by Sean Orr | Twitterism: Liberal staffer behind Toews Twitter attack: Rae. Attack? Is providing information – personal details that you could find with any FOI – akin to terrorism?
Vision Vancouver just loves having control of your taxes. Yeah, it’s called being a government. Look into it.
Besides, tax cuts don’t work: The Era of Tax Cut Stupidity that Starved BC. It’s all about Stump Rates, I tell you! Stump Rates!
And yet, they still find a way to get your money: Check your wallet when Premier Clark speaks. I don’t even carry a wallet. It really annoys everyone in my life.
Faulty Towers: Tall, thin, curvy, gorgeous – and heating the winter sky. “Kesik predicts an average shelf life for today’s glass towers of only 15 to 20 years, provoking a massive new problem of how to retrofit them when the glass starts to fog and condensation leaks inside.” Here’s looking at you, Yaletown.
Blueprints for change: Why NIMBYs could be calling the shots on how our city is planned and built. Everybody knows that developers and real estate marketers know what they’re doing. Just trust them.
Moving on up: Gentrification in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. “Despite pockets of low-income housing, the transformation of Gastown and Victory Square into a tourist destination with trendy restaurants and boutique shops is almost complete”. If that’s true, then it started in the 70s with the Steam Clock and Blood Alley – and as a reaction to numerous highway plans that would have levelled the DTES and Gastown (if it hadn’t been for the loud intervention of heritage advocates, Chinatown preservationists, and a little group called DERA). If this is gentrification, then it’s a slow, stumbling, self-starting, clumsy beast. And where else can you get a “high-faluting grilled cheese” next to a shop that sells hooker boots?
The writers of the Rabble article point to 21 Doors and 60W Cordova as evidence of gentrification, despite both projects being market-priced, lower middle class housing. And then there’s this: “As on the western edge of the DTES, accompanying all these condo projects are a plethora of restaurants, coffee shops, hair salons, fitness centres, furniture stores, art galleries, organic food stores, banks, and specialty clothing outlets that have opened atop already inadequate low-income services and stores.” OK, first…what exactly is a low-income store? Second, let’s not forget about Community Vintage; Window Arts; Gallery Gachet; W2; Metropole Community Pub; the Waves on Cordova that operates the housing above it; the DNC Sunday Street Market; Megaphone; Lu’s Pharmacy; et cetera. To put it another way, why don’t opponents to development on the DTES ever claim their victories? And third, what exactly is wrong with art galleries, coffee shops, and hair salons? I understand the anti-bank sentiment because they left and now want back in, but otherwise this particular anti-gentrification argument just comes off as petty.
Granville Street and Cambie Street are better examples of the wholesale clearance of unwanted (lower class) businesses, which were replaced with stores like Future Shop, Best Buy, Sears, Winners, Canadian Tire, and Save on Foods. Are risk-taking restauranteurs like Mark Brand merely paving the way for over-priced chain restaurants like Milestones and Joeys? Will Cactus Club be the anchor tenants of a cool new renovation of the Carnegie designed by Henriques? I really doubt it.
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” I understand the anti-bank sentiment because they left and now want back in, but otherwise this particular anti-gentrification argument just comes off as petty.”
nice to hear from a rabble rouser like Messr. Orr. May the days of my nascent views of young Orr continue rather than return to quagmire of hypocrisy I once set my gaze upon.
I’ve had very similar arguments with my esteemed editor Andrew Morrison, wherein I point to Granville Street and Cambie Street as better examples of wholesale clearance of unwanted (lower class) elements- replaced with stores like Future Shop, Best Buy, Sears, Winners, Canadian Tire, and Save on Foods.
It seems like the authors have simply replaced the word gentrification with commercialization. About the only thing they mentioned that is an ltimate factor of this process is the city-approved Historic Area Heights Review. Anything else is just the natural ebb and flow of capital, and complaining about rich people moving into your area sounds exactly the same as rich people complaining about poor people moving into the area.
“Anything else is just the natural ebb and flow of capital”
That’s what gentrification *is*: a process that emerges naturally in places where real estate is primarily market-driven.
And the difference in complaining about rich people vs. poor people moving in is that rich people have a lot more flexibility about where they choose to live; if you drive low-income people out of a low-income neighborhood (which is the long-term effect of those higher-end galleries and coffee shops and restaurants), they generally don’t have a lot of other options for places to live.
Our examination of the subject:
http://thedependent.ca/featured/gentrifiers/
People who romanticize the DTES of the nineties and early 2000s need to get a grip. Having lived here my whole life and gone to Woodwards and Gastown as a child in the 80s, what happened there after Woodwards closed is a disgrace. Open drug use, homelessness and mentally ill people walking around lost without support is not something we need to hold on to. Just because legitimate businesses and middle class people move in, it does not equate to gentrification. As long as balance of support for low-income and middle/high income are in place, you have a thriving community. I see this in my neighbourhood Commercial Drive (whether or not people agree with me). Nobody benefits when an neighbourhood is not mixed income. Rich only exposed to rich, or poor only exposed to poor. Creativity is in the mix.
Amen, Jill.
The drug users, homeless and mentally ill count too…and although it’s easy to just label them as undesirable, a community actually exists there. Of course they need more support, there should be changes to the DTES. I think the problem is that when gentrification happens this group just gets pushed out, they’re not actually integrated back into the community. People who run high/middle-end independent businesses in gastown or the DTES are not bad people at all, who have bad intentions towards this marginalized group. On the contrary you see a lot of charity on their part. But charity doesn’t fix structural violence, which is what the rabble article was referring to. Structural violence isn’t intentional…it’s just a result, again, of that “ebb and flow of capital”. What’s really interesting is to see all these folks who thought they opposed “gentrification” actually realize their own role in it and instead of being self-reflexive, just respond negatively. We are not just producers and consumers of fine foods and goods (and I also love that stuff too), we have a responsibility to understand how our habits effect the lives of others.
So it’s only “gentrification” if it’s big capital, like Cactus Club, that moves in and forces out low-income residents and the homeless? And gentrification has to be fast, consistently paced, and precise–because if it’s “slow, halting and clumsy” then it’s something else altogether?
It’s only obvious that the displacement of the low-income, poor, sick, homeless, weak, precarious, historically exploited–all those without the political or economic power to do anything about it–can take a lot of different forms, whether it’s perpetrated by big capital or small, whether it happens in the urban core to make way for high-income families or in northern BC to make way for gold mines and pipelines.
The form is important, but what matters is the principle: people should have the ability to decide the fate of their own lives. There’s no reason that just because someone was born into money, or is more ruthless or callous, or more selfish, or happens to have a piece of paper in their pocket that says they “own” something (whatever that means), that they should have absolute control over their lives and the lives of countless others. It’s wrong, and disgustingly so because it’s not necessary. There’s no law of nature that says our society must be built on greed, self-interest, competition, and exploitation. There’s not one kind of human born destined to live in comfort and privilege, and another kind of human restricted to either selling themselves or starving. The systems, economic, political and otherwise, that propel and compel things like gentrification, are totally unfit for human freedom and development–except for a lucky few, and what empty lives they lead!–and on top of it all, they’re doing a pretty good job of destroying the planet. It’s time for change.