Why we’re disrupting the Re:Address Int’l Housing Summit
Alliance Against Displacement is disrupting Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Re:Address housing summit because we have nothing to discuss with the experts assembled here. Our people are the displaced people of the Jungle in Calais France, which the French state has razed without concern for the destinies of the thousands living there. We tie our housing policy to the fates of homeless people of the tent city just blocks from this hypocrite’s housing summit, whose community is being smashed and swept under mats on the concrete floors of temporary shelters hidden from public view. We demand homes for our people –for refugees fleeing war and climate terror in Europe and for homeless people displaced by the twin pressures of urbanization and gentrification in Western Canada.
Abolish private property
There is the opposite of a scarcity of housing supply in this housing crisis. But in Vancouver, like in other resort-cities, the supply is not open to the low-income rabble who litter the streets outside the gates. We reject the notion that this is a problem of “foreign” capital investment because in the globalized economy of an imperialist country, all capital is transnational. The problem is capital investment itself, in the form of private property. We demand homes as shelter from the laws of capital investment.
Redistribution not innovation
Every single panel of today’s summit is concerned primarily with the causes and solutions to the home ownership crisis. Maybe there is some way to “innovatively” balance the interests of wannabe property owners with the monopoly real estate development corporations and mortgage firms they work for. We don’t care.
But there is no way to balance the demands of the profit-driven real estate market with the housing needs of low-income working-class, Indigenous, displaced people. We demand every level of government make ending homelessness and evictions the highest priority of your housing policies. Stop all demolitions of affordable rental housing. Outlaw all evictions. Raise taxes on the rich and corporations to whatever level necessary in order to build 77,000 units of social housing every year across Canada. F*ck your experts. Build our homes now.