False Creek South fights to keep affordable homes in an unaffordable city
When Darcey Johnson and his wife, both fully vaccinated, contracted the COVID Delta variant last month, their False Creek South neighbours went grocery shopping and dropped off food to help the couple and their eight-year-old daughter get through their days of isolation.
Damla Tamer felt lonely after immigrating from Turkey and financially unstable while her husband battled poor health, but the couple and their four-year-old son “flourished” after moving two years ago into a False Creek South co-op, where they built partnerships and friendships with their neighbours.
After moving from Ontario to Vancouver to study architecture at UBC 20 years ago, Shira Stanfield struggled to find an affordable apartment that could accommodate her wheelchair. When she got an adapted unit in a False Creek South co-op, it provided her with accessibility and affordability, and also a community where neighbours looked out for each other.
“If I didn’t open my front door, someone would notice. And as a single person when I first moved in, it was so important to me,” said Stanfield, a landscape architect with Parks Canada. “The beauty of this neighbourhood is all of the little interconnected pockets and places and enclaves and community spaces, and you meet people.”
It was this sense of an interconnected community that False Creek South residents say was missing from Vancouver City Hall’s recent proposal to redevelopment their neighbourhood , a community that has been lauded since it was created four decades ago with an equal mix of low-, middle- and high-income residents living together in affordable and market housing.
Instead, city hall’s conceptual blueprint for change — which last week was sent back to the drawing board after significant community opposition — called for increasing the proportion of market housing, tearing down much of the affordable housing, and putting the low-income people in new buildings on the back edge of the property, far from the water.
