cope

This weekend, Vancouver's left-wing municipal party will hold its annual full general coming together at the Maritime Labour Centre. Before hundreds of Vancouverites file into the 600-capacity hall, I want to reverberate on "what at present" and "what next" for COPE. My hope is to place COPE within the larger history of Vancouver's political struggles — in particular the unnamed struggle between the political masses and the rich who oppose them.

Brief history: 1968 — Present

The Committee of Progressive Electors (COPE) was formed in 1968 by organized labour, tenant organizers, and socialists. In 1993 the political party was was renamed the Coalition of Progressive Electors, signaling the entry of social movements emergent since the 1960s, including feminist, anti-racist and peace movements rooted in Vancouver.

Throughout its history, the party has been known for its fight to defend public funding for transit and housing, rent control in the 1970s, radical demands for total employment in the 1980s, and more recently, a Sanctuary Urban center policy to confront Harper'southward policing and anti-immigrant agenda.

Mass-based and membership-driven, COPE brings together social movements, organizations and communities from across the city. In that spirit, COPE has as well struck balloter agreements with Greens and the civic NDP since 1980. At the plow of the 21st century, however, groups within COPE began to fence that the principle of coalition-building should exist extended to Vancouver's business customs and developer class.

Most of the few remaining rights and affordable housing that tenants have in British Columbia were earned by working class activists and renters in the 1970s. This piece, written in 1981 past old housing activist and COPE City Councilor Bruce Yorke, provides some insight into the local by. Information technology documents struggles that won tangible victories in the late '60s and '70s, while hinting at how new basis can exist won today. In the context of unending evictions, a neoliberal municipal government, and a right-shifting provincial NDP under Adrian Dix, tenants must now more than always take to the streets, organize buildings, and look land-owning interests straight in the eyes.

-Editors

The pioneer and leader of the tenants' movement in B.C. was the Vancouver Tenant Quango established in 1968. This was an individual membership organization with membership dues at $2.00 a yr. The fees were used to set up an role with a phone.

In August, 1968, we held our first coming together of tenants. It was at the Driftwood apartment in Kitsilano. I took the initiative in calling that meeting. The chief effect disturbing tenants was a 5% increase in rents imposed on very short notice, plus a rather insulting letter of the alphabet from Block Brothers.

The meeting was held at Kitsilano Beach. Nearly 75 tenants attended. Alderman Harry Rankin was also there and gave united states of america his support.

The media coverage of this coming together created a lot of interest and led to many telephone enquiries.

We didn't win that boxing just nosotros did found the fact that tenants were adamant to get organized and brand their voices heard.


Yesterday Vision Vancouver released its concluding report on Housing Affordability in Vancouver. Shortly later on being elected for a second term, Vision created an Affordability Task Force to accost issues of housing affordability. The high-profile Task Force was co-chaired by the Mayor and right fly millionaire developer Olga Ilich, a onetime member of Gordon Campbell'south cabinet. The remaining members were comprised of xiv Vision appointees drawn from the evolution industry: prominent developers, landlord lobbyists and manufacture insiders. Not a single renter or renter representative was appointed to the Chore Forcefulness, despite the fact that renters — making upwardly 55% of the city's population — are the worst afflicted by the housing crunch.

For a long time Vancouver elites take struggled to foursquare the circle of how to produce housing affordability without negatively affecting developer profits and property owners' interests. The Chore Forcefulness has proved no different in encountering this clash betwixt ideal and reality, vexed by the challenge of balancing profitability with public acrimony about the housing crisis. That contradiction is the precipitous rock upon which the Job Force is now shipwrecked. Despite Olga Ilich'southward statement that "the biggest cost in Vancouver is the cost of country," the Mayor admitted yesterday to the Province that he "doesn't see the affordability plan having a wide impact on land values in Vancouver."

