Dear Editor:
Thank you for your article Emery Tenants Raise Displacement Worry, March 21.
In Dark Age Ahead, citizen-planner and author Jane Jacobs observed: “Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can’t afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.”
For two years, 61 families at Emery Village have been privy to the disconcerting process that characterizes the demise of a well-formed neighbourhood. Our collective hearts are broken; soon to be without affordable homes, vast green space and social connections, many formed over three decades ago.
In 1993, as newlyweds of 22 and 23, we landed in North Vancouver. While Michael established his engineering career, I became a full time mother. A single income meant sacrificing home ownership, but we were equal minded in our values. The kids have enjoyed nine remarkable years of childhood at Emery: running, riding, hiding, seeking, disagreeing, compromising, enterprising, building, climbing, cannon balling, swimming, shooting hoops and mentoring their younger counterparts. There is nothing that can compensate them for the looming loss of these healthy freedoms.
Displacement from North Vancouver when our youngest children approach the vulnerable stage of adolescence could prove very detrimental to their mental and physical well-being. They’ll leave service clubs, sports teams, school and church communities. Our older children attend university and work here but will also be forced to leave when we are.
District’s Tenant Assistance Policy directs developers to relocate their evictees to other rental units. Weekly options are sent our way, but suitable units are 40-60 per cent higher than our current rent and many are as far east as Coquitlam and as far south as White Rock.
I urge district council to retain Emery Village as an existing affordable rental complex until adequate affordable rental relocation options are available. In their haste to back countless district developments, this council has failed to ensure new projects (now approaching 8000+ housing units district wide) offer a consistent, sufficient supply of rentals (Strategy 7.3 Housing Affordability, Policy 2, OCP, Oct. 2017). If they had, more choices would certainly be available for residents facing demo-viction.
Jane Jacobs once asserted, “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.”
Council, please amend your plans in order to respect the people of Emery Village, their rights to life, liberty and security and their right not to be deprived thereof.
Kelly Bond
North Vancouver
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