Saturday, June 30, 2007

VANOC and Vancouver City Council go for the gold in homelessness

On Wednesday the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee issued its blueprint for how it will be the first Games to "leave a lasting positive social, economic and environmental legacy".
VP of sustainability for VANOC Linda Coady : "a report at the end of June will come from VANOC and the three levels of government because they carry the accountability for the social housing unit.”
Accountability.
She said VANOC has committed to providing 250 social housing units from the athlete’s village in Vancouver’s False Creek area and has budgeted $500,000 for shelters to deal with any spike in homelessness during the Games.
She then went on to boast that VANOC had saved some frogs by not running over them with bulldozers.
But a Freedom of Information request showed "head of the City of Vancouver’s housing department reveals that none of the 250 units of promised “affordable housing” are guaranteed to be available to people living below the poverty line".
This comes on top of the city voting in 2005 to eliminate the promised middle income housing in False Creek and cutting the social housing from 33% to 20%.
The same FOI request revealed documents showing that the City of Vancouver will make at least $64.5m profit on the SE False Creek development project
On Thursday Vancouver citizens presented four hours of submissions to council begging them to reject the bullshit VANOC-approved report, which revealed no new housing from VANOC despite the loss of 700 units to the Olympics so far and VANOC's own housing subcommittee report that 3,300 new social housing units would be required to offset homelessness caused by Olympic "urban renewal".
Mayor Sam Sullivan left during the second speaker.
Thursday night Vancouver City Council went for the gold in homelessness, voting 6 to 5 to approve the VANOC report, asserting that housing recommendations developed for VANOC are "not binding."
How the hell is this not actionable?
The 2010 Olympics were sold to us as the greenest most socially responsible Olympics evah in order to get a "YES" vote to satisfy IOC standards requiring public support.
Again, how is this not actionable?

1 comment:

West End Bob said...

Again, after living through the aftermath of hosting the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, I can only hope the same does not happen in Vancouver.

The promised benefits do not overcome the downsides . . . .

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