Tea & Two Slices is a long-running local news round-up by NEEDS frontman and veteran dishwasher Sean Orr, who lives and works in Gastown, deeply aware of his privilege.

Metro Vancouver gas is so expensive, someone drilled it out of this man’s tank. It’s 2019 and Vancouver has finally devolved into a Mad Max type of situation where roaming bandits fight skirmishes over gasoline in the flooded, empty condo wastelands of Coal Harbour and I couldn’t be more stoked for it.

It’s 2019 and developers are so desperate for millennials to live in their cardboard cutout condos that they’re offering free avocado toast for a year.

Yeah, I mean it sucks that you got renovicted…but look, we’re giving you first dibs on this $2,132/month two-bedroom and we totally didn’t even have to: 1-bedroom unit will cost $1,300/month at ‘affordable’ housing project in Burnaby. Those golden shovels are a nice touch. They really hammer the point home.

Related satire of the day: HGTV greenlights dream renoviction show.

Antisocial housing: Dan Fumano: ‘Call it what it is’ — Most Vancouver ‘social housing’ geared to $50,000+ incomes.

Sahota family pleads guilty, agrees to $150K fine over bylaw violations in 2 hotels. These two hotels are monuments to misery. A brooding, hulking beacon of neoliberal austerity politics. The number of people who died in these hotels due to persistent and sustained neglect is inexcusable and 150k doesn’t even scratch the surface of the justice that will be forthcoming. We will expropriate these hotels. We will turn them into monuments of hope.

Maple Ridge’s homeless feel abandoned by the city they call home. Maple Ridge is full of fucking psychopaths. I don’t know how they missed this but a fundamental tenet of living in a society is that we all take care of each other.

This article goes a long way to explain why people forget this seemingly basic truth: The Legal Roots of Anti-Homeless Hate.

This is because the basic right enshrined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom is to own and trade property. So when I say that homeless and property-less people are not seen as human, I mean not only in the eyes of bigots, but in the eyes of the law. In other words, personal prejudices are a reflection of our decidedly impersonal legal system.

Meanwhile, renting in East Van be like:

The gig economy be like: The working-at-home blues: Loneliness, depression a risk for those who are isolated. Oh, weird. I wonder what that’s like?

Speaking of the gig economy: We’re doubling down: All you self-absorbed babies don’t need Uber — you just really, really want it. The thing is, we have it, as I’ve said before. And yet Uber choses not to operate because of the regulatory framework. If they can’t agree to some fairly basic stuff, then their rationale isn’t really about competition, it’s about de-regulation.

This is interesting:

Christopher Langmuir unpacks this:

I mean, having worked on on and knowing a bit about the other, both figures are inflated by lobbyists to make their industries sound like an indispensible part of our social fabric when they are parasites attracted by tax breaks (ie neither pays fair taxes into our social system). Both industries spend millions but leave very little lasting value, damaging workers, properties, destroying our local ‘antique stock’ and environment (ie our aesthetic heritage and air/water). Both make Americans based far from the border very rich while helping to create a middle class laborer that are fiercely protective of their bubble industries despite the damage such work causes to their minds, bodies, social environments, and their country’s stability. Basically, the ticks are arguing who’s responsible for lyme disease.

Bonus: The little-known history of Squamish Nation land in Vancouver.