WRITE NOW: Stop the DTES & Chinatown from mega gentrification before 9:30am today
Write to City Council to stop the rezoning plan that will erase the DTES
We need your help by 9:30am today to write to City Council.
Today, November 4, the City of Vancouver plans to refer a massive rezoning plan for the Downtown Eastside-Oppenheimer District (DEOD) to a public hearing.
They want to let developers build massive 32-storey gentrifier towers.
This plan will decimate the DTES and Chinatown with gentrification.
We need your help to write a letter to City Council before 9:30am to City Council right now. Here’s the letter writing guide and more information here from the Carnegie Housing Project.
What does DEOD have to do with Chinatown?
Many Chinese seniors, clan societies, businesses are located in the DEOD district adjacent to what the City zoned as “Chinatown”.
What does the City want to do?
They want to let developers build massive 32-storey gentrifier towers, while reducing shelter rate social housing requirements from 20% to 4%. Here’s the full report and a resource site from the Carnegie Housing Project with more info.
They are also recommending the redevelopment of many heritage buildings that currently contain social housing, SROs, and community-serving businesses, including those that are home to:
Toi Shan Benevolent Society:
and Ovaltine Cafe:
This is what the City is recommending:
Here’s the full City report and a resource site from the Carnegie Housing Project with more information.
What will this rezoning mean for DTES and Chinatown?
If this rezoning pushes through, it will mean a tsunami of gentrification in the DTES and Chinatown. Learn more at Carnegie Housing Project’s resource site.
What you can do to help right now
Write to City Council by 9:30am today to stop them from sending the rezoning plans to public hearing.
You can use this letter writing guide put together by the Carnegie Housing Project.
Here are the demands recommended by the Carnegie Housing Project you can add to your letter:
Request that Staff return to the community to consult them on the new plan to demonstrate that they made appropriate improvements before referring their recommendations to a public hearing. Staff should:
Consult with the Metro Vancouver Aboriginal Executive Council, since 31% of SRO residents and 33% of unhoused people are Indigenous.
Have consultations with the Japanese Community about retaining their cultural assets in the DEOD.
Make sure that the plan includes what people in the community actually think would improve the neighbourhood, starting with what the Carnegie Housing Project has already recorded.
In the “Uplifting the DTES” motion that called for this report, mayor and council agreed that the mayor would work with the provincial housing minister to find funding for deeply affordable housing. Request that the mayors office report back on Sim’s efforts.
Develop a plan to retain DTES assets and set aside more land for shelter rate housing before any towers.
Write to Council members at the following email addresses: rebecca.bligh@vancouver.ca lisa.dominato@vancouver.ca sean.orr@vancouver.ca lucy.maloney@vancouver.ca pete.fry@vancouver.ca ken.sim@vancouver.ca sarah.kirby-yung@vancouver.ca mike.klassen@vancouver.ca peter.meiszner@vancouver.ca brian.montague@vancouver.ca lenny.zhou@vancouver.ca