Strathcona “Safe Homes For All” Protest Reveals The Hypocrisy Of NIMBYISM
Faux-Solidarity Finds A Welcome Home
From 7:30–8:30 on Tuesday morning, housed residents of the Strathcona neighbourhood gathered adjacent the Kennedy-Trudeau homeless encampment to protest…something.
According to organizers, the lively group of children, teens, and adults was at the intersection of Hawks and Prior to demand government action on a housing crisis that has plagued Vancouver for decades but has newly touched Strathcona. A major homeless encampment has been a thorn in the neighbourhood’s side since June, and residents announced yesterday that they have had enough. What exactly these folks have had enough of will depend on whom you ask (and whether the cameras are rolling), though.
An invitation to the event reads, “In recent months, hundreds of our unhoused neighbours have been repeatedly displaced into unsafe and unsupported park spaces.” This is true, and it definitely warrants protest. However, the invitation then goes on to say, “The Strathcona community has also experienced a dramatic increase in personal and property crime, also [sic] public health hazards,” a move that exposes the protestor’s disingenuousness. First, there is no evidence to support the assertion that crime has directly escalated in conjunction with the camp. Crime has been rising throughout Vancouver for months, regardless of location. Next, and more importantly, how can a group of organizers purport to be objecting the displacement of unhoused people and be upset by how said people have been forced by the government to survive? Individual-level crime comes from bad policy, so the inclusion of it here suggests that the organizers aren’t upset about displacement so much as they’re mad that the results of displacement —social disorder —have become an inconvenience.
Ideological inconsistencies not withstanding, I will say this: These folks were committed. Until, that is, they weren’t. More on that in a minute.
As a supporter of camp, I was privy to concerns about the protest: Who would explain the opaque goings-on to K-T residents, many of whom would be disturbed by the loud noise and possible influx of police? That both these things could potentially re-traumatize an already traumatized population didn’t occur to protest organizers, or it did occur and they simply didn’t care. We also strategized on how to direct media away from housed residents and toward the unhoused, whose voices are minimized in conversations about their lives because in the eyes of decision-makers, they’re only quasi — human.
It was immediately evident on Tuesday that our preparation had been very different from that of the Strathcona residents. They arrived with colourful posters, the messaging of which was contradictory and confused: Some signage read “safe homes for all” (great!) while others demanded a “safer Strathcona” (for whom, exactly?) and others still drew from Black Lives Matter discourse to remind the city that “Strathcona [also] matters” (yikes). Apparently none of the organizers recognized that co-opting a racial justice movement to serve the interests of a mostly-White crowd was in poor taste, but I digress. The protestor’s joviality was clear amidst their chants of “Homeless lives matter!” though their definition of “matters” leaves much to be desired.
Despite organizers claims that the protest was a “call to action” for government and wasn’t directed at the camp, media coverage since has predictably reproduced damning myths about homelessness: Mounting tensions between the housed and unhoused have received significant air time, as has the fallacy that more supported housing and addiction treatments are real solutions to poverty.
Haven’t we covered this already?
I can’t say definitively what the organizer’s motivations were. They may have naively neglected to consider how they were inviting a homeless person pile-on (see comments on today’s news articles), or they may have strategically framed the protest in such a way that their real grievances (violence, crime, open drug use) could be aired under the guise of benevolence. Once thing I do know: When it’s NIMBYs versus homeless people (and in this context it very much is, regardless of what they’ve told themselves), impact trumps intent.
As the hour wore on, two occurrences elucidated the protestor’s profound lack of insight. First, a camp resident was arrested by police mid-way through because his bike edged beyond the sidewalk and hit a moving car. This is the same man who was recently stabbed by a housed predator known to the VPD for stalking vulnerable women, but watching him get cuffed didn’t deter the chanting (or the dancing), even for a moment.
A few minutes later, camp leader Chrissy Brett objected to the arrest by sitting in the street. Until this point she had been speaking with media adjacent the protest about things that really matter (i.e. settler-colonialism, the inflated budget of a police force that demonstrably gives no fucks about Vancouverites who aren’t wealthy, able, and White), but as the event closed she held the intersection for roughly thirty seconds before the VPD descended. As the same cops who will gladly protect anti-maskers dragged Brett off the road, the protestor’s weren’t just silent, which would have been bad enough; they had the gall to actually kept on chanting.
A few camp supporters, myself included, trailed Brett flanked by nine cops for two blocks as the increasingly grating “Homeless lives matter!” persisted. The irony would be hilarious if it wasn’t also tragic. Within five minutes Brett had been stuffed into a paddy-wagon, and those of us still there were left to deal with the aftermath. This meant lingering long after attendees had congratulated themselves on a job well done and resumed their regularly scheduled programming, first to ensure that media received footage of the arrest (none has aired it thus far, but it has appeared as a footnote on a few articles) and to organize legal aid. In other words, when met with a chance to display genuine solidarity by intervening as an unhoused Indigenous Matriarch was man-handled by government — deployed goons (the same government folks claimed to be protesting), NIMBYs gonna NIMBY.
Is there nuance here? Absolutely. Does it matter when something like this goes down? Not anymore.
That Strathcona “matters” is no longer up for dispute after yesterday. Representatives from every major media outlet were present, and passers-by honked encouragement as reporters interviewed the housed. This was in stark contrast to direct action taken by unhoused residents of Camp K-T, not to mention Crab and Oppenheimer parks before it, whose cries for safe, sustainable housing have been ignored or met with derision.
One message is clear: when housed people make noise, those in positions of power listen, especially if the city’s bottom line is threatened. Important to note here is that yesterday’s protest coincides with a “tax resistance” campaign initiated last month, with some home-owners pledging to withhold property taxes until the city steps up. It’s no coincidence that the protest was held just three days before the city reports on the feasibility and cost of three “emergency measures” for housing, each of which entails disappearing the unhoused into non — profit run sites that directly undermine their repeated pleas for autonomy. My questions for protestors, then, are as follows: If you truly want “safe homes for all,” will you continue pressuring government even after the unhoused have been displaced (again) from “your” park? With that, are you willing to consistently advocate for drug policy reform, the legalization of sex work, Indigenous sovereignty, and equitable opportunity for economic advancement among those who have been historically marginalized on the bases of race, class, ability status, and culture? Will you also stop calling the bloody cops any time you feel the slightest twinge of anxiety? If not, then I’d say this is really more of an “out of sight, out of mind” thing.
So what will actually help unhoused people? Camp residents have made this abundantly clear: They want Indigenous determination related to land management and resource extraction, sustainable housing catered to individual need, the end of the drug war, and the city to stop criminalizing poverty. Attaining each of these will require prolonged disruption to colonial structures, the intentional subversion of capitalism, and, given the intrinsically colonial nature of government, very possibly violence – not things one is likely to find at a feel-good, family-friendly gathering.
What’s unfortunate is that housed people wield significant power when it comes to social change. Their event could have illuminated the systemic injustices that produce homelessness, but representatives who spoke to media focused on symptoms, not solutions. Had they done what they allege they wanted to do — support the unhoused — by adequately consulting them and centralizing them, they may have been impactful. Instead, their “solidarity” ended in two people arrested, needless distress among the city’s most marginalized, and, based on social media, some really well-lit selfies.
Well done, folks. I know you’re super proud.
