Filmmaker and activist David Vaisbord doesn’t give up easily, but then again neither do the subjects featured in his soon to be completed documentary.
For the last six years, Vaisbord has documented the ongoing fight over social housing at Little Mountain, Vancouver’s oldest public social housing development, located in the Riley Park neighbourhood just east of Queen Elizabeth Park.
In 2007, the federal government transferred ownership of the 15-acre property to the provincial government, which then reached a deal to sell the property to developer Holborn Properties in 2008.
Residents in the 224 units at Little Mountain, some of whom had lived in their homes for generations, were told that they were to be relocated while new housing was built on the site of their circa Second World War homes.
Vaisbord, who lives just four blocks away from residential complex, thought the conflict would make good fodder for a documentary. He had no idea the project would consume his life.
“It was an experiment to begin with in super-local filmmaking,” he said. “Let’s walk on the site and start talking and listening to people… and then it turns out it takes half your life to make it.”
His six-year-old son has never known him to do anything else.
“He just thinks I work at Little Mountain,” he said.
Vaisbord’s 400 hours of footage focuses on three families and their refusal to leave their homes as well as on the community engagement involved in the redevelopment.
According to Vaisbord, it is thanks to the activism of the remaining tenants that a 53-unit building for low-income seniors is set to open this summer in the first phase of the Little Mountain redevelopment.
“What’s amazing about their story is you can win. You can win against an arrogant and misguided government if you push and have the right people involved,” he said.
It’s that culture of protecting community ties evident in the passion of the characters in Vaisbord’s footage that has kept him in the area for 14 years. “Everyone wants to interact. I sit on my porch in the front every evening and I see friends go by and we talk to each other,” he said.
Vaisbord said being so intricately involved in the community for so long has meant a blurring of the lines between the filmmaker and his subjects. Some have become friends and others have become both friends and collaborators on the project.
Ingrid Steenhuisen, 57, is one of the holdouts in the last remaining building on the site and has gone from being a primary character in the film to being a friend and behind-the-scenes collaborator. She installed one of Vaisbord’s video cameras in her window to help create a time-lapse for the documentary of the construction of the new development.
For her part, Steenhuisen said Vaisbord made valuable contribution to the residents’ fight.
“It lent greater, I think, accountability in the whole process because the various powers that be couldn’t say, ‘Oh, we didn’t say that,’” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.
Don Davies, NDP MP for Vancouver Kingsway, agrees Vaisbord enhanced the debate over social housing in Vancouver.
“Most importantly, he has highlighted the humanity of generations of families who have called Little Mountain home, and the need to inject humanity into our housing policy now and into the future,” Davies told the Courier by email.
But neither the documentary nor the story is finished yet.
Vaisbord has one more scene he has been waiting six years to shoot. “The last scene is the last tenants of Little Mountain moving into their homes,” he said.
Vaisbord is fundraising to cover costs for the final editing stage of his project, but he admitted even if he can’t garner the cash, the movie will be released sometime in 2015.
“I will just make it anyway, I will edit it all myself,” he said. “I want to inspire people to take action in their own communities.”
For more information, go to littlemountainfilm.com.
thuncher@shaw.ca
