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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