The Belongings of Precariously Housed People

Alexandra Flynn

Alexandra Flynn is an Associate Professor at Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. She teaches and works in the area of law and cities, with a focus on housing and homelessness, and Indigenous-municipal legal relationships.

Nicholas Blomley

Nicholas Blomley is Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University. He has a long standing interest in questions relating to property, space and power, particularly in relation to the oppression of marginalised people.

Margot Young - Moderator

Margot Young is Professor in the Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. After studying at the University of British Columbia, the University of Toronto, and the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Young began her teaching career at the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. In 2002, she moved to the University of British Columbia.

Professor Young teaches in the areas of constitutional and social justice law. She was the Director of the Social Justice Specialization at the law school and has organized the Law and Society Speakers Series for close to a decade. Professor Young served three terms as Chair of the university-wide Faculty Association Status of Women Committee. She is a research associate with Green College, the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, and the Centre for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC.

Julia Riddle

Julia is a lawyer who specializes in constitutional law, including the rights of Indigenous peoples and Charter rights. They have represented clients defending their right to safe shelter in a number of cases, including in the 2021 attempt of the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation to evict the CRAB Park community and a challenge to the 2022 Vancouver Fire Chief decision to evict the Hastings Street encampment. They work at Arvay Finlay LLP.

Fiona York

Fiona has worked in community services and non-profit organizations for over twenty years, and for the past 13 years in the Downtown Eastside. She is the former coordinator of the Carnegie Community Action Project, which focussed on development, gentrification and housing in the DTES, and authored the 2019 and 2020 Hotel Reports about SROs and rents.

For the past five years, she has provided frontline support and advocacy for tent cities in so-called Vancouver and currently volunteers full time for the encampment at CRAB Park. She is employed as a support worker and is a board member of The Dugout, a drop-in centre in the DTES.