VA N M AG .C O M/C I T Y
G O O D CA S T I N G / VA I N C O U V E R / A I R I N G E QUA L I T Y / T H E B I T E S T U F F
City Big Plans Larry Beasley helped create the Building Community Society to address housing issues in the Downtown Eastside.
Eastern Promises
Behind the Building Community Society is a collection of revered older Vancouverites who think they have the right plan for the Downtown Eastside. But not everyone is signing on. Nathan Caddell
PAUL JOSEPH
by
You won’t find Larry Beasley or Mike Harcourt on the Power 50 list in this issue. The former was a featured top-10 player during his time as the city’s codirector of planning in the mid-2000s, while the latter was premier in the ’90s and likely would have been a top-5 fixture if the list had existed back then. But the two men, now both in their 70s, are still wielding a particular kind of power in this city, working behind the scenes to try to address housing concerns in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Harcourt has been an ally via various housing support initiatives designed to alleviate homelessness in the area for years and, in 2006, he helped establish (with the late Milton Wong, among others) the DTES Land Use Development Principles, which was funded by the Real Estate Foundation of BC and the Vancouver Foundation with the mandate to find solutions for housing in the DTES. The working group commissioned studies on how to house the most vulnerable until Wong’s death in 2011, when it largely disbanded. A couple of years ago, however, the group rebranded under the Building Community Society banner. Beasley stepped on as a board member, joining
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