For at least ten years, a community of people have been using False Creek, a former industrial sewer and more recently a focal point for a rapidly expanding civic rehabilitation zone, as a permanent anchoring site for their boats. The interesting twist is that the boats are inhabited, each a one or two bedroom apartment floating on the inlet.

As the surrounding neighborhood beautified and the average income of its residents skyrocketed, more and more complaints about the boat dwellers made it to city hall. Some of the boats are perfectly tidy boats but some are, ahem, creatively maintained. Many of the boats are commercial fishing craft converted to be ‘liveaboards’. There owners row back and fourth to their jobs and city activities, confident that the heavily integrated community that has been forged among the boaters of False Creek will keep their possessions safe and also comforted by the fact that the ebb and tide of parochial NIMBY-ism sometimes prevalent in city politics will not impact their way of life as False Creek is under the jurisdiction of a Federal government that, for the most part, has forgotten we exist and only speaks French anyway.

Until recently. Boaters, out! Find a new home or sell your boats! The boaters of False Creek must leave immediately now that the city has successfully lobbied Ottawa to change the navigation act to make False Creek a regulated anchorage area. The salty nonconformists must weigh anchor and move on.

I don’t know how I feel about this actually. I often liked the thought of having them there. It was quirky and community making and a good story to tell. I sometimes feel that governments can push for a civic state of being that is too sanitized and not folksy enough to represent an “organically cohesive” society and the result is social alienation. (eat that Emile Durkheim). It s true that new sewage regulation would have made the squatters (ha-ha) illegal anyway as it is now prohibited to discharge waste closer than 2 miles from land. (This regulation does not apply to the city of Victoria apparently, who dumps the contents of its citizen’s bowels into the Straight of Georgia. It also would require the building of a few hundred more pump-out stations), but considering that the Creek has not fully recovered from being a 70 year old industrial waste pool, 100 boaters seems less important.

Still, some of the boats looked kind of ratty. The Olympics are coming up (but should we remove a charming quirk?) and given the rudimentary nature of marine showers, these people probably smell.

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