HOUSING

HOUSING Housing campaigner decries city’s conservatism

by Carlito Pablo

Sara Sagaii draws strength from the stories of ordinary people.

The Vancouver housing activist recalls one tragic tale about a gay refugee for whom she fought. The person was evicted from a rental apartment. The building was slated to be demolished for a new condo tower in the Metrotown area of Burnaby.

The loss of his home added to the many difficulties he was facing. Within a year of coming to Canada, the man was dead. He took his own life. “The stories of tenants you work with and advocate for always stay with you,” Sagaii told the Straight in a virtual chat. “It’s what makes someone like me stick around over the years.”

Sagaii is deeply moved by stories of immigrants and refugees, being an immigrant herself.

“I have seen firsthand how immigrants, especially racialized and low-income newcomers, are more likely to accept unfair treatments and not ask for their rights, not just because they don’t know their rights— which many don’t, never having received an education about it—but because, even if they do, they don’t feel confident to rock the boat in a foreign country,” Sagaii said.

The East Van renter arrived from Iran in

Housing activist Sara Sagaii questions why Vancouver city council has not wielded its power to the same degree as its counterpart in Montreal in pursuing more affordable housing options. 2009. She came for graduate studies in computer science and later worked in the tech industry. In 2014, Sagaii started teaching at a local college. A year later, she went back to school to pursue her interest in social justice.

“I came to support the initiative of a friend of mine, a fellow Middle Eastern woman, and cofounded a Jacobin magazine readinggroup branch in Vancouver,” she said. The group took a lot of interest in a 98page study by the Coalition of Progressive Electors titled “Ending the Housing Crisis: International Best-practices for Creating a Vancouver Housing Authority”. In it, the party declared that it is “fighting to clean out the profiteering real-estate corporations and their politicians at City Hall who keep housing prices high”.

Sagaii got involved with COPE and also started devoting her energy to the Vancouver Tenants Union. She pointed out that city governments have a lot of authority over housing, should they choose to wield their power, citing Montreal as an example. The city exercises its right of first refusal to purchase vacant lots and existing buildings.

“Unfortunately, the City of Vancouver is very conservative in the sense of being unwilling to try new things,” Sagaii said. “They keep doing the same things and expecting different results.”

One example is generous incentives for developers to build new market rentals. “Case after case, we see these supposedly affordable market rentals double, triple, quadruple in rent not long after they start, and they are contributing massively to the process of gentrification of neighbourhoods,” Sagaii said.

She wonders why the city refuses to accept that this approach is broken.

“It’s a religious-like ideological faith, and it unfortunately has a strong grip over the politics of the City of Vancouver,” Sagaii said. “It’s right-wing neoliberal faith in the market, and the eventual coming of the trickle-down messiah.” g

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