CE

By FRED WILSON

Aniron bar bashes in the door of
ahouse. Following quickly behind,
a sheriff's squad enters to forcibly
evict the tenants. But the. tenants
have organized and are determined
Not to go. The ensuing confronta-
tion is a stalemate until police ar-
rive to enforce the sheriff’s order.

Before the house is cleared the iron _ -

bar has landed on the ribs of one of
the defenders, and another is hurt
in a scuffle.

The scene seems an inevitable
One in Vancouver’s current hous-
ing crisis, but this one has already
been played out, in 1945. And
Variations of it have taken place
Many times in the housing struggles
which have been a continuum of
Vancouver’s development.

As bad as the current zero vacan-
cy rate and incredible speculation
and inflation in land and housing
are, there have been years in which
Vancouver’s housing crisis has
been worse than today. And those
years gave rise to more than a
decade of class conflict which
dramatically thrust the housing
issue into public view, and even-
tually forced government to begin
to find solutions.

These were years which forced
working people and the labor and
progressive movement to take new
forms of militant action in defence
not only of the right, but of the
necessity, for a family to have
shelter. :

The bottom line of defence was
to stop evictions of families who
would otherwise be left homeless
on the street surrounded by their
possessions. It was done by arous-
ing public indignation, by em-
barrassing landlords and sheriffs,
and often by sheer force. The
organizational form was an adhoc
group of volunteers called a picket.
For 15:years, from the early 1930’s
to the end of WWII, the term
picket did not necessarily evoke im-
ages of a trade union strike in Van-
couver; it could just-as easily refer
to a spirited, popular action to
block an eviction. And often it
worked.

One of the first recorded in-
cidents of a picket was in Nov.,
1931. A married couple with an in-
fant were evicted from their home
at 396 Princess St. for failing to
meet rent payments. In desperation
they brought their dilemma to a
public meeting of the Canadian
Labor Defense League which after
hearing the case voted to donate
part of the meeting collection to the
family and to refer the matter to the
National Unemployed Workers’
Association (NUWA).

According to the Unemployed
Worker, the mimeographed organ
of the unemployed movement, the
NUWA grievance committee
“placed them back in their house.”
The landlord gave the family an
eight day reprieve, but when it was
up NUWA organized a large

delegation of men to “‘picket”’ the
house. There were no placards, just
@ group of men intending to
urage any attempt to put the
tenants out. The landlord decided it
wasn’t worth it to press his case.
“All unemployed workers faced
with eviction should notify the
NUWA at once,” the Unemployed
Worker exclaimed in announcing
the victory, ‘Join the NUWA and
fight evictions of unemploy:
workers!’?

The depression housing crisis
was not immediately one of a shor-
tage of housing. Quite to the con-
trary, 1929 was a record year for
housing starts in Vancouver, which
Would not be surpassed until after
the war. However construction
soon came screeching to a halt and

1934 PICKET...

FIGHT!

NG EVICTIONS

. protecting the E. 42nd Ave. home of Arthur and Ethel Evans.

Confronting Vancouver's housing crisis

in a few years a shortage of ac-
commodation became apparent.
But the problem in the early
1930’s wasn’t supply, but the de-
mand by landlords and mortgage
companies to maintain high profits
in spite of depressed incomes.
While wages were cut in 1931
and 1932, the seven percent mort-
gage interest rates, with an addi-
tional percentage point as penalty
for delinquent payments, remained
intact from the 1929 boom. High

people just couldn’t make the
payments.

The Vancouver Sun lamented
the situation in an editorial in Dec.,
1933: ‘‘Mortgage interest
payments get behind, taxes get
behind, foreclosure follows. The
owner has lost his equity, seen the
value of his holdings exploded to a
fraction and dumped on the
market for what it will bring. — -

‘“‘John Doe has a Hastings St.
property that he paid $30,000 for.
He has a $10,000 mortgage on it; he
can’t keep it up. It is foreclosed,
goes on the market for $10,000. If it
brings $8,000, John Doe is still
liable for $2,000, after losing
$20,000.

‘But that is not all. The property ~

next to him is offered for sale at
$15,000. The buyer comes along.
‘Why should I pay $15,000 when I
can get Doe’s property for $10,000
or less?” he asks.”

That should be a chilling realiza-
tion to those who have bought to-
day’s high interest rates believing
that housing will always stay ahead
of inflation. When enough people
are priced out of it, the housing
market can — and has — come
crashing down.

In Nov., 1933, 2,500 Vancouver
homes were auctioned by the city to
pay back taxes. About 150
members of the unemployed
association jammed city hall in a
valiant attempt to stop the auction,
but six policemen stood as sentries
while the houses were sold for 1930
taxes. 4

There are several cases of actions
around mortgage foreclosures and
tax sales which dot the records of
the unemployed movement, but by
far the overwhelming majority of
actions were to prevent eviction of

tenants.
Like most of the depression

struggles, it wasn’t until near the
end of 1932 that the unemployed
found the strength to fight back ef-
fectively against evictions. In Van-
couver, the key was the formation
of the unemployed neighborhood
councils.

