Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Eight - Part One.

               Chapter Eight - Part One


   Politics didn't dominate all of my life in the 1980's and 1990's.  On a late summer day in 1982, I opened up the door of  an apartment in a housing co-operative on Cambie street. The housing co-op lay about eight blocks south of Vancouver City Hall. Up the street few blocks south lay the beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park and down the street going northwards, was the Cambie Street bridge which led straight into downtown Vancouver.
     But as I opened the door to this spanking new apartment, my spirits leaped up. Here at last, I told myself, was a nice place to come home to. Carpets ran along the floors of this small one-bedroom apartment. A washroom with a washer and dryer stood just next door.  And  in this co-op, or around it, lay just about everything I needed.
     For the next two weeks I couldn't wait to leave the two tiny rooms where I'd stayed in Kitsilano for the past seven years."When you move into a housing co-op you've won the lottery," said May Brown, the centre-right city councillor to a Vancouver city council. Brown had rightly described my state of mind on my first sight of where I would live.
     Yet she didn't mention the constant meetings and tensions required to run a housing co-op. In the previous 16 months I'd gone to over 20 meetings and also twice to city council to make this co-op happen. Now the moment of payback had come. I was now a full-fledged resident of Eight Oaks Housing Co-operative, a four storey, 42 suite building on Cambie Street. On the co-op's north side and on its first floor sat Acorn Day Care where some of the co-op's children could go to.
     1982 was one of the last years of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's time in power. The aging prime minister had been goaded by the left leaning New Democratic Party to finance social housing. Eight Oaks and many other co-ops came out of this new government spending. In his time in power Trudeau encouraged the building of 600,000 units of social housing. Never before or since has a Canadian government financed and helped build so many units of social housing.
     Our co-op was developed by Richard Morgan and Jacques Khouri. Khouri headed up Inner City Housing and before becoming a developer, he had tried to save low cost housing in Kitsilano. I love living in Eight Oaks Housing and still live there, the last of the original residents to do so. Yet not all people were happy living there., a fact I'll discuss in the next section of this memoir.