AAD Statement on the involuntary decampment of DTES homeless encampment

This morning at 7:00am, Tuesday December 19, 2017, Sugar Mountain Tent City was finally crushed. Originating in Ten Year Ten City, the seven and a half month protest represented the political struggle of homeless communities to form their own centers of survival. Today, the Canadian State and its supporters have triumphed in increasing?homelessness.

As the first snow of the year touches the ground, the last remaining residents at Sugar Mountain are forced to take down their tents and find a new place to ‘call home’. Wade, one of the original Sugar Mountain residents, says they are moving under a bridge to keep out of the snow. Other residents have been put in jail, some do not know what they are going to do, and many have chosen to enter the shelter system they resent because it is the only alternative given by the City of Vancouver, the NDP, and the Liberals other than freezing to death.

10 Year Tent City and Sugar Mountain did not fail. These tent cities were organized as a fight back against the normalization and disappearance of homelessness in public consciousness; these tent cities are responsible for keeping homelessness and poverty up front as a public issue – evidence of this was the ease with which we drew media attention consistently through the duration of the camp’s existence. Carlos, a resident of Sugar Mountain said on Friday, “this camp is important because it is in the heart of the City where capitalists are creating homelessness. We have to make that obvious.”

The political work of supporting self-organized tent cities has had a bearing (which no one can exactly measure) on setting the NDP government’s approach towards homelessness. We introduced the “modular housing” demand and Sugar Mountain contributed towards winning billions of dollars to be released in this direction.

Yet, the breakup of Sugar Mountain represents the continuation of the government policy of hiding homelessness rather than confronting and ending poverty. Since the fall rains and cold weather began the City of Vancouver and Province of BC have opened hundreds of temporary and transitional shelter beds in order to cover up the homelessness crisis they have no intention of ending. We know that homeless people hate this policy; that it is humiliating; that it is disgusting and inhuman; that it doesn’t work; and that homeless people are committed to fighting to end it.

The City and Province have tried to neutralize and spin around criticisms of the shelter system by reforming the management style of shelters. For instance, many winter shelters now allow pets and couples and storage of belongings. These modifications are representative of our resistance to the conditions imposed upon us and the unwillingness of the Canadian government to present actual solutions to a major crisis of capitalism and colonialism: the ever-expanding homelessness population.

The tent city tactic for fighting austerity policies demonstrates the contradiction homeless activists are forced to face: the ‘choice’ between health and survival, and political goals. The State and capital have made the emancipation of Indigenous and low-income people directly oppositional to our immediate safety in attempt to shut down the struggle for freedom before it can even start. Alliance Against Displacement unreservedly supports the decisions of homeless people who are facing unrelenting attacks by the State and the weather to accept shelter beds over pneumonia. The breakup of Sugar Mountain Tent City does not represent an end of residents’ determination to abolish the shelter system – it represents the coercive power of that system.

This fight has exposed the reality that the Canadian government is more interested in utilizing its resources to destroy collective power than promote the democratic self-expression of the most vulnerable communities within its colonial borders, that it will let people die if it means maintaining the facade that homelessness doesn’t exist. AAD is committed to continuing the fight against state strategies of displacement and containment, against sophisticated Vision-NDP poverty cover up efforts, and alongside Indigenous and non-native working class homeless communities for the power we need to end poverty, and with it, capitalism and colonialism.

Supreme court decision affirms the value of homeless people lives over the City’s property rights

On May 17th, a group of residents from the Ten Year Tent City trekked to the Supreme Court to defend their charter rights against the City’s application for emergency injunction, a court-order to displace the camp with police force. Homeless people and activists launched the Ten Year Tent City a week before the 2017 BC election to expose the crisis of homelessness that the Parties were trying to ignore, and to create a lifesaving space for homeless people, over a thousand of whom live under the constant threat of violence, police harassment, and displacement in the Downtown Eastside alone. The City of Vancouver’s attempt to get a court injunction to remove the camp callously undermined this effort of homeless people to survive together. Ten Year Tent City residents went to Court dutifully, but expecting to lose. They were surprised by the result.

Judge Neena Sharma sided with the homeless residents , agreeing that an injunction would jeopardize homeless people’s charter right to life, liberty and security. She said the City of Vancouver had failed to prove that the tent city would cause irreparable harm. She denied the City their application for an injunction to displace the camp; Ten Year Tent City will not go! The meaning of Judge Sharma’s historic decision is that the BC Supreme Court has found that homeless people’s lives and well being are part of the public good, and that harm done to their lives must be weighed against the City’s private property rights.

Sharma’s decision does not change homeless people’s rights under Canadian law, but it is is part of a trend of Court decisions that are recognizing homeless people as human beings.  These legal decisions are turning slightly against the general and fundamental colonial rule of Canadian law that private property is more important than people’s lives. These court decisions give homeless and other people who don’t own significant private property more tools to fight against our displacement by corporate and colonial powers, but they are not the only threat we face.

