Little Mountain Housing showdown looms

As the remaining residents of Little Mountain Housing hunker down, the unfolding drama at Vancouver’s oldest social-housing project promises to become a contest of wills between the incoming city council and the B.C. Liberal government.

Coun. David Cadman noted that one of the first tasks facing council, which comes to office on December 8, is to insist to Housing Minister Rich Coleman that the site stay open until redevelopment starts.

“What the new council has to do immediately is to contact Minister Coleman and say, ”˜Look, this is a public-housing project; there are 205 units there now that are available; we’ve got a housing crisis in the city; do not go in and dismantle those because we know fully well you’re not going to be able to build anything there until after the Olympics,’ ” Cadman told the Georgia Straight.

Nineteen units are still occupied, but the rest of the project’s 224 housing units have been emptied.

Cadman noted that the city must issue a demolition permit, and can impose certain conditions before the structures can be torn down. However, he acknowledged that the provincial government can have the homes’ interiors destroyed to make the place uninhabitable “if they want to spite us”.

Coleman didn’t return a call before the Straight’s deadline.

Five days before the November 15 civic election, Cadman and fellow Coalition of Progressive Electors council candidate Ellen Woodsworth rushed to the site to lend support to residents after workers started boarding up the empty homes for demolition. On December 7, Woodsworth will join artists and housing activists in painting the boards covering vacant units to draw attention to the situation.

During the campaign, mayor-elect Gregor Robertson indicated he is amenable to suggestions to use the public-housing complex to temporarily shelter the city’s homeless.

Built in the mid-1950s, Little Mountain Housing sits on six hectares of prime land east of Queen Elizabeth Park. The land was transferred by the federal government to B.C. Housing in 2007. In May this year, the province chose the Holborn Group to redevelop the site into mostly upscale residences.

B.C. Housing spokesperson Sam Rainboth confirmed that the site is being “prepared for some pre-demolition work that’s getting under way”.

In a phone interview, Rainboth said that he doesn’t know when redevelopment will begin. He said the city and Holborn will establish the process for moving forward.

Residents like Ingrid Steenhuisen are determined to stay at Little Mountain as long as they can. Her ailing mother has been a tenant for more than 40 years. “For the families that are left here, most”¦have one or more than one family member with some kind of special need or mobility problem,” Steenhuisen told the Straight. “So it’s important for us to stay together. It’s not just about the four walls, it’s not just about this site, it’s about that this community is a part of who we are.”

According to Steenhuisen, Little Mountain Housing will be the first test of the new council’s approach to addressing the city’s homelessness and housing problems.

Given the current economic environment, housing activist Ned Jacobs doubts the redevelopment will occur in the next few years.

“It’s common knowledge now that Holborn is encountering the same difficulties that many other developers are: the credit crunch,” Jacobs told the Straight.

Holborn Group didn’t return calls by the Straight. In October, excavation work on its downtown Ritz-Carlton hotel-condo project came to a halt. Holborn president Simon Lim told CBC News that work was stopped because of changes in the building’s parkade design. CBC News also reported that Holborn’s condo project at Knight Street and Kingsway, known as The Hills, has been delayed.

“With things up in the air, it just doesn’t make sense to demolish those homes when it would take very little money to fix them up to the point where they could all be inhabited,” Jacobs said.