Vancouver artist Ken Lum’s East Van cross at East 6th Avenue and Clark Drive is impeccable in its timing as a work of public art reflecting this period. As a piece that is partially about pain and suffering in the city, it is a stunning visual landmark that is daring in its scale. We are a city divided, and it’s important to be reminded of that.

The housing movement that has emerged during the Olympic period in Vancouver shaped the 2008 civic election. It pushed a provincial government which had done nothing on the file since cancelling the 2002 Homes B.C. program, an initiative that used to build 1,200 units annually, in addition to buying SRO buildings and starting construction on some units.

This movement will also blow back if the City of Vancouver attempts to erode the social-housing units at the athletes’ village site. Vancouver social movements are asserting themselves on the national stage. During the Olympics, the Red Tent campaign set a Guinness world record for longest banner wrap after wrapping the entire Canadian pavilion with red tarps.

Last week, SFU communication PhD student Julia Aoki, is completing week 66 of a rolling hunger strike, an action designed to push the federal government to re-establish a national housing program in Canada. In a few weeks’ time, MP Libby Davies’ private member’s bill calling for a national housing strategy will be debated in Parliament. Don’t be surprised if you see red tents turning up on Parliament Hill. On June 6, a delegation will leave by train for Ottawa, just as people did in 1935 on the original On-to-Ottawa Trek. Were it not for the egregious democratic distortions of the Olympics, civil society would not be so energized.

Without a national housing program, Canada is falling far behind other countries in addressing this crisis of affordability. While 40 percent of all housing in the Netherlands is social housing; 22 percent in the U.K. and Sweden; and 14 percent in Germany, France, and Ireland, Canada only has five percent of its overall housing stock as social housing. As more and more of people’s incomes cover the high cost of housing in urban centres, less is available to spend in the economy and personal debt levels tend to rise. It is unsustainable economically to allow this affordability crisis to perpetuate itself. The social consequences are devastating.

The Conference Board of Canada released a report last week which showed that 67 percent of Metro Vancouver households struggle with the high cost of housing. Nationally, the lack of affordable housing hurts Canada’s overall productivity. The report showed that a typical Canadian household spends 50 percent more on shelter than on food and over five times more on clothing. The report states “housing unaffordability is a structural feature of the Canadian economy affecting people at a wide range of income levels”.

The Olympic project amplified and accelerated development paths in the city which increased the divides in the city. The City of Vancouver’s social indicators report from 2009, based on numbers compiled from the 2006 census, shows a city divided. While we invested public dollars in luge tracks and speed-skating ovals, little was done on the affordability crisis. We were too busy putting on an expensive two-week party to think about things that really matter.

Now, David Podmore and Gordon Campbell are bringing us a $600-million roof for B.C. Place and a mega casino in the downtown core. Vancouver is gunning to be branded “Las Vegas North”. Now the logic has been twisted to say that if we want social programs or arts funding, we should support more gambling. To stand opposed to these projects would be to stand in the way of progress—a pre-determined conversation dreamt up by the backroom boys at the Vancouver Club. Rather than fund child-care spaces or social housing units as would be normal in the developments around the stadium, the money will be rerouted to the roof.

The opportunity costs of hosting the 2010 Olympics have been immense. Had Vanoc and the government partners kept to their commitments, they would not have left a city divided. Instead, we are now facing a 50 percent cut to arts and culture and massive cuts to education, social assistance, and many other areas. Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, presented a report in March 2010 to the UN Human Rights Council stating, “In the period between the designation of the host city and the staging of the event, cities normally undergo a series of transformations that not only affect their urban infrastructure, but also bring about economic, social and demographic changes that have long-term consequences for the local population....Regrettably, the legacy of hallmark events on the situation of these people has been far from positive. The alleged economic benefits of staging the games are not spread evenly throughout the local population. Instead, old disparities appear to be exacerbated as the processes of regeneration and beautification of the city usually focus on areas mostly populated by poor and vulnerable groups.”

The future of the city, if there is to be one at all, must be prefaced on the advancement of human rights. City bylaws and engineering departments that move homeless people along are totally unacceptable. Policing methods that use selective ticketing as a basis of sanitizing public space are from another era. We need a charter of human rights at the civic level as the City of Montreal has adopted.

In a city without election spending limits or caps on donations, we will always get the best democracy money can buy. It is structurally unsound and morally indefensible. The City of Vancouver currently is a banana republic shaped largely by a private club of developers, planners, and architects; the citizen has virtually no role in the workings of government or public processes. Surely, we should aspire for something higher in this great city. We should give democracy a try.

Human rights are basic rights and should never be based on obligations or coercion by the state. They are the beginning point of a mature democracy. How a citizen engages with the state matters. The “right to the city” is a slogan, it is a clarion call for human rights, for access to the necessities of life, for civil liberties, for participatory democracy. It is a gesture of resistance to the psychological posture of the city and the rules of the game it has established. It is a refusal to participate on those terms. It is about asserting an independent culture of civil society in the city.

With the 2010 Olympics, we were promised that we would do things differently. Unfortunately, on housing, civil liberties, and costs of the games, in an all too familiar pattern, the spectacle became a missed opportunity to bring the city together.