As Vancouver comes closer to hosting the Olympics, more residents of Vancouver are becoming victims of Olympic-related evictions. Last week the residents of a Downtown Eastside hotel were given eviction notices. In 2007, the Carnegie Community Action Project claimed the Golden Crown Hotel was the site of the first Olympic Games-related evictions. At the time the hotel owner issued eviction notices to tenants so that the hotel could rent rooms to Olympic construction workers.

The Carnegie Community Action Project has created an international media campaign to send poverty-related olympic bulletins to over 800 international media contacts to highlight issues of homelessness and poverty leading up to the games.

Meanwhile, the reporter, Frances Bula, is calling on activists, reporters, politicians, and academics to come up with concrete evidence that the police are forcing homeless people out of the city and landlords are evicting tenants to clear rooms for Olympic visitors. She says that as long as she remembers, landlords have been kicking tenants out of hotels in the Downtown Eastside and social service agencies have been sending people back to where they're from.

Housing activist Am Johal responded to Bula's plea by saying that although there are no official statistics that prove that evictions are happening in Vancouver because of the Olympics, previous research shows that mega-events such as the Olympics displace people who are already marginalized.