Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 167: Housing Affordability and Safe Supply — with Jean Swanson
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Jean Swanson
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Kathy Feng 00:00
Hello listeners. I'm Kathy Feng with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host Am Johal speaks with Vancouver city councillor Jean Swanson about issues in housing affordability, safe supply, and her life as an activist on the Downtown Eastside. I hope you enjoy the discussion!
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Am Johal 0:24
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us here again this week. It's my pleasure to be speaking with Jean Swanson, who, of course, is a Vancouver city councillor, a long-time advocate in the Downtown Eastside for going on probably over 50 years. But as a social activist in many areas, and it's just going to be wonderful to speak to her about her current role as a city councillor, but also work that she's done, historically, so much to learn from Jean. Welcome. Welcome, Jean.
Jean Swanson 1:00
Thanks, Am. Nice to be here.
Am Johal 1:03
Jean, I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Jean Swanson 1:09
So yeah, I'm Jean Swanson. I'm a city councillor. And I'm a newbie city councillor. And most of my life, I've been an anti-poverty activist.
Am Johal 1:20
Yeah, maybe we'll start with city council. Before we talk about other things. But recently, city council passed a motion to do further work related to single family homes, to be able to build six units on a site, up to 2000 places and staff, are going to report back to city council soon. You were able to get through some really interesting amendments on that as well. But wondering if you can speak to that motion and the kind of aspirations behind it because it seemed to get in a city council that represent so many different political parties, there seemed to be a general level of support for it.
Jean Swanson 2:03
Yeah, so the basis of it is to allow six units on 2000 single family lots in the city, or to have the staff report back on doing that. And I liked the idea that in a number of ways. A, it's better to build denser housing on single family lots than to demolish existing apartments to build more housing, because we need all of the rental housing we can get. B, it had a plan for capturing the value of the land lift. If you have a single-family lot, you can only put, say a house in a duplex in the laneway house on it, that's three units. And then you say, oh, okay, now you've got six units, the value of that land will go up. And so, part of this proposal is to capture that value that goes up and use that to increase affordability either for people who are on that site in the new development, or off that site in new development, I really liked that part of it. And there was another part about maybe downzoning single family lots, so that the amount of land value that you capture would be higher. So that was good, but I had some questions about it, too. Because nothing is really carved in stone yet. And I wanted to make sure that we get affordability out of it for some either on the site or someplace else. So, I put in four or five amendments basically designed to do that. I actually defined affordability as affordable for people earning under 50,000 if they're single or 80,000 if they're a family. But that, of course doesn't even begin to get at the need for folks in the Downtown Eastside, for example.
Am Johal 3:54
Yeah, yeah, it you know, I guess, yeah, this will be interesting as it goes through and gets the next layer of due diligence around it, because, of course, the concerns are sort of, you know, when duplex zoning and other things came across, it didn't bring about affordability. I guess the theory behind this is that with the number of sites increased that this will create a layer of affordability where previous policies happened. And so, I guess the devil will be in the details in terms of how it rolls out. I'm wondering, Jean, if you can speak about your time on council in terms of other housing affordability policies, you've been doing work on, you know, particularly single residency occupancy hotels. There’s been a significant amount of movement that you've initiated. And just wondering at the civic level, you know, there's so many policies that rely on a provincial and federal but at the city level, there's a lot that the city can do. And I'm wondering if you can speak to what you've been pushing the city to be doing more of.
Jean Swanson 4:57
So, for the SROs, the single room occupancy hotels, there's about 4000 units of them in the Downtown Eastside, and they're often called the last resort of housing before homelessness is a single room, 10 by 10, washroom down the hall, no kitchen. The conditions sometimes aren't very good in them. So, we've been having a huge problem with them over the last 10 years ever since Woodward's was rebuilt. Woodward's development, and that is they've been gentrified. So, investors have been buying them up, they've been getting rid of the low-income tenants, then, of course, when you get rid of a tenant, you can raise the rent as much as you want.
Jean Swanson 5:40
So even before I got elected, I was dealing with this, reporting on it in the Carnegie Action Projects’ Annual Hotel Report, and also trying to help people who were being evicted, keep them from being evicted. And you know, a landlord would come along and post a sign on the door saying you have bugs, you have to move, and the tenant wouldn't know that the landlords were responsible for bugs, not them. And so, then they would move and then they wouldn't be able to find an affordable place. And they'd be homeless. Or the landlord would simply buy out the tenant, say, tenants came to me and said, Jean, they're offering me $1,000, I've never had that much money in my life. I think I'm going to take it and I'd say no, no, don't take it you find another place and be way more expensive.
Jean Swanson 6:28
So, this has happened to hundreds of units in the Downtown Eastside and the rents have gone up by hundreds of dollars, just because the Residential Tenancy Act doesn't require, it doesn’t stop landlords from raising rents as much as they want when a tenant leaves. If we had a law like that, one name for it is Vacancy Control. So, what we got it at the city, and usually that's considered to be a provincial responsibility under the Residential Tenancy Act, but what we got at the City in December, is we got vacancy control in the SROs with city jurisdiction. So now landlords can't raise the rents as much as they like when a tenant leaves. They can raise it a little bit, but not as much as they like. And I've, I'm hoping that that will prevent a lot of homelessness.
Jean Swanson 7:19
And I'm also hoping that we can expand it to more apartments in the city. CMHC comes out with rental housing market stats every year, at the end of January or early February. So, they haven't come out this year. But last year, they came out. And they said of something like 60,000 purpose built rental housing units in Vancouver. They have what the average rent is, they have what the average rent increase is. And they distinguish between what the rent is in a rented place versus what the rent is in a place that's for rent. And the difference they found was 20% in Vancouver. So, places for rent is 20% more than a place that's already rented. And they said there was a turnover of 11%. Well, so I'm figuring that we're losing affordability in about 10,000 units a year, just because we don't have vacancy control. Just because landlords can raise the rents as much as they like when a tenant leaves. And now with SRO motion that passed in December, we've shown that the City can do it. The lawyers say it's good. And I think we should expand it to protect affordability for the rest of the renters in the City.
Am Johal 8:46
Given the durability, the extent of the housing crisis, which you know, really goes back decades. It's still alarming to me that there isn't more public funding of advocacy for tenants. It certainly happens in a grassroots way with particular organizations, but it's really shocking to me that there hasn't been greater investment to support tenants from public funding to have a greater system of advocacy in place. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit too, you know, you as a as a housing advocate in the Downtown Eastside with the Carnegie Community Action Project and other organizations, and now being at the city. I'm wondering what more can be done by citizens, people who are concerned about the housing situation to call for more support, because it seems to me that when people are put into that precarious situation, you know, you can stay and fight it and get advocates and all of that, but it takes, people oftentimes don't have time to deal with the time that the advocacy takes that know what more can be done in that context, because it does seem, in a way, it's a system designed to benefit the landlord and the powers that be to just move people along for the sake of profit.
Jean Swanson 10:06
So, at the beginning of this council, we got some motions through about having a city renter centre. So, there is a phone that you can call at the city. And they'll help a little bit, mostly referrals to other organizations. And we also got a motion through to have a renter center. So that's it, one of the things I've learned being on council is that things take a really long time to get done. So but that should be up and running pretty soon. I think we've I've seen reports saying that is happening soon. So hopefully that will happen in via renter center that people can go to and get tenant help. Yeah, and the city does fund, give grants to various community organizations that help tenants. I'm not saying it's enough, but it is essential to have that and yeah, if you think we need more, just get your group to apply for money.
Am Johal 11:06
Jean, I'm wondering, with this council, you know, given that no one really had a majority, there's different groups on council in your, you've announced you'll be running for council again. But in terms of reflecting back on the past three and a half years almost. What are you most proud of in terms of what the council has accomplished by working together on some policies?
Jean Swanson 11:30
The vacancy control in SROs.
Am Johal 11:33
Yeah. And Jean, I'm wondering in the in the pandemic context, which is really been particularly intense in the Downtown Eastside, how drug policy and the push for safe supply, kind of where that's at right now.
Jean Swanson 11:51
It's in a mess. It's a horrible, killing mess. There are all sorts of people in the community that are willing to solve the problem. There are all sorts of public health professionals that are pleading for help. I just saw an article by Ian Mulgrew in the Sun yesterday. It was an interview with Lisa Lapointe, the chief coroner. She was just railing about it, that it's the drug policy that is killing people. We need a safe supply. The city has supported the idea of safe supply of drugs, the city has supported the idea of decriminalization, but it's just sitting there with the Feds. And, you know, they haven't done anything yet. And meanwhile, six people a day are dying. And there's groups like VANDU, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, and Drug Users Liberation Front that have actually applied to set up a compassion clubs where they could distribute safe tested drugs to people over eighteen with all the protocols in place like having everything locked up and accounted for and everything. And they could start saving lives tomorrow if the Feds would give them the grant to do that and change the law so they wouldn't be arrested for doing it.
Jean Swanson 13:22
And I'm actually quite, I'm not proud of the city for a lot of stuff but I am quite proud of the city for standing for safe supply and for Decrim. And yeah, we desperately need that safe supply there. You know, there's so many people like Perry Kendall, Dr. Perry Kendall, that was the previous provincial health officer before Bonnie Henry. You know, what did he do in his retirement, he helped set up a non-profit company called Fair Price Pharma, and they have heroin already ready to distribute, if they would not be arrested for doing it.
Jean Swanson 14:04
And so, there's so many people in the community and in the medical profession that know what needs to be done. And it's just stupid governments are preventing them from doing it. And as a result of that stupidity, people are dying. I think I know why they're not doing it. DULF and VANDU asked me to go with him one day to hand out free drugs, which I did. And I'm glad that I did it. But as a result of doing that, you know, Twitter is full of, oh, Jean Swanson is a drug dealer, blah, blah, blah. And I, you know, Trudeau was probably afraid of something like that. But the thing is, and you can see it on the council. You know, when we spoke about this, the compassion club motion, and the counselor spoke, you know, virtually everyone has been affected by the poison drug crisis. People know, have people in their families and their friends have died from it. And, you know, that's probably true in at the upper levels of government, too. And I just wish they would come around; I think the public would support it.
Am Johal 15:17
Yeah, it's, it's remarkable to me that, you know, in the, in the late 90s, when the number of deaths provincially that we're having today, it's three to four times the number of deaths provincially. Yet, we haven't seen the level of movement from government that needs to happen. And even with the opening of Insite as a result of that social movement, that what people were calling for back then was safe supply. And we're still, you know, 20 years later, still haven't achieved that in a proper way. And so, I hope that the movement continues, and that we do see much more urgency from the level of government and in trying to make this happen, given the incredible death toll this has already exerted not just in the Downtown Eastside, but provincially and nationally. Jean, wondering if we can, in speaking about your long advocacy, of course, you, you became a city councillor. Much more recently, but you have this, you know, 50-year history of doing grassroots activities.
Jean Swanson 16:23
45.
Am Johal 16:23
45, sure. But I'm wondering, you know, you in the 80s ran for mayor of Vancouver, which a lot of people don't know, and wondering if you can share some stories from that period. I, if I remember correctly, you ran against Gordon Campbell, who was mayor at the time. Wondering if you can share some stories of what you remember from that political run.
Jean Swanson 16:48
Yeah, actually, I think excluding communists, I'm probably the most defeated candidate in Vancouver today. Because I ran for council a few times, and MLA a few times and then I ran against Gordon Campbell. Yeah, that was kind of interesting. He had a lot more resources than I had. But the issues were the same, you know, development. Who is the development for, that was the issue. In those days, I think was illegal suites. We wanted illegal suites to be legalized. He ended up getting 75% of the vote and I got 45%, so I figured there was a clear 45. Or he got 75,000, I got 45,000, so I figured there it was clear 45,000 progressive people in Vancouver.
Am Johal 17:44
So, Jean, how did you, I know that you worked as a server in a bar in the Downtown Eastside, eventually began to do advocacy work, but I'm wondering if you can share a little bit of the story of how you arrived to doing work in the in the Downtown Eastside and your sort of entry into community organizing. And the reason I ask is that there's a lot of people in our podcast who are young people, university students who are just getting started on their activism journey and stories from people of how they first got started is always interesting for people.