Almost every part of Vancouver
had a neighborhood council which
usually was subdivided into block
committees. Attached to each
council was a grievance committee

. Which on any given day could be
interest rates kept rents up, and

demanding relief for an
unemployed family, or organizing
a picket at an eviction. The
Unemployed Worker of 1933 and
1934 are filled with reports of
picketing actions, and, of course,
all of those reported were victories.

Two neighborhood councils

were particularly active, Grand-.

view and South Fraser. In March,
1933. the South Fraser
neighborhood council related the
story of one picket:

“The case was reported 11 p.m.

’ Friday at Block 4 whist and social.

The Block Committee chairman
and the grievance committee im-
mediately gotinto action. At 8a.m.
the tenant was interviewed and a
general call went out for pickets. By
12 noon 18 pickets had arrived. A
bumming committee was elected to
approach merchants on Main St. S.

“Pickets continued to arrive and
at 1:30 p.m. the landlord returned.
After taking a good look at the
pickets he beat it. We have not seen
him since. However pickets will be
on duty at 6. a.m. Monday to pro-
tect the tenants. Nevertheless we
feel the landlord will not return. He
saw a little of the workers’ united
front and no doubt the solidarity of
the workers convinced him of the
futility of intimidation.”

It was about one year later, in
April, 1934, that the most well
known eviction fight of the 1930’s
began when a Vancouver city
alderman, W. J. Twiss, foreclosed
on a mortgage he held on the East
42 Ave. home of Communist
organizer Arthur Evans.

Evans was languishing in
Oakalla prison at the time after be-

ing framed for his role in a miner’s:

strike at Princeton. Although he
had built the house himself, it was
later mortgaged for $1,800 and
when Evans went to jail his wife

and daughter couldn’t make

payments.
The unemployed movement

. organized a picket of 40 men who

guarded Evan’s house for 13 days
and rebuffed several attempts by
the sheriff to move the family out.
Twiss had the oil and electricity cut
off and using his influence as a

member of the city’s relief commit- -

tee, had Ethel Evans thrown off
relief as well.

Public pressure forced Twiss
and the authorities to restore
utilities and relief payments to Mrs.
Evans and the Single Unemployed
Protective Association, formerly
NUWA, thought they had won.
But on Apr. 24 while most of the
pickets had gone to pick up relief
cheques, the police made a surprise
raid. Twelve car loads of police,
eight mounted police, six motorcy-
cle police and the chief of police all
converged on the Evans bungalow
to evict a woman and her seven year
old daughter. The furniture and
other possessions were seized.

Twiss wasn’t the only, city alder-
man profiting from the housing
crisis, although others were less
successful. An alderman Shinnick
attempted to auction off the
possessions of a West End tenant to
pay back rent, Mar. 29, 1934, but,
as the Unemployed Worker
reported, the sale “‘was called off
due to too many friends of the
worker being there.”

Ron Liversedge also recounts
the incident in his ‘‘Recollections of
the On to Ottawa Trek’’ and recalls
that one of the pickets got up just as
the auction was to begin and after
telling the crowd about the plight of
the worker warned that ‘“‘any bid
over one cent would be considered
an unfriendly act.”

After about an hour without a
serious bid, the auctioneer left and
the pickets moved the furniture

back inside the house and barricad- -

ed the doors. The following even-
ing the possessions were ushered
away to safety, although the
worker and his family remained in
the house.

The Second World War even-
tually pulled the Canadian
economy out of the depression, but
the economic,recovery was geared
to military purposes, and little at-
tention was paid to the growing

housing problem in Vancouver.

In fact, by 1943, there were again
thousands of people in Vancouver
who. were literally homeless. In
September of that year, the war-
time National Housing Registry
reported 10,000 families in Van-
couver seeking homes. ‘“The situa-
tion seems hopeless,’’ said Milli-
cent Fleming, office manager of
the Registry, ‘‘More than 2,000 ap-
plications in our files are from
families with children. It is prac-
tically impossible to persuade a
landlord to accept families with
children.”

The structure of this housing |
crisis was quite different from that
of a decade before, although the
social impact was the same. The de-
pression slump in house building
had left a real shortage, made
worse by the unavailability of
building supplies when Canada en-
tered the war. The problem was ex-
acerbated as the new war produc-
tion industries swelled Vancouver’s
population, and in 1944 and 1945
with the return of thousands of ser-
vicemen, there was a negative vac-
ancy rate of huge proportions. At
the end of May, 1945, the Citizens’
Rehabilitation Council released a
report citing a housing shortage in
the city of 17,731, of which 8,000
were families in immediate need of
aid. Only one month later the
federal government appointed
Emergency Shelter Adminstrator
Leigh Stevenson upped the figure
again with the admission that Van-
couver was short by 25,000 housing
units.

This was fertile ground for
speculators, developers, and real
estate companies. Between 1939
and 1944 building costs almost
doubled, and in 1944homes valued -
at $3,500 by mortgage companies
were being listed on the market at
$6,000 or higher by real estate com-
panies.

However since 1940 the War-
time Prices and Trade Board had
controlled prices in Canada, in-
cluding rents. That madeit difficult
for landlords to cash in on the
housing crisis, unless they could get

‘rid of the tenants.

Another wartime regulation of
the Prices Board prohibited evic-
tions from being carried out during
the winter months, October to

See FIGHTING page 8

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—MAY 1, 1981—Page 7