An observer intensely involved with Vancouver housing and communities recently called False Creek South “the most organized neighbourhood in the city”. The very idea of “neighbourhood organization” isn’t often raised, but it’s part of the DNA of False Creek South.
In the mid-1970’s, there was no organized entity to support the new False Creek community where every occupant was a newcomer. Even much of the land upon which this “instant” neighbourhood was built had been dredged from the Creek itself. The mud flats integral to the indigenous communities had long since been replaced by mills and factories, themselves then fading or falling away. There were no old libraries or schools or buildings holding institutional memories, no ways of being or local lore providing guidance and direction. What could be done to ensure the success of an experimental neighbourhood that many predicted would fail?
Doing nothing was not an option. A school could be planned and built, but a school is more than a building. Public transit was planned (there was even a library bus) but needed to be organized, tried and tested. Local – very local – organization was needed and was something the City was anxious to foster; close collaboration with its idealized community dovetailed nicely with the social philosophy that had brought it into being.
To achieve this, the new co-op and strata enclaves needed some way to interact to meet the community’s collective needs. On the City’s initiative, a neighbourhood association came into being specifically to address the day to day concerns of its residents and to help realize the community’s potential.
Most resident associations are formed with individual memberships. Not so in False Creek South. Since 1976, the members of what is now the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association have been the enclaves themselves – that is, the co-ops and stratas that house most residents. Then, as now, each member enclave sends delegates to the Association’s regular monthly meetings. Most significantly, each strata and co-op, through line items in their annual budgets, fund the Association’s operating costs through a modest fee-per-door formula.
No other city neighbourhood would organize on this basis. Why did False Creek South?
Perhaps it was the very process of literally building something from nothing that fostered a deeply-held sense of community among people ready and willing to co-exist on shared turf and principles. Perhaps it was the influence of hundreds of co-op members whose housing depends entirely on pooling resources of time and labour as well as money. Perhaps it was the very design of the enclaves that consciously sought to bring people together, in part through the absence of physical barriers such as locked gates and walled off gardens. Perhaps the freedom from car-dependency compelled social interactions among people engaged in the necessarily slow process of walking. Perhaps the design created constant opportunities for people to bump into each other.
Whatever fostered this social connectivity, projects and activities undertaken by this “most organized” neighbourhood ebbed and flowed along with changing issues and concerns. Some celebratory activities have been fairly constant: picnics and parades, winter processions and summer barbecues, neighbourhood clean-ups, kids events, all diligently documented in The Creek newspaper, produced for years by the late Beryl Wilson (Spruce Village), with the Neighbourhood Association’s sponsorship and support.
Less celebratory but more serious efforts also found their place in the community. Given its existing organizational base, the Association easily tapped into a network of active and financial support when several delegates, especially the Regatta’s Kathleen MacKinnon and Evan Alderson, led the sponsorship of two refugee families from Syria. (In response, so many neighbours donated to that cause that its organizers abandoned its fundraising plans as unnecessary.)
More recently, following the City’s decision to build new Temporary Modular Housing (TMH) at 6th Avenue and Ash Street, and on the initiative of Jim Woodward (Market Hill), the Association formed a working group to meet with the City and help facilitate the integration of formerly homeless residents into the community. At the Association’s suggestion, and to honour a longtime neighbourhood activist whose life focus had been to build social equity, the building was named Margaret Mitchell Place. Upon its opening, kids from False Creek Elementary made and presented a personal gift to each new resident.
How that integration took place was not lost on the community. When the provincial government offered buildings to house the homeless, the City freed up land – attracting considerable pockets of opposition around town. Subsequently, during its series of well-attended open houses in affected neighbourhoods, the City collected “votes” in the form of written responses to the proposed TMH in their neighbourhoods. The results were telling. In Marpole, where the centre of opposition was greatest, the City reported responses of 25% in favour and 75% against. But its report for the False Creek TMH was exactly the reverse: 75% in favour and 25% against.
What accounts for this?
False Creek South has always been a mixed income community where subsidized, special needs and other non-market housing exists side by side with market stratas and rentals. That seems to make a significant difference in outlook. Where, by conscious design, enclaves with such a range of housing physically connect and integrate their residents with each other, the notion that another supportive housing unit would downgrade the neighbourhood just didn’t make sense.
Most of the people in this community live on land leased from the City, but everyone in both leasehold and freehold enclaves benefit from the social and physical lay of the land. As established housing elsewhere falls to the wrecking ball and towers of unaffordability scrape the sky, more and more False Creek South residents recognize that the designers of our neighbourhood got it right.
Forty-five years later, the community has become more and more anxious over whatever the City may be planning for the future. In facing the challenge before us, the question may well be whether the most organized neighbourhood is organized enough.
Fifth in the series False Creek South: The Solution, Not The Problem, by the False Creek South Neighbourhood Association