High rises and the rise of houselessness
Kayla Price (she/her/they) // Contributor
Alex Baidanuta (she/her) // Illustrator
If you search up Vancouver city photography, you’ll be met with dozens upon dozens of gorgeous city skylines. The rich glass highrises around the downtown core, ocean sunsets from Waterfront and Granville Island and a myriad of near-identical aerial shots of the city’s nihilistic, angular architecture. Capturing the city at its best: from zoomed out lenses and convenient cropping. Something these photos all seem to neglect is the street-level view of this beautiful city, and the makeshift shelters and tents that line the sidewalks a couple blocks up from the Gastown steam clock.
Vancouver has a problem with wealth disparity; not the fact that an evergrowing financial gap exists between the ultra wealthy and the impoverished, but the fact that people struggling with poverty in this city of grandieur are being seen by tourists, sullying Vancouver’s precious image of being a modern, glass-paned city where nothing could possibly be wrong. If the state of the housing crisis is anything to go by, policymakers have been out of touch with the needs of Vancouver’s lower income populations for quite some time, and with hosting the FIFA World Cup this summer, city officials are brandishing specific camera angles and increased police spending in order to cover up a deeper problem with homelessness and unaffordability, rather than addressing its root causes.
The VPD has a history of facing the homeless crisis in the city head on; via “leaf blower” displacement techniques to push the unsightly suffering of the vulnerable population away to another block, “criminalizing [unhoused] people’s everyday survival” as journalist Tyson Singh Kelsall from Breach Media puts it. “As registered social workers in the Lower Mainland we know that policing the housing crisis—or any crisis of inequality—fails to provide positive outcomes. . . Our experience has taught us that tackling issues facing tent cities directly, rather than relying on policing, will result in better outcomes for individuals and communities.”
City resources currently being spent on overpolicing the homeless populace could otherwise be allocated into mental health support for those living in poverty, as well as social housing and community services to help all of Vancouver’s population with the skyrocketing costs of living. . . But, how would long-term communal solutions like that help the short-term aesthetics of our street photography? Instead of such positive societal progress, we can expect the VPD to keep sweeping people around streetcorners to save face. What this city truly needs from its leaders through our current economic hardship is an even BIGGER collection of skyward-angled pictures of Science World (ones that tastefully keep the impoverished out of frame, of course!). Especially in the face of hosting international events like the upcoming 2026 Fifa World Cup, our precious city council members couldn’t let all those tourists from abroad catch sight of the city’s reality, nor are they willing to shell over city resources to grass-roots organizations working to solve the issue either.
Unless we have something to say about it.
Rather than letting local police and government officials get away with shoving our struggling communities about, we need to use significant events like the World Cup as leverage for genuine social change. Let’s take this as an opportunity to connect with representatives and with your communities across Metro Vancouver to voice these concerns, and to address the root cause of affordable housing.