Squatting or Activist Posturing?
by Incontrolados
Vancouver, April 3, 2004
According to local political activist organization, the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) - "On April 1st, homeless people and their supporters marched on a piece of vacant and under-used city property to create a tent city. We did this to help house the city's ballooning homeless population and to draw attention to the need for housing for all! After a tense standoff with over 100 police officers and after the arrest of two of our allies we succeeded in finally taking the land. Our tents and shelter had already been taken down by City workers. People still want to occupy the land and demand that the city put aside ONE green space in this city for homeless people to live in."
The protest was organized by the Downtown Eastside Resident’s Association (DERA), which at least one APC activist has recently joined as a board member. Apparently DERA asked for permission from the City of Vancouver beforehand, but by the time the protest got to the park, City workers and the police were already taking the tent city down. In APC's report on the protest they say - "On Saturday, April 3rd we will be meeting at Victory Square at noon to march to the Vancouver Public Library where COPE is holding their Annual General Meeting." Once there they will "demand" (more like "request") that the City give them a greenspace for a tent city. Why ask the same people who fucked you over, the same people who create and profit from poverty, to allow you to set up a tent city, especially when they have already shown you that they aren't interested?
According to DERA, they are a "charitable society formed in 1973 by residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside." On their website they list "achievements" such as:
- won changes to the Liquor Control and Licensing Act resulting in the closure of a local liquor store which reduced the level of crime and disruption in the area
- opening of a Neighbourhood Safety Office in partnership with the Vancouver City Police
- development of 562 non-market housing suites
- inclusion and acknowledgement by all levels of government and their agencies in matters pertaining to the Downtown eastside
They are a social service agency which has received funding from all levels of government and are basically landlords who manage welfare hotels in the Downtown Eastside. These kinds of hotels are not much better than prisons, and serve the same purpose - social control of the poor for the benefit of the rich elite.
Well known former DERA activist Libby Davies went on to join city council, approve the demolition of the Frances Street Squats in 1990, and then become a Member of Parliament in the colonial Canadian government.
So why did DERA try to set up a tent city now, and why did the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Police have such a strong response? To understand that it's useful to take a look at the Woodwards Squat, which was opened in September of 2002, in part, by City employee Jim Leyden.
According to the Vancouver Police, their first course of action at the Woodwards Squat was to find cop-sympathetic activists involved in the occupation. This proved to be very easy for them, as several activists and politicians were more than willing to actively collaborate with the cops in undermining any further direct action on the part of the squatters. Activists in the Anti-Poverty Committee attempted to control the squat and divert the struggle into social democratic channels by bringing in speakers like Libby Davies, dominating squatter decision-making meetings (even though almost none of the APC members were squatters themselves), collaborating with the corporate media, and making up bullshit claims that the squatters wanted to "demand social housing". Fortunately, APC only had a marginal influence on the squatters, got caught up in internal bureaucratic infighting, and lost interest in the squat itself over time.
The Vancouver Police say they were very dissapointed when the "leadership" of the squat dissolved, since this left them with nobody to negotiate with, and forced them to deploy their forces to physically evict the squatters. They had hoped that they could convince the activists to get the squatters to leave, but this failed. After the eviction of the inside squat, the tent city on the outside was reinforced, brutally evicted by the cops again, and set up for a third time. The outside tent city lasted for 92 days, until the City of Vancouver sent in their soft cops, the social workers, to displace the squatters, shoving some of them into shitty welfare hotels and leaving others homeless. Activists like Jim Leyden helped facilitate this process, calling it a "victory for the squatters", while APC was nowhere to be found and did nothing to effectively challenge the eviction. Some political activists tried to get squatters to vote in the City elections for the COPE party, claiming this would help the squatters. COPE won, evicted the squat, and brought in more than 50 new cops to militarily occupy the neighborhood. Around the same time DERA held a "community saftey meeting" during which people demanded that more cops be brought in. Other activist organizations like APC tried to lobby the City government to grant them concessions such as social housing, which many squatters did not want. During the inside occupation of Woodwards, APC was basically demanding that the city evict the squatters and turn Woodwards into social housing. The squatters, for the most part, already had a self-managed living space and community they wanted to hold on to.
In July of 2003 the APC created another tent city at the Victory Square park. They then followed orders from the City of Vancouver to leave the park, but moved the tent city to another location. The tent city broke up and split into several tent cities that were beyond APC's interest or control, all of which were eventually taken down by the City of Vancouver and the cops.
This brings us back to DERA's recent attempt at a tent city. We can clearly see that political activists want to use controlled protests, such as tent cities, to pressure governments, for political gain. The Vancouver Police took down DERA's tent city because the City and the rich ruling elite doesn't want the eyesore, but also because they don't want another tent city to get out from under the control of political activists like past squats have. The activists are trying to use homeless people as pawns in a political chess game by creating an annoying, but unthreatening tent city, to lobby the government and to gain political prestige for themselves. In the case of DERA, it would be against their own interests to seriously challenge the dominant order of the city, which they are part of. Poverty pimps should be called what they are. Activists want to be the public face of the opposition to the government, and this means that they must also oppose genuine, self-organized poor-people's actions which have no need of charismatic leaders and threaten the very basis of this system - property relations and social class divisions.
What we need is more uncontrollable squats, organized by the squatters themselves, not more media spectacles and activist popularity games
Woodsquat Book Launch at Woodwards
March 27th, 2004
About 40 people, including some of the original squatters, gathered for the launch of the Woodsquat book at the Woodwards building, made some rousing speeches, and took the streets, shouting down cops and yuppies alike as they drove by. A cop with a angry look on his face pulled up after a while to observe the spontaneous disruption.