The final recommendations of the Task Force prove little accelerate from the neoliberal recommendations offered in the interim recommendations of last March. The first, and arguably the most disastrous for deregulating the private housing market, is a recommendation that planners carelessness the metropolis'southward Inclusionary Zoning requirements. "The City'southward current inclusionary zoning policy requires developers to set up aside 20% of land for affordable housing," the study states. "While this approach creates the opportunity for affordable housing development…a different approach will be needed to deliver affordability."

Current metropolis by-laws require twenty% non-market housing in all new large-scale evolution projects, as well equally in the DEOD (Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer Commune). This twelvemonth, still, inclusionary zoning policies have already been flouted by major urban center council decisions, including 800 Griffiths Fashion, "market rent" social housing at 955 E Hastings, and the conclusion to rent "social housing" for $900 per month at Sequel 138 Pantages redevelopment. The Task Force recommendation goes a step further in pushing council to put the deregulation approach into writing, thereby further lowering the bar for maintaining safeguards against privatization. The Mainlander has warned as far back as January 2011 that Vision Vancouver was planning to remove inclusionary zoning in Vancouver. This proposal will just make Vancouver more than unaffordable for the long-term.

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION| The first office of Nathan Crompton'due south iii-part essay introduced the history of anti-asian racism in Vancouver, while the second part focused on contemporary versions of scapegoating in Vancouver culture. Simply if racism and scapegoating are used to hide reality, the following essay asks a simpler question: what is the reality it hides? Behind the "empty signifiers" of culture and its discourses, what exactly is happening on the ground in Vancouver?

Despite constant invocations of "the Chinese" in debates on the housing crunch, a full third of all people living in poverty in Vancouver are Chinese. Today, in the shifting world of the city'due south various neighborhoods, the gentrification of Eastward Vancouver is in fact having its nearly direct effect on immigrants and racialized communities. Crompton draws from endless academic publications and recent demographic studies to reveal that the complex diversions of scapegoating conceal the racial and class divisions that define contemporary Vancouver.

Footing Zero: Mount Pleasant

The signs are difficult to ignore for anyone taking a walk down Main Street. Since at least 2008, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood has experienced a renewed wave of gentrification. Major shifts in the movement of uppercase take brought a sea-change in the number of rental apartments upgraded, renovicted, converted into strata condos, or altogether demolished to make manner for new condo towers. Loftier-cease storefronts and promotional materials from the local BIA give an impression of a settled centre-class neighborhood, and the epitome depicted past local boosterism is slowly in the process of matching up with a new reality. Just nevertheless the hype also tells us surprisingly piffling about the neighborhood. At this phase of gentrification, prototype-making even so lacks command over the world it might hope to represent. A vast majority of residents in the North Mountain Pleasant area are renters (lxx%), most of them first and second-generation immigrants (58%).[one] Despite beingness put in the unforgiving cross-hairs of gentrification, and despite superficial appearances suggesting urban lifestyle and conspicuous consumption, Mount Pleasant is today a proud and live immigrant neighborhood.

EDITORAL INTRODUCTION | From the start, Vancouver has been marked by a history of racism against Chinese and Asian immigrants, a fact which few commentators tin overlook (although not few enough, as this article demonstrates in its sharp critique of Vancouver Courier columnist Mark Hasiuk). Part I of this three-part essay past Nathan Crompton reaches into contemporary Vancouver to find that despite the passage of fourth dimension, original assumptions and archetypes of race and class have proven indispensable for an ongoing history of scapegoating – a history that has, co-ordinate to Crompton, reached a peak in today's discussion of housing in Vancouver. Far from signaling the simple suspension away from the city's colonial past, the mystical existent-manor economy proves fertile grounds for the re-capitulation of the time-tested logic of political scapegoating. This iii-function essay is sure to have an touch not just for its utilise of historical and empirical research to blow the lid off assumptions that Vancouver's housing crisis can be explained by Asian upper-case letter, but for its direct critique of household politicians and commentators. From Sandy Garossino to Gregor Robertson, few are spared in this militant blaring-telephone call to movement across the present by immigration out the skeletons of history.

