by Sean Orr | Clinging to the live-aboard life: Vancouver’s Other Housing Crisis.
Back then, a slip at Coal Harbour would have cost van Eyk an estimated $145 a month, but the waiting list was already four years long. In the early ’90s, Marathon Realty—the real estate arm of Canadian Pacific Railway that owned Coal Harbour Marina at the time—“decided to clean it up and do, what I call, ‘sanitize’ it,” says Ross. