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This weekend, David Chudnovsky will return to the spot of what used to be the oldest social housing community in Vancouver.

The homes that stood there are long gone, their former residents scattered everywhere.

For Chudnovsky, the saga of Little Mountain offers valuable lessons, especially in a city where housing is beyond the reach of many.

Ten years after the provincial government announced plans to redevelop the site east of Queen Elizabeth Park, the six-hectare property remains largely empty.

Chudnovsky was then MLA for Vancouver-Kensington with the B.C. NDP when he was invited by residents to attend a meeting called by B.C. Housing in Little Mountain in late March 2007.

According to him, there had been rumours then about plans for Little Mountain, and it was at that meeting that these were confirmed.

As Chudnovsky recalled, it was also at the meeting that the government started to push residents out.

“They told people, ‘You should move quickly because if you move out quickly, we’ll be able to help you alternative accommodations, but if you wait, we can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to help you find alternative accommodations’,” Chudnovsky recalled in a phone interview with the Georgia Straight.

It didn’t stop there.

“They began at that meeting to push, bully, manipulate, encourage - you choose the verb - people to leave very, very quickly, and they continued to do that. They opened an office, and they continued to tell people, ‘You should go quickly’.”

According to Chudnovsky, the government also made a promise it didn’t keep.

He recalled that the residents were told that if they leave soon, they’ll be back in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics because the project would be done by then.

It didn’t happen.

David Chudnovsky used to be the B.C. NDP representative for Vancouver-Kensington.

By the time the bulldozers came in November 2009, all but four households remained on Little Mountain.

With the City of Vancouver on board with the redevelopment plan, the buildings were demolished.

Left standing was one building where four households made a stand.

One of these families was that of Sammy and Joan Chang. They were both blind. They called Little Mountain home for 40 years.

In 2014, Sammy and Joan died within less than two months of each other’s demise.

Two years earlier in 2012, the Changs and the other holdouts fought off eviction. This forced the province, city hall, and private developer Holborn Properties Ltd., to plan the construction of the first of the replacement homes for the 224 social housing units that were lost in Little Mountain.

The Changs never got the chance to live in the new five-storey building. The building containing 53 apartments opened in 2015, and it is only new development so far in Little Mountain.

Nine years after the homes were razed, city council in 2016 approved Holborn’s application to rezone the property.

Holborn has proposed to build 1,573 new homes, of which 1,291 will be market apartments and townhouses. The remaining 282 will be for public housing, and the city will get 48 of these units.

There were 224 social housing units in Little Mountain that were built by the federal government during the 1950s.

On Saturday (April 8), Chudnovsky and other members of the Community Advocates for Little Mountain (CALM) will hold a ceremony to mark the 10th anniversary of the government’s action to remove people from Little Mountain.

For Chudnovsky, it’s “10 years of stupidity on the part of government”.

According to him, the story of Little Mountain provides important lessons.

“Lesson number one is that it doesn’t make sense to privatize a social housing community,” Chudnovsky said. “What should be done with social housing communities, if they need to be redeveloped and if government wants to redevelop them is that they should be used for additional social housing and affordable housing, both of which we need in Vancouver.”

The second lesson is that the redevelopment of social housing sites should be done in phases.

“It shouldn’t be done all at once as the government initially planned,” Chudnovsky said. “It looks like after all of these years, after who knows when the construction will start or if it will ever start, but it looks like they will do it in phases. But it took them 10 years or more to figure that out when the members of the community said from the very beginning, ‘Do it in phases. A few people will move out, you build a building, they’ll move back in, and you won’t disrupt and destroy a community’.”

The third lesson, according to him, is that people need more social housing, “not more expensive condos”.

The fourth lesson is the need for transparency. “We asked from the very beginning, and the community asked from the very beginning, to see the contract that the provincial government had with the eventual developer, which was Holborn Properties. We never given that information, and the community has a right to know and to see what is going on with an asset that belongs to the community. This was land that we held in common as a provincial asset and it was sold.”

Around 2007, when Little Mountain's residents learned about plans for their community, Holborn was also proposing what was to become the Trump International Hotel and Tower Vancouver in another part of the city. The downtown hotel bearing the name of U.S. President Donald Trump opened in February 2017.

The commemoration of the Little Mountain saga on Saturday (April 8) will start at 10:30 a.m. at the corner of 37th Avenue and Ontario Street.