Dear David and the thousands of former Residents of Little Mountain Housing,

The story of Little Mountain Housing, a 7-hectare piece of public land developed to house ultimately thousands of returning war veterans, their families, and many more Vancouver families from 1954 to 2009, is a story of the brilliant success of public housing, and its tragic demise.

Public advocates, lawyers, rock stars, tradespeople, small business owners, public servants, devoted parents, and honours students made their homes there, watching and helping each other’s children grow and mature.

A resilient, diverse, complex, and stable community called Little Mountain its home until foreign capital, electoral finance scandal, and Machiavellian power politics scattered the community in every direction and demolished their homes.  In a city with the worst homelessness and child poverty rates in North America, over 740 people were robbed of their economic stability, their social connections, their relationships with school and teachers, and their pride of place.  Their extended community of thousands of neighbours rallied and demonstrated for years against this scourge of disaster capitalism, but without immediate success.

Five years later, the rubble from this destruction remains, like a bombed out and abandoned city after a brutal war of extermination.  In the second most expensive city in the world and surrounded by a quarter trillion dollars of housing, this still-fenced-off, scorched-earth battlefield continues as a vivid reminder of society’s losses when the global rich are loosed by our governments to prey upon and brutalize the poor.

Nie wieder,

Rand Chatterjee