Tent city update

Mercedes Eng

In response to Homelessness Action Week (October 12-18), the City of Vancouver dismantled the tent city at Oppenheimer Park. At 10pm on October 17th, the Vancouver Police Department enforced the BC Supreme Court injunction and sent homeless people packing. While dominant media coverage of the dispersal from the park has emphasized the placement of people into housing and shelters, it has neglected to give voices to the people who say they would rather sleep in tents than in the City’s shelter beds. This is because often shelters do not have space for people to store their belongings overnight. This is because people do not feel safe from the threat of sexual and physical violence in the shelters.

During the same week, the Ray-Cam Co-operative Centre, a Downtown Eastside community centre, announced that BC Housing is selling Stamps Place, one of Vancouver’s biggest social-housing complexes. As DTES artist and community organizer Ali Lohan said, it is more accurately Homelessness Action Weak.

I will conclude my Commentaries series on Vancouver poets and poetry with a haiku by Downtown Eastside poet laureate and harm reduction activist, Bud Osborn:

who do you

panhandle

for real change?

November 5, 2014

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In June the City of Vancouver announced that Mayor Gregor Robertson and Council voted unanimously to acknowlege that Vancouver is built on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations peoples, also collectively called the Coast Salish peoples. Despite his campaign promise to end homelessness by 2015, Robertson and the party he leads, Vision Vancouver, have a history of colluding with real estate developers in gentrifying Vancouver, resulting in displacement of low-income residents and a corresponding rise in homelessness.

In this city many struggles for social justice are rooted in understanding the ongoing occupation of Indigenous land. In places/spaces where these struggles occur, it is protocol to acknowledge unceded land. But the City’s decision to formally declare that Vancouver is on unceded territory as it actively increases the number of homeless people, many of whom are indigenous, is an empty gesture, a public relations tactic.

To protest the doubling of the homeless population since Vision began envisioning Vancouver as a real-estate developer's paradise, homeless people, Indigenous activists, and housing activists established a tent city in Oppenheimer Park shortly after the City’s announcement. When threatened with removal, Indigenous tent city residents responded that the park is on unceded land while other residents cited the B.C. Court’s Adams decision that it is unconstitutional to deny homeless people the right to find shelter outdoors.

It is from this spatial and temporal frame that I consider the work of some of the many Vancouver poets who focus on the politics of the city of Vancouver—of Lotusland, Terminal City, Vansterdam, the City of Glass, Vancity, Gold Mountain, Saltwater City, Raincity, the Wet Coast, the Left Coast, unceded Coast Salish territories—and its formation, its development, its architecture, its waves of gentrification, its attempt to become a global city, its branding as “most livable city.”

Mercedes Eng is a teacher and writer in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territories. Her first book of poetry is Mercenary English (CUE Books, 2013).

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

Posts

Jordan Abel's 'The Place of Scraps'

Cecily Nicholson's 'From the Poplars'

Reading Vancouver from abroad

Decoding 'Digital Natives'

Downtown Eastside poets: Antonette Rea and Phoenix Winter

Downtown Eastside poets: Bud Osborn

Architectural Digest: Vancouver edition

no one is illegal / the system is illegal

Tent city update

Unceded west coast city: Vancouver

Tent city update