Remembering the pathbreaking Super InTent City of 2015-16

Lessons from Super InTent City

The decision on Wednesday is the second time a Canadian court refused a state injunction to displace homeless people. The first time it happened was about a year ago when the BC Government requested an interim injunction to displace Super InTent City from the lawn of the Victoria court house. Similarly to the Ten Year Tent City case, Chief Justice Christopher Hinkson found that there was not sufficient evidence that the BC government would experience irreparable harm if the camp was allowed to remain. Instead, the judge found that many of the government’s allegations about hazards at Super InTent City were caused by homelessness itself.

The judge also found that the provincial government’s concerns were minor concerns compared to the harm that would be caused to the residents of the camp if the camp were displaced. The judge stated that residents “simply have nowhere to move to, if the injunction were to issue, other than shelters that are incapable of meeting the needs of some of them, or will result in their constant disruption and a perpetuation of a relentless series of daily moves to the streets, doorways, and parks of the City of Victoria”.

Hinkson’s decision put pressure on the Provincial government to provide the tent city residents with actual housing. Following the Hinkson decision, in Spring and Summer 2016, Victoria’s Together Against Poverty Society estimates that the Province was pressed to spend $86 million; creating 714 units of welfare-rate housing for homeless people that would not have otherwise existed. In late June 2016 after having announced these new housing projects, the Province was finally successful in getting an injunction. Hinkson’s decision set a strong precedent for future tent city court cases and it means that now when a government seeks an injunction against a tent city, the judge has to consider the benefits of tent cities to homeless people as well as the harms that would be caused by displacing tent cities.

However, the decision also showed the limits of tent city legal victories. In a reflection on the Super InTent City fight, activists writing in The Volcano wrote: When the law failed to police and displace residents of SIC, the Provincial government hired the Portland Hotel Society, a non-profit housing and social service provider, to manage the camp. The danger posed by social service management is that rather than being temporary, politicized spaces to fight to end homelessness, tent cities could become government-funded, open-air, ‘lowest-barrier’ shelters that modify and manage homelessness. Finally, almost all the housing that was won through the tent city resistance was supportive and institutional housing, and the struggle of former Super InTent city residents to get independent and dignified housing continues to this day.

Benefits of tent city trumps the development of 8 social housing units

The recent decision in Vancouver, builds on Hinkson’s decision in Victoria. Similar to the Super InTent City case, the City was unable to prove that irreparable harm would be caused if Ten Year Tent City remained on the site. But the specific “harms” that the judges considered in each case were different. In Victoria the judge had to decide whether the camp should stay or go based on whether the government’s claims of public safety harms were more important than the camp’s claims of homeless health and safety benefits. In Vancouver the lawyer representing the City even said that there were no safety or fire concerns about Ten Year Tent City. The harms the Vancouver judge had to weigh were between the City’s claim that the camp was interfering with their private property rights and the health and safety claims made by homeless people. The Supreme Court decision to reject the City of Vancouver’s injunction application directly supports low-income people’s lives against the City’s private property rights.

The site at 950 Main Street has been owned by the City of Vancouver since 1998 and has been vacant ever since. In 2016, the City announced they were finally planning to build social housing on the site. The 26 unit development would be managed by Lu’ma Native Housing Society and funded through BC Housing, Services Canada, and allegedly an anonymous German foundation. Social housing sounds good, but only 8 units would be guaranteed to rent at the shelter rate of welfare ($375), which is the maximum rent that homeless people can afford.

In her decision to not grant the injunction, Judge Sharma questioned the City’s sudden urgency to develop the site. The City argued that the anonymous German foundation would pull their $500,000 donation if the development did not start right away; Judge Sharma found that the City failed to provide sufficient evidence that this was in fact the case. With this decision, Sharma supported homeless people’s access to safety and security over the City’s arbitrary use of its private property.

Judge Sharma’s decision to not grant the City its injunction to displace the camp does not change Canadian law because it is not a Charter challenge, but it does help homeless people’s fight for power against some of the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions of homelessness. Sharma’s decision will make it harder for governments to displace tent cities on the grounds of their private property right to use the site for other uses; this decision immediately adds strength to the legal claim made by homeless people in Maple Ridge’s Anita Place tent city. As with Super InTent City’s injunction victory, Sharma’s decision also makes it harder for governments to secure injunctions without providing actual housing alternatives for the homeless residents on site.

Tent cities, however, are not the the end-goal of the anti-displacement movement; they are a tactic in the fight. The legal victory represented by Sharma’s decision to not allow the City of Vancouver to break up Ten Year Tent City gives homeless people and anti-displacement activists more power against police and bylaw officers; it lets us stay in place and create an exception to the rule of daily indignity, police violence, bylaw theft, and displacement that homeless people face in every city and town in BC. But what will we do with that exceptional space? One danger is that we could settle into these spaces and allow tent cities to be another place where low-income people are contained and isolated in our cities, managed by social workers in an open-air, low-cost shelter.

We can avoid that danger by gathering our communities around these exceptional spaces, organize to defend and expand them, and use them as low-income community political spaces from where we can launch a broader struggle against poverty, housing insecurity, and the systematic displacement and dispossession of our communities by for-profit, land grabbing corporations and landlords. The legal victory of Ten Year Tent City against the City of Vancouver should not be interpreted as securing justice – winning some security in our tent cities is the beginning of a new stage of struggle that rises outwards and upwards from the leadership of our most vulnerable communities, to transform every corner of our world.

By: Maria Wallstam
Initially published in the The Volcano Newsletter. 

Volunteers are greatly needed at the Ten Year Tent City on an ongoing basis. Sign up at http://signup.com/go/YYCJbSf for shifts.. Supporters are asked to be present at site on Monday morning and every morning following (until further notice) at 8:30am as the police are expected to show up at any time and evict the residents. Residents are also asking supporters to sign up for regular volunteer shifts that consist of clean-up, moral and community support, help guard the space against police, fire, and social worker invaders, and other supports for residents to defend and improve the camp. 

Ten Year Tent City launched on the morning of Friday April 28th and received its first eviction notice from the City of Vancouver by the end of the workday. The trespass order was issued for 9am of Saturday, April 29th. Thanks to the forty supporters who showed up on Saturday morning to rally in support of the camp, the residents were able to defy the order, against possible police action. As the rally began, a VPD officer pulled up to “count heads” and left when he saw the level of support.

The ongoing support of the community is required in order to continue to fight off the City’s displacement threat. Residents and supporters gathered inside the fenced off City-owned lot at 950 Main st. Speakers began by explaining the name of the 10 Year Tent City. In 2007, in the run up to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, a Tent City started at the same site and ended with the government promise to build social housing on the empty lot to house the homeless.

Dave Diewert with the Alliance Against Displacement dedicated the Tent City to “the 3 Indigenous homeless men who led this fight 10 years ago and who we lost: Dwayne, Noah, & Ashley.” The Tent City is named Ten Year Tent City to commemorate and continue their effort. “It was outrageous that this site was empty in 2007. It’s more outrageous that it’s still empty 10 years later,” Dave added.

Jack Gates, an organizer with SRO Collaborative and a tenant at the Regent hotel, said: “I couldn’t sleep last night thinking how the City won’t use bylaws to clean up the Regent but they’ll use them to break the tent city.” Jack’s observation shows that the City uses bylaws to manage the homelessness crisis caused by the real estate economy and all levels of government.

With BC Housing closing HEAT shelters at the end of Winter, it is not clear where the BC Liberal government expects residents to move to. “People in the DTES can no longer find shelter or a place to stay. 85% of hotel rooms rents are more than $425 a month” Lenee with Carnegie Community Action Project said. But Christy Clark and Gregor Robertson don’t care. They are more interested in harassing the homeless than housing them. As DJ Larkin with Pivot Legal Society said, “the fact is that being homeless is illegal.” Police and bylaw officers pushing people out of places where they can feel safe with their loved ones.

Joyce, a resident, who was previously at 58 W Hastings Tent City, said that after she was evicted from that site she was promised housing, but was instead put in a shelter. “We are human beings not animals, we need homes”; and shelters are not homes. Sarah, another resident, said: “They need to build more housing for families, where I can be with my kid and my boyfriend together.”

Lenee said that to end homelessness all levels of government need to come together to build 10,000 units of social housing every year at welfare rate. BC Liberal cuts social housing programs means there are no homes to move into, and persistent police harassment and brutality means that homeless people are constantly displaced within Vancouver; residents have found that their only option is a tent city that they make for themselves. Crystal, a resident said: “I’m trying to get all my family here to join this tent city because this is the place we need to survive, and to be safe together.”

The residents have been working hard since Friday to build a safe and livable environment where everyone’s basic needs are met, food and supplies are shared, decisions are made communally, and everyone looks after one another. There has been a lot of support from the community at large, with tens of volunteers and supporters present on site at any time and donations flying in on online and offline channels to meet the day to day needs of the camp.

As the Tent City starts its 4th day, the morale of the community is high. The space has been made beautiful with painted murals and signs, and replenished with donated supplies. Everyone is hopeful that this will be a place where they can settle down for a while. As Rick, a resident of 950, said: “I’m here at this tent city because I have a sense of frustration about broken promises from the government. I’m here for hope.”

At 9am on Friday April 28^th, one week before the 2017 BC election and two weeks after the release of the highest homeless count in Vancouver history, a dozen homeless people and a group of supporters took over a city owned empty lot, founding a new tent city. Dubbed the “10 Year Tent City” because this lot was also taken as a tent city in 2007 and while the government promised housing, the lot still stands empty and homelessness has boomed.

While residents and supporters clean, weed, build gravel pathways, and organize the empty lot into neat rows of tents and a common area, City workers and police amass across the street plotting a takedown and displacement of the camp. The question they are asking is whether they can take down the camp without a court order. At 4:30pm Friday the City of Vancouver issued a notice of trespassing, demanding the tent city disperse by 9am. This indicates that the City is considering displacing the tent city without a court injunction. Legal experts and tent city residents are demanding they do otherwise.

DJ Larkin was the lawyer with Pivot Legal Society who represented homeless people in the precedent setting BC Supreme Court case that found that Cities cannot displace homeless camps from public lands if they do not provide reasonable accommodations. Acting as a legal advocate for the new camp, Larkin argued, “The City is not the same as any other private land owner. Because this tent city is being established as a safe haven for people without housing, shelter or other safe options, the City has an obligation to act in accordance with the Constitutional rights of the inhabitants,” she said.

Larkin argued that the City cannot make a decision about the balance of public interest without a Court hearing. “Forcibly evicting people from this encampment in the absence of a court hearing leaves the residents no recourse and may violate their most important Constitutional rights to life and security of the person,” she said. “Now is a time to prioritize the rights of Vancouver’s vulnerable homeless population over the property interests of the City of Vancouver.”

Further complicating the question of public interest is that the 10 Year Tent City was established by a group of homeless women, who founded the camp as a safe space for women. Gena, who was camped in front of the Living Room on Powell Street for months, explained, “We decided to have women lead the tent city because it’s safer. When women are in charge it feels safer and more reliable. I feel trust with women in charge.” This experience of a safer community space is a contrast with her experience on the street, where she said, “On the street I feel put down by cops and let down by everybody.”

But women’s leadership of the 10 Year Tent City doesn’t make it a women-only space. In fact, as two women leaders explain, having men along with them is part of why they don’t want to stay in shelters. Justice said, “I lived at 58 W. Hastings Tent City with my boyfriend. They promised us housing but we didn’t get any. So we went to the only shelter where they allow couples, and now that’s going to move this week and we’re back on the streets.” She said being with her boyfriend is a matter of safety. “It’s hard enough being in a shelter or on the street as a woman. I feel safer with my boyfriend by my side.”

Sarah B is 6 months pregnant and was also living in a tent outside the Living Room. She says, “I’m pregnant so I could get housing but it’s all transitional housing, where the father of my baby is not allowed to stay with the mom and baby. I want my boyfriend to be there with me.” That’s also why she won’t stay in a shelter. But also, she says, “I’d rather stay in a tent than in a dirty SRO with abusive landlords or in transitional or supportive housing with all those rules rules rules…”

But it’s hard to be pregnant on the street, Sarah says. “I stayed in front of Living Room for months and the police and bylaw always harassed me. I told a City worker than I was pregnant and he said ‘not my problem’ and threw out my stuff, like they do with everyone.”

For these women, the 10 Year Tent City is safer and healthier than shelters, transitional housing, or sleeping on the street. “I feel like it’s safer here because the cops aren’t harassing us, and the City workers aren’t scooping up my stuff,” Sarah said. “Here there are people to watch out for us.” This watching-out is a something that rang true for Justice too; she said, “I already feel like this tent city is home. We’re all the same people – I feel supported and protected by people like me, in the same situation as me.”

Alliance Against Displacement (AAD) is supporting the 10 Year Tent City as a space of survival for these women and other homeless people languishing on the streets while the NDP and BC Liberals ignore them. Maria Wallstam, organizer with AAD and supporter of the camp’s leadership council, emphasized the need for the camp in the context of BC’s homelessness and housing crisis. “The Metro Vancouver homeless count found more than 70 temporary camps as well as thousands of homeless people. These camps are temporary places that homeless people put up to survive, and they are constantly attacked and displaced by bylaw officers and police,” she said. “AAD is helping by supporting homeless people against those violent forces of displacement; we’re on the side of building homeless people’s power against politicians who are giving up on homelessness, and trying to bury the issue. We are calling on the City of Vancouver to stand with the 10 Year Tent City demand for a Provincial social housing program to build 10,000 units of social housing every year and end, not normalize, homelessness.”

AAD is calling for supporters to rally at the camp at starting at 8:30am on Saturday April 29th to demonstrate support for homeless people, the 10 Year Tent City’s demand for the Provincial parties to pledge to build 10,000 units of social housing every year to end homelessness, and against the City’s attempt to smash the tent city and bury the issue of homelessness.

Besides the emergency rally, campers are also calling for ongoing support. To volunteer for a support shift, contact organize@stopdisplacement.ca