Kerry Jang on the Little Mountain redevelopment

This is an audio recording of an interview that I conducted with then-Vancouver City Councilor Kerry Jang regarding the redevelopment and privatization of the Little Mountain Housing Project in Vancouver and the displacement of just under 200 families who had lived there. Little Mountain was the first and oldest public housing project in BC and was highly successful. It was demolished in the lead-up to the 2010 Olympics because it was sold to a developer based in Malaysia in order for the government to raise money to spend on supportive housing for drug and mentally ill.

In this interview, Kerry Jang explains how the City of Vancouver held back the demolition permit as leverage over the provincial government in order to get the provincial government to actually start building the supportive housing that they had previously announced and funded. The demolition for Little Mountain was a bargaining chip used to achieve Vision Vancouver's goal of supportive housing for addicts and the 200 families who were displaced were the collateral damage. The families were told they could return when it was rebuilt by 2010. It is now 2022 and it has still not been rebuilt and most of the families have still not returned. It is a humanitarian tragedy of immense proportions and I played a key role in exposing it with my thesis. In return for my efforts, I have been absolutely destroyed by both the Left and Right. I may now be heading towards homelessness and addiction myself, so how ironic that is.