Cheryl-lee feels strongly about many topics like rental-only zones, socially responsible housing, halting speculative land use values from hyperinflating real estate, and more.
These are some of the topics I feel really strongly about!
Push for rental-only zoning sites to protect the few existing purpose-built rental apartment buildings (just like what New Westminster did when they fought back and won against developer in BC Appeals Court and BC Supreme Court).
Halt speculative land-use values from hyperinflating real estate, which in turn drives up rental housing costs as landlords pass on to the ‘consumer’ their costs.
Push for rental housing to be removed from commodity-driven real estate market of ‘luxury’ apartments. What we need is NOT luxury rental units; we need more affordable housing.
Push for socially responsible housing to reinstate pre-2004 Residential Tenancy Act, which mandated landlords reimburse renter sweat equity costs by deducting them from the next month’s rental cost.
Create a renter citizenry through an anonymous ‘real time’ Geolive rental map mapping out forced moves pinned to the nearest intersection to get a big picture view on the existing few and far between purpose-built rental units that remain and are the last affordable housing sites to create renter-only zones of sweat equity renters.
Push to create a cartographic GeoLive citizen renter “early warning system” through a sweat equity renter social reproduction community group, aimed at preventing speculative land-use forced moves. The goal is to cartographically map and “identify, manage, and prevent vacant properties at risk of physical decline” (Hillier et al., 2003, p. 92). This occurs when renters become invisible as only producing a rental payment—particularly those in older apartments considered to be taking up ‘wasted space’—space which could otherwise be speculatively bargained by rezoning practices to incur up to three times more rental capitalist accumulation by dispossession, gained by a forced move.
CITE:
Hillier, A., Culhane, D., Smith, T., & Tomlin, C.D. (2003). Predicting housing abandonment
with the Philadelphia neighborhood information system. Journal of Urban Affairs, 25, 91-
105. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9906.00007
Fight for legislation creating more “rental-only zoning” protected by the Residential Tenancy Act and both levels of BC court system eliminating those companies that hire renovictors that specialize in relocating tenants.
Here’s a worst-case scenario from the 1980s:
Trump’s legal fight to create forced moves against rental-subsidized tenants in a building he’d just bought during the 1980s in New York City
https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/trump-apartment-tenants/
Hosting citizen renter social reproduction events—as a keynote speaker to open horizons for renters by illuminating maps as “liberators and revelatory tools” (Phillips & Ayewa, 2017).
Phillips, R. & Ayewa, C. (2017). Black Quantum Futurism: You are Here [Workshop].
Philadelphia Assembled, Philadelphia, PA.
http://phlassembled.net/futures/blog/you_are_now_here_with_black_quantum_futurism/
Creating a REAL livable city NOT just for elite capitalists
Professor Patrick Condon recently told The Tyee, https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/05/07/Sick-City-Pandemic-Housing-Crisis/
“It’s ridiculous to call Vancouver “livable” if no one can afford to live here. It’s ridiculous to call Vancouver the “greenest city” if half of our workforce has to drive for hours in polluting vehicles twice a day, fouling the confined airshed of the eastern end of the valley. It would be far better, and cheaper and greener, to find a way to keep our crucial service sector employees here in Vancouver, instead of spending billions on bridges and subways to get them in and out each day. Housing should be seen as infrastructure, not just subways and bridges.”
Create citizen renter “sound maps” based on the nearest intersection to where the renter lives to highlight that their apartment—no matter what year it was built—is a valuable piece of real estate, NOT ‘vacant space’ to build a social reproduction movement countering forced moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIwGqFmroOc
My intention in creating sound maps with the Kitsilano renter community is, as Elsa Noterman in her paper “Speculating on Vacancy” (p.22), explains, to create maps to “reconfigure geographical information and imaginaries to account for the complexity and multiplicity of space-time.”
Fight against this vicious cycle by running for municipal council, ratifying the above initiatives, as Professor Patrick Condon explained in The Tyee:
“What we are doing now is raising average rents, displacing renters and adding to the land price feeding frenzy that enriches only land speculators. What we are doing now is driving our kids and grandkids out of the city they grew up in and forcing our crucial frontline service workers out of a city they can no longer afford. This is how cities die.”
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/05/07/Sick-City-Pandemic-Housing-Crisis/