Jean Swanson 18:19
Yeah, I was slinging beer at the Patricia Hotel. And Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies used to come in and, and have a beer now and then. And Libby was our Member of Parliament for a long time. But in those days, she was so young that I asked her for her ID. And she had it and Bruce would come too, and they would always have the TV on in the pub. And when the news came on, I'd often see Bruce and Libby doing something that looked like it would be interesting, like occupying the Continental Hotel so that it could be used for housing for low-income folks. And the other thing was that my boss took me aside and said, watch out for that guy, he'll turn you in, if you over serve, but the thing was, at that time, they wanted me to over serve there, you know, I would come and say, give me I know that maybe five people wanted a beer. So, I say give me five. And they'd say, take 10 and then stack them on my thing. So, I knew that my job there was basically making people into alcoholics. And I didn't like that job. So, after a while, I asked Bruce, one time I saw Bruce eating on my lunch hour. He was eating at The Ovaltine and I went in and sat down beside him and asked him for a job. And about six weeks later, I got one. And then we started working on things like stopping over serving, stopping the tax buyers from ripping people off, trying to get the conditions in the hotels improved, trying to get higher welfare rates, things like that. So that was how I started.
Am Johal 20:10
When you think about community organizing at that time, you know, going door to door, knocking on people’s door, putting up posters, setting up community meetings to how your community organizing with the Carnegie Community Action Project, where there's email and Facebook pages, and the technology of how we organize has changed, but so many things stay the same as well, because you still need to meet in person, and all of those kinds of things. But I'm wondering if you can sort of share your thoughts on how you were organizing in the early 70s to just before you became a city councillor in terms of like, what changed in terms of how to mobilize people, like you still have to show up at City Hall, you still have to do all those things, like what stayed the same and what changed over that time in terms of community organizing.
Jean Swanson 20:58
The thing that jumps into my brain, as you're saying that was, we had a monthly paper called The Downtown East. And the way we would set it up is we had these big layout sheets that we got from the printer. And we would type the columns of text twice, because we wanted them to be even on both sides or type them on a typewriter. And then we would glue them onto the layout sheets, until some guy from the printer came and told us about hot wax. So, then we get a little hot wax machine. And so, we wax them on so you could pull them up if you wanted. And we make headlines with Letraset, where you got this, you scratched these letters off big letters off onto paper to make the headlines. So that's how we did it instead of by computer. And the way we distributed the newsletter, of course was by going door to door or taking them to, you know, places where people came in the community. So that's one thing that's different, the ways of communication because nobody had phones in those days. So, we did a lot of door, see, but that's the key, you know, Am, you still need to do that person to person contact. Regardless of whether you have Facebook or Twitter or I mean you can get you can get the notice of an event out really fast with Facebook. Faster than going out and putting up posters and having the police rip them off and putting them back, but still, it's the person to person contact that really gets more people involved, I think.
Am Johal 22:42
Jean, you know, besides this work in the Downtown Eastside you've done, you know, social justice work in various ways and I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to kind of, you know, your own personal motivation in getting involved in social justice work. You once told me a story about, I believe it was going to Mexico, I'm not sure. But wondering how, you know, what shaped you that you wanted to have a life working in social justice, because you have done it so consistently and for so long, and you're so deeply respected, not just in the political arena, but within activist communities, as well, in a really grassroots way.
Jean Swanson 23:24
Yeah, when I was, I got married when I was 18, I started having kids. And my first baby died from meningitis when he was 17 months. And right after that, I inherited $1,000 from my grandma. So, we went to Mexico. And I remember that, being on the bus going down to Mexico City, we could see these little processions beside the road, that were funeral processions. And the coffins would be about this big, because they were babies. And I remember, we found a place to live that was kind of catering to Americans. It was on a hill and below that there was a barrio. And some of the guys from the barrio used to come up and work for the landlord. And they would, one of their jobs was mortaring broken glass into the top of the fence around the landlord's hacienda, I guess so people can come in and steal clothes off the line or something. And I don't know, there's just something about the juxtaposition of that poverty that we saw in Mexico.
Jean Swanson 24:42
And I used to, when I was a kid, I picked berries and beans. And I lived in Forest Grove, Oregon, and all the kids did all the agricultural work, which I now think is probably because of racism, because the local folks wanted to keep the Mexicans out. So, they had all, we all the white kids did the farm work. But sometimes, I would go up into the hills and pick berries and up there, they had more black folks and people from Mexico doing their work. And I could see, you know that there was a tremendous amount of poverty, and they would be actual families in the fields with the kids in the rows. And in those days, they sprayed the fields with, you know, pesticides. I got crop dusted a couple of times. So, there were kids there being sprayed with all this stuff, and getting sores all over them. And no Medicare, of course, in those days, and even now in the States. So, you know, I saw some poverty and I didn't like it. So, I guess that's what motivated me. Seemed wrong. And then when Bruce and Libby came along, and I saw an avenue for working on that.
Am Johal 26:02
And I wanted to see if you could speak a little bit as well about Sandy Cameron, in you know, meeting with him, and you know, he did so much amazing work. He was such a great poet, and an organizer but someone who obviously was very important in your life.
Jean Swanson 26:23
Yeah, I'm glad you asked me that. But I'm starting to cry, so, yeah, he was amazing. I met him in 1985, I think. And we became an item. And yeah, so I was with him for about 25 years. And he was very political and he really encouraged me in all my work. He edited everything I wrote. He was very gentle. He was very present. Everyone loves him still. He was a beautiful poet. He wrote history of the Carnegie Center. I don't know if you’ve seen it. It starts out, of course, on being on Indigenous land. He used to, before he met me, he had worked at the Union of BC chiefs, and he taught Native Studies in a couple of places. He was a prospector, like my dad, too, although, I think he prospected just because he liked to get out in nature. And he took me, I always wanted to go hiking, but I never had, the kids never liked it. They'd rather go to a motel with a pool. But he took me out hiking, and we went all over BC, all the regional parks all over the BC, all the provincial parks. And yeah, he was, he was pretty amazing.
Am Johal 28:02
Yeah, I remember meeting him at the Carnegie Center and seeing him read his poetry a few times, of course, seeing it in the Carnegie newsletter all the time as well, it just always learning from being around him and his writing. Thank you, thank you so much for sharing that. Jean, I'm wondering if you can speak to in your time being in the Downtown Eastside when you think about the future of the neighborhood, and what you would like to see there, what comes to mind for you?
Jean Swanson 28:41
Well, first thing, right now is safe supply, right. That's got to be the first priority. And then the thing is, we need housing. I think there's about 2,000 homeless people in Vancouver, now, maybe more. And probably we only have shelter space for about 1,500 of them. But a lot of people don't like shelters for very good reasons. So, we desperately need housing that low-income people can afford. And that's suitable for them that they should have some sort of say into what kind of building they go into. Number of rules it has and that kind of thing. But beyond that, I mean, welfare and disability are so low. I think welfare is about $900 and disability is $1,100 and some, but people can't afford to rent and eat, you know. I was on welfare in the 70s. And I've rented a bottom floor of a house with my two kids. And I saved $100 a month. I mean, I didn't live high on the hog. But welfare is, as it related to the cost of living was a lot better then and there was a lot less of that kind of poverty. And there was about I would say about a 10th of the amount of homelessness in those days.
Jean Swanson 30:01
The other thing that was happening in those days was governments were building a lot of social housing. In 1972, I think there was about 30,000 units of social housing built across Canada. And that's when low-income people could afford social housing. Whereas now, in Vancouver, they can only afford at most, well, not at most, but the definition is 30% has to be for people earning 50-80k basically. So even very low-income people can't even get into social housing, some social housing. So, for the Downtown Eastside, I think the keys are safe supply, housing, and higher social assistance. And there's actually no reason not to do them. We could easily tax the rich and get the money for that. It would be so easy. And in the long run. It will be way cheaper for taxpayers. Because there's all kinds of studies that show, it is more expensive to keep a homeless person on the street, it's more expensive to keep people poor than to give them enough money to live. So, I think those are the three big things right now. Safe supply, housing and welfare rates.
Am Johal 31:18
Jean is there anything you'd like to add?
Jean Swanson 31:22
Yeah, taxing the rich. That's, that would help a lot. That would, that could give us what we need for climate too. Climate is a huge, huge, huge issue. I was just seeing that when we had the atmospheric river, there were sewer pipes in about 25 places in Metro Vancouver that broke. So, what are we going to do for the next atmospheric river? Or they overflowed and some broke and additional mount broke? You know, that's just one tiny, tiny thing. So, taxing the rich is going to be able to solve a lot of, could solve a lot of problems that we're experiencing and help us to do it in a just way.
Am Johal 32:06
Jean, thank you so much for joining us on the Below the Radar podcast. Always lovely to speak with you and thank you so much for the work that you've done over many years and also as a city councillor. It's a really important voice to have on Council. Thank you.
Jean Swanson 32:24
Okay, thank you Am. This is fun.
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Kathy Feng 32:30
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with Jean Swanson. Head to the show notes to read up on some of the initiatives and examples mentioned in this episode. Thanks for listening, and tune in Tuesdays for more Below the Radar.
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