When you choose to hold a city-led, invite-only housing conference in a municipality mired in an affordability crisis you can expect to take a few licks.
For the City of Vancouver, those came early Thursday when protesters belonging to a group called the Alliance Against Displacement stormed the stage at its Re:Address conference.
“Tax the rich. House the poor. Social housing now,” the dozen-or-so anti-poverty advocates chanted as they rushed the podium.
Mayor Gregor Robertson, who had been moderating a panel of housing experts from Vienna, San Francisco, New York and Toronto, stepped aside as security personnel grappled with the protesters and forcefully led one woman out of the room.
Then came a few unexpected twists.
Rather than dismissing the anti-poverty protesters with jeers, attendees in the audience greeted them with scattered applause, one of which came in reaction to the following decree: “The problem is capital investment itself in the form of private property. We demand homes — a shelter from the loss (to) capital investment.”
That, incidentally, is in line with a message city staff and councillors have repeatedly stated in past months when discussing the state of local housing. As Robertson insisted when he announced an empty homes tax: “Vancouver housing is first and foremost for homes, not a commodity to make money with.”
Later, a member of the mayor’s staff told reporters that the city had given the protesters free passes to attend the ticketed conference.
And finally, after the protesters left the building and the panel resumed, the mayor and his international guests offered messages of solidarity with the advocates.
“I think probably almost all of us in the room agree with the sentiments of the people who were here, who expressed their frustration and anger at the current situation,” Robertson began.
“Lots of us would probably like to see more taxes on the rich to house the poor,” he continued, to applause.
Before the protesters marched out, one of them had shouted: “F*ck your experts. Build our homes now.” Among the handwritten signs they carried out with them was one that called for 77,000 social housing units per year across Canada. One member of the group said that figure represented its estimated national need for homes for low-income residents.
Ana Bailão, a panelist and Toronto city councillor, tried to make sense of the disruption. She said stagnant salaries, income inequality and abandoned dreams of home ownership — those of long-standing residents and newcomers alike — are leading people to understand that the basic need of shelter is in jeopardy.
“It’s understandable when people are angry, because we’re failing them,” Bailão said.
Vicki Been, the commissioner of New York City’s department of housing preservation and development, said she had a more pessimistic take.
“The notion that local governments can really solve this problem is just fundamentally wrong and to me it’s a dangerous tip towards more and more activism at a local level but not enough attention at a state and federal level.”
That too smacked of a message often repeated by Robertson, who is regularly criticized for failing to deliver on his promise to end homelessness in Vancouver by 2015, and one that he offered again at a news conference after the panel broke.
“In Canada and B.C., those levels of government have downloaded considerably (their) housing responsibilities onto cities. That’s what has created a crisis, along with huge demand.”