Introduction

At unlike points throughout the 125 years of its history, colonial Vancouver has blamed its problems on others. The relation betwixt "citizens" and "foreigners" underlying the identity of Vancouver has been at times explosive – equally when anti-Asian riots attacked Chinatown and Japantown in 1907. Flashpoints occurred once more in the 1880s, the 1900s, the 1930s, the 1970s and 1990s, ever with the aforementioned result: to draw up new lines of exclusion and discrimination while deepening the political disorientation of the times. At other moments the relationship has been segregated simply passive, embedded in the habits and rituals of the city. Today, when it is assumed that xenophobic movements could not gain the same momentum every bit 100 years ago, the penchant to blame "foreigners" for local problems continues. In an assessment of contemporary Vancouver, Henry Yu once asked presciently, "is Vancouver the future or the past"?[one] If the question reads similar a riddle, information technology is considering the answer is equally uncertain. Every bit extreme-right movements today pick up momentum in Europe and elsewhere in the context of financial crisis and long-term economical stagnation, it is now more than ever that we should examine global and local histories of racism and xenophobia.

Fin de siècle Vancouver

There was recently a telling moment when Vancouver Courier columnist Mark Hasiuk used his column to target Vancouver school board trustee, Allan Wong. Hasiuk attacked Wong for a motion put forward at the schoolhouse board calling on the province to incorporate the history of British Columbians of Chinese descent into the regular provincial curriculum. Curriculum changes were not needed, according to Hasiuk, since there is already also much Chinese Canadian history taught in the secondary curriculum. Hasiuk moreover mocks the Head Tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Canadian Pacific Railway as a "holy trinity" in both the curriculum and cultural memory of Vancouver.

Today Vancouver is conceived as a monopolizable totality, everywhere placed in circulation for consumption and contemplation. Equally every square-inch of the urban center becomes privatized for Vancouver's capitalist class, the balance of forces veer in favor of profit, enjoyment, and the preservation of crisis. Beating with the mercurial blood of surplus value, the pulse of the urban center is tightly constricted past the developer-monopoly tourniquet — a tried, tested and truthful appliance of monopoly-backer evolution that equilibrates the terms of supply and need in club to keep housing prices impossibly loftier.

This slice was originally published in rabble.ca here

In the poorest urban neighbourhood in Canada, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES), gentrification has been on the movement for decades. Plotting these new developments on a map of the DTES and walking forth the at present unfamiliar streets reveals gentrification for what it is: a grade of structural violence.

Gentrification is the social, economic, and cultural transformation of a predominantly depression-income neighbourhood through the deliberate influx of upscale residential and commercial development. Encouraged past municipal development policies, economic incentives for investors, and the mythical pull of the creative city, urban land is purchased and developed at low price for middle course buyers. As urban theorist Neil Smith writes, "As a generalized urban strategy, gentrification weaves together the interests of city managers, developers and landlords, corporate employers and cultural and educational institutions."

Despite pockets of low-income housing, the transformation of Gastown and Victory Square into a tourist destination with trendy restaurants and boutique shops is almost complete. On the western edge of the DTES is the massive mixed development at the old Woodward's site/squat with over 500 condos, SFU campus with an arts heart funded by notorious mining giant Goldcorp, and retail stores. This has set off a tidal wave of gentrification within a few blocks, with four new condo developments (Paris Annex, Paris Block, threescore W. Cordova, 21 Doors) and countless restaurants and confined, including those owned by barons Sean Heather (Irish gaelic Heather, Salty Tongue, Shebeen, Penn Bakeshop, Everything Café, Fetch Kiosk, Biting Tasting Room, Judas Goat) and Marc Brand (Diamond, Sharks and Hammers, Boneta, Sea Monstr Sushi, Save on Meats), over-priced coffee shops, and designer stores. In symbiotic fashion, retail stores and cultural sites proliferate alongside new housing, rendering the area more welcoming and familiar for wealthier consumers.