When B.C. Housing slipped letters under residents’ doors advising in October that Stamps Place is being sold, it marked the beginning of a massive divesting of public property, public assets and responsibility for operating social housing units.

Within the next three years, 350 properties are to be sold to non-profit organizations to own and operate, while B.C. Housing will be left to focus on “innovation with the private market.”

For many social housing advocates as well as the 1,500 Stamps Place residents, that October letter was a call to arms.

Since 1968, Stamps Place has been a safe and secure home for tens of thousands of people — mostly families and seniors — in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Valued at $50.5 million, the Campbell Avenue complex includes the only family-oriented building downtown and it has units ranging from studios to five-bedroom apartments.

But residents argue that it’s more than a social housing complex. It’s a community within a community. It’s also one that defies the stereotypes about large public-housing projects.

Among its notable residents were the Militant Mothers of Raymur. In 1971, fed up with the risks their children faced each day going to school and having to cross railway tracks with Burlington Northern trains hurtling down them, the mothers pitched tents on the tracks. They took them down only after they had a firm commitment for construction of a pedestrian overpass, which still bridges the gap between home and school.

“Just because residents have a lack of income doesn’t mean that they lack understanding or will,” says Judy McGuire, a director of the RayCam Cooperative Community Centre, which shares the site with Stamps Place.

The letter raised plenty of fears and questions.

According to the request for expressions of interest, successful bidders will have full control over who lives there with no requirement to have tenants sit on the housing society’s board.

The non-profits will be required to increase the number of units offered at rents below market value for low-income tenants and the number of units for tenants paying 30 per cent of their income.

But the non-profits will also be eligible for monthly subsidies from B.C. Housing, which is offering to arrange a first mortgage and provide financial assistance for debt servicing.

One of the big questions for Stamps Place residents is how exactly would a new owner/operator increase the number of units. Could it mean reducing the size of the units?

Could it mean for that site, as well as many others, existing public housing units will be demolished and rebuilt? That, of course, raises the spectre of a repeat of what happened at Little Mountain. There, most residents of the 234 homes were evicted in 2009, it was five years before the first few replacement units were completed and tenants allowed to return.

Following in the footsteps of the Militant Mothers, residents got together and came up with a manifesto that among other things set out a plan for a different model.

“Stamps Place is our home,” it says. “We believe it is our duty to protect it for all who live here now and to safeguard this land and complex for those who will need housing in the future.”