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.

Councillor Jean Swanson wants to get rental housing ‘out of the market’. “The impasse by some Vancouver city councillors over market rental housing increasingly appears to centre around differences in ideology”. Wow, no shit. Except the people who are most ideological are the people who believe in the status-quo; the omni-benevolent power of the market to solve the crisis it has only ever profited from. “To date, Swanson has voted against every single market rental housing proposal — nine projects totalling nearly 450 units — brought forward to council”. This is just a hint of the gaslighting that emanates from the toxic dialogue in #vanre on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s actually pretty simple. 1: The goal of market redevelopment is to increase value for investors, not to provide housing. 2: There are more middle income units than low income units. 3: There aren’t enough middle income earners because our wages are divorced from the market. 4: Increasing supply at the top level does zero for affordability. 5: Social housing is better competition for market housing than more market housing. 6: The argument that voting against supply for the middle class is bad for affordability is absurd.

Why, for example, would middle income people be forced to rent cheap units when the cheap units barely exist? By what mechanism will middle income people automatically choose to pay more for rent? By what mechanism do you prevent landlords from jacking up the rents once they leave?

Portraying Swanson as some anti-rental ideologue, “grounded in misguided beliefs and a failure to accept the economic realities of the costs and risks — as well as the laws of supply and demand economics — associated with building market rental housing in our market-based economy and society”, as the author does here, is rooted in a type of Stockholm Syndrome to our capitalist overlords. That this amount of vitriol is being spent on a motion that passed is telling about who the real ideologues are.

Spoiler: It’s the supplyists. Like this guy, head of Abundant Housing Vancouver (a developer front group), whose feelings about renters are already well established…

Did anyone else catch adrian crook trying to offer a room in his condo for free childcare and labour Lol
#vancouver #revan #vanshitty #vanelxn #crook #yimby #nimby #vanpoli #creepy #vanpoli pic.twitter.com/cX64YPd0US

— Dragon fruit (@Lildragonfruit) July 5, 2019

Anyway, I’ll leave you with the best comment:

The only thing that trickles down from the top is oppression. But in upside down Vancouver, the oppressors are the actual victims: Following a shooting, Vancouver police don’t feel safe on their own in Oppenheimer Park. “On Wednesday, a police officer was assaulted as she tried to assist city crews working to keep the park clean…” Translation: After decades of verbal and physical aggression and intimidation by city workers and VPD, a cop tried to throw someone’s personal belongings in the dump truck and got decked for it.

Then there’s the flip side. ‘We didn’t know there was a ghetto’: NBA star says car broken into in Vancouver. ‘Millionaire didn’t know there was inequality’. There, I fixed it for you. Heads up, Danny. There’s a Skid Row in Los Angeles, too.

World class city: Canada Line is a model example of a poorly-designed, under-built toy train. Ah yes, pushed through ahead of the more densely populated Evergreen Line to appease the IOC for the 2010 Olympics; routed down Cambie for maximum redevelopment potential despite an already built rail line; switched to cut-and-cover that all but destroyed Cambie Village; built by non-unionized foreign workers making $3.89 an hour by a company that made bullets for the Iraq War (and was embroiled in international scandal); that doesn’t work in the snow; is now almost at capacity? Sounds about right.

As terribly planned the Canada Line was, maybe Translink has started to act with a little forethought:

Related: The climate crisis: These are Canada’s worst-case scenarios.

North Vancouver man charged in cyclist’s ‘dooring’ death. Start doing the Dutch Reach.