Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Coming up, I talk with Jeff Masuda about an open letter to the city of Vancouver calling for an end to evictions of unhoused people.
Speaker: More than 700 academics from 58 universities across Canada have issued an open letter calling for an end to the eviction of encampments in the city of Vancouver. The letter is in response to the wholesale removal of tents along Hastings Street that took place in the first week of April. It's addressed to the mayor and council, union and health officials, plus members of the provincial government.
Speaker: Many of the signatories of the letter carry out research and community -based work on housing, public health, and social justice, both in the Downtown Eastside and elsewhere. Jeff Masuda is professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria. He joins me today to talk about the concerns raised in the letter. Hello, Jeff. Good morning, Jean. That's a lot of signatories to the letter.
Speaker: Since the weekend, that letter has just surpassed the 1000 mark. And so certainly this is not last week's story, but it's a letter that signifies the breadth and the depth of concern, not only here in Vancouver, but across the country, from folks who are watching very closely what's unfolding in Vancouver, and probably in many cases, given the systemic nature of the housing crisis,
Speaker: drawing comparisons with what's going on in their own backyards in terms of encampments that have cropped up, increasingly so, during and since the COVID -19 pandemic.
Speaker: So the letter really is certainly an indictment on what's unfolded last week in Vancouver, but I think it also signifies the level of concern that we have across the country and certainly across the political spectrum around how we've allowed the housing crisis in this country to devolve to the point where we're dealing with these issues.
Speaker: Now, city manager Paul Mockery said that the encampment on Hastings Street was a very serious public safety issue. And in fact, the fire chief here, Karen Fry, had issued an order in July based on extreme fire risk. Do encampments pose a public safety risk, in your opinion? I mean, I think it goes without saying that when you look at what's unfolding on the streets in East Hastings,
Speaker: who are forced to live within an encampment on the street with all of the physical and social dangers that come with it.
Speaker: I guess probably a different way to look at the question is, does removing that encampment decrease the danger to health and safety of people? And the answer to that question is a little bit more uncertain. We simply don't know. Anecdotally, I think we do have some degree of evidence of what happens to individuals who are forcibly removed from encampments. And we can say with some degree of confidence
Speaker: people's health outcomes and puts people in instances of danger, particularly people in vulnerable positions based on gender or based on drug use and things like that. But any benefits to public safety with decampments such as we've seen unfolding last week in Vancouver
Speaker: If you're trying to report on increases in safety and things like that and decreases in fire, I would take those kinds of reports with a grain of salt. I mean, we're still in the active mode of decantment and any short -term benefits, I think, are certainly going to be offset by long -term risks. The letter states that internal city of Vancouver documents rationalize the decantment as an attempt to reset behaviour. Now, do we know what they mean by that?
Speaker: I have only seen that quoted in the media and so quite frankly when I read that I was taken aback. I mean it is a shocking statement to say that when you're talking about people who are living
Speaker: in the most precarious kind of situation possible in this country. And their behaviors, if you will, are basically survival strategies that we're asking individuals and responsibleizing those individuals to reset their behavior is preposterous. And I think the letter puts it that way. It's kind of like the thing you might say to your teenager. Indeed. It is certainly patronizing, if not dehumanizing.
Speaker: There have been 10 previous decampments here in Vancouver over the past decade. So it's obviously a strategy that's not working from the point of view of the city. And there's a suggestion in the letter that's actually a form of vendetta against the poor. Can you explain what's meant by that? Yeah, that's a term that we borrow from this concept that we also mention in the letter, which is urban revanchism.
Speaker: This is a philosophy or an ideology of urban governance that's been around for probably the last 30, 40 years. And it's a concept that basically talks about the ways in which governments have put themselves in a position where they put responsibility for social problems in the city, problems that are underpinned by societal neglect, social disinvestment, government disinvestment, and things like that.
Speaker: and they place responsibility on the poor. And so the vendetta is really about taking the city back from the ostensible encroachment of the poor on public spaces that are really not meant for them, but rather are meant for people like you and me. And so in 2023, a decantment such as has unfolded in Vancouver
Speaker: in a way that really harkens back to decampments that have been taking place not only in Vancouver but across the continent over those decades.
Speaker: It really seems to me to be taking two steps back. Not all tent cities are the same, and certainly not all decampment strategies are the same. You can't paint them all with one brush. Of course, nobody wants to see any kind of decampment happen, but with a more preventative point of view, nobody, including people living in tent cities, want to be there in the first place.
Speaker: So the tactics that were used in this case really haven't learned any lessons from this long history of when cities find themselves in a position where they are feeling obliged to enact a decampment, that there are better practices than what we've seen in Vancouver last week.
Speaker: I guess whether you see it as vengeance or a vendetta, you could also just see it as making the problems of poor people invisible. Indeed, it makes the problems invisible and it also makes the people invisible and that's one of the primary dangers of decantment is particularly when there is a dearth of available adequate and dignified permanent housing, is it invisibilizes a situation and that invisibilization is a major threat to their well -being.
Speaker: Well, let's talk about the housing that's available because the city says, it always says, that it offered housing to the people whose tents and belongings were removed. And I heard that this time people's belongings were put in large plastic containers with their names on them, but they could only claim them on condition that they accepted the housing that was offered. Is there enough housing to offer the people who were decamped?
Speaker: Well, I would just maybe reframe the offer because certainly what might be available in the form of shelters and temporary housing is not.
Speaker: permanent, adequate and dignified housing. We don't in this country, in Vancouver or anywhere else, have nearly sufficient numbers of permanent housing available to people. And so what's on offer are situations that are often, I mean certainly people are aware of the available shelters. Whether those shelters will accept people based on who they are or whether those shelters are
Speaker: safer really is contingent on people's personal situation. And so people have lots of experience with shelters and choose to protect themselves by refusing those offers. Why is the housing crisis so acute right now in the Downtown Eastside?
Speaker: I can answer that in two ways. The acute part of it is certainly the fact that three years into a global pandemic, many of us like to think to ourselves that it's largely in the rearview mirror. It is definitely not in the rearview mirror when we think about the situation in the downtown New Side as a direct consequence of the pandemic, of the multilayered crises that have unfolded because of the pandemic.
Speaker: in relation to housing affordability for sure, about the toxic drug supply. And so the numbers of unhoused people in the downtown Eastside have been growing steadily over many years, but certainly the massive increase that we've seen since 2020 is because of the pandemic. Now, the other side of answering that question, we have to go back in time much, much further back in time. This is not a surprise, the situation in the downtown Eastside
Speaker: is the logical outcome of decades of disinvestment at all levels of government to secure and sustain an adequate housing supply for all Canadians. Indigenous people make up almost half the homeless population. How does this decampment square with, for example, the city's adoption of UNDRIP?
Speaker: It's a shame that this hasn't been more widely acknowledged on the part of the city that when we see government statements about the Decampment, there is never reference to this point that what's actually happening here is an expulsion and eviction and dispossession of dozens of Indigenous people from their homes in the Downtown Eastside.
Speaker: And so in other places, including Crab Park, which sits on federal lands, there is more recognition of those rights. But for some reason, because the other sites of encampment are full, many people are choosing to live on East Hastings Street for whatever reason, those rights aren't recognized.
Speaker: The letter makes it parallel between the destruction and removal of Squamish families from the Kitsilano Reserve, and that was like 110 years ago.
Speaker: Indeed, not so long ago, 1913, I think it was. Yeah, and I think that was a timely homology to think about colonial dispossession and expulsion within the same city is appropriate. Of course, that's not my story to tell. This letter was necessarily concise and there are all kinds of precedents of forcible expulsion that the city, all levels of government, including the city, have been complicit in and have enacted
Speaker: I can speak with a little bit more direct experience about another expulsion in the Downtown Eastside. Some number of decades after 1913, in 1942, Japanese Canadians by the thousands were dispossessed from their homes and expelled from the very same neighborhood today. And in both cases, whether it was the eviction or expulsion of Squamish peoples from Senok or the Japanese Canadians from the Downtown Eastside,
Speaker: It has taken decades upon decades for any form of redress to take place, whether we'll see that happen today in the form of hundreds, if not thousands of housing units that are needed to finally solve this problem that remains to be seen. What is the letter calling on the mayor, council and staff to do? And it's also city engineering services workers.
Speaker: In the short term, the call is for a change in approach. The way in which this encampment unfolded represents the worst practice of how to deal with a tent city that has, because of the lack of available supports, gotten to the point where it does pose risks to the people living within those encampments and of course the surrounding community. In the larger picture, we call for the city to return to a position of being a champion.
Speaker: I mean, I think that this government, the new municipal government has inherited a problem that's certainly long in the making. But in the last 10 years or so, I would say from my own experience that the city really did make a fair degree of progress in shifting
Speaker: from its previous approach to one where at least they acknowledge that there is a need for multiple levels of government to intervene. And so taking the role of champion is really important. There's a lot of attention that's being paid to what's happening at the city, but we can't let senior levels of government evade scrutiny because all levels of government have been complicit in the creation of the housing crisis that we see today. Well, thanks so much for speaking with me today, Jeff. Well, thank you very much, Jean.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Jeff Masuda, professor in the School of Public Health and Social Policy at the University of Victoria, and one of over a thousand signatories of an open letter about the decampment on Hastings Street earlier this month.
Speaker: The Red Eye Collective is based in Vancouver. You can check us out at coopradio .org slash redeye.
