Jeff Shantz
In response to planned supportive housing projects, slated for Guidlford and Whalley, poor bashing vigilantes in Surrey, British Columbia (unceded Coast Salish territories) have circulated flyers stigmatizing and demonizing homeless people. Their efforts seem to have been oriented toward getting City Council to vote against the two projects and the flyers were distributed ahead of the vote at Council on July 22, 2019. This both reflects and reinforces the fear and panic stoked by police, bylaw enforcement, and businesses against homeless people in the city through practices of criminalization.
The Guildford flyer provides a stigmatizing rant against homeless people that tries to diminish, other, and exclude. It uses all too familiar poor bashing terms to knock residents and neighbors in our city on the basis of class and residence status. These sorts of rants increase conditions for criminalization, further stigmatization, marginalization, and punishment. They can have deadly consequences. While these sorts of hateful manifestations might help justify expanded police budgets to regulate homeless people, they are not about community safety in any real sense. They only serve to stoke the fires of the hateful even further, while providing cover for further diversion of police resources to criminalize poverty.
There is an additional hypocrisy that seeks to present hateful diatribes against homeless people as neighborhood concern or even neighborhood responsibility. The Guildford flyer attempts to position angry people who oppose support for homeless people (or who resent the presence of homeless people period) as community members simply trying to protect their neighbourhoods. APPS rejects this cynical attempt at framing the issue. Homeless people are part of our communities and residents of our neighbourhoods. The Guildford letter would try to set up a division between supposedly legitimate community members (i.e. property owners?) and illegitimate ones (i.e. homeless people). Or to suggest that, actually, homeless people are somehow not part of our communities after all, fully deserving of welcoming and respect.
Angry NIMBYists often pose as concern for neighbourhood what is really prejudice toward homeless people. Concern for our neighbourhoods should extend to concern for our neighbours, who might well be homeless. Or is it really only a concern for property values and business profits after all?
Groups like Anti-Police Power Surrey (APPS) oppose the criminalization of poverty and homelessness by police and bylaw enforcement and oppose poor bashing vigilantes who stigmatize and target homeless people.
While APPS recognizes that surveillance “housing” is not properly housing, we completely and unreservedly reject the mean-spirited poor bashing of neighborhood vigilantes who would spread stigmatizing and denigrating materials and who would campaign against homeless people.
Dozens of people spoke in favor of the projects, including a few currently homeless residents in Surrey. While many NIMBYists spoke against them, the projects were approved.
