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, the population of drug-addicted people, people with physical disabilities or mental handicaps, people in the sex trades . . . that is, the usual suspects. In trying to help the homeless, Dobell and the rest contribute to a narrowed discussion in which homelessness appears as a discrete problem, unrelated to the myriad other housing problems. In this way they avoid the larger causes of homelessness-land speculation, government collusion with the development industry, government refusal to tax windfall speculative profits, housing-induced poverty among wide swaths of average working people-that would require radical solutions.
There are tens of thousands of people in Greater Vancouver in insecure housing arrangements living one pay cheque-or one order to vacate due to renovations-away from homelessness. Thousands more are already homeless, but they have patched something over for the time being, and they couch surf with friends or relatives or live crowded into small apartments. Instead of dealing with the larger structural problem, the "homelessness debate" accepts a neo-liberal social welfare paradigm, ie they focus on those most victimized by the housing crisis, the homeless. A broader perspective would require remedies, such as massive new taxes on the real estate industry, land banking, and removal of land from the private developers, that would impinge on the real estate and development industries' massive profits.
The homeless are the evicted who do not have the means (financial, social, familial) to reenter the housing market. Drug addiction, mental health problems and prostitution do not cause homelessness. It is our irrational real estate market that produces homelessness, in the same way that our economy produces unemployment. Our economy requires unemployment to keep wages down, and our housing market requires low vacancy rates and few low-end rental units to keep real estate industry profits high. You could house every homeless person in Vancouver and there will be hundreds more to replace them.
The argument regarding APC's claim is irrelevant. APC formulated its slogan wrong, but they are right: thousands of people have been displaced in Vancouver by the huge rise in the cost of housing in Vancouver. Much of the pressure, as explained above in the COHRE report, is caused by the Olympic developments. However, most of the displaced were not homeless, they were simply working people looking for somewhere to live, but they're unable to cough up the $900 or so per month it costs for a single bedroom apartment in Vancouver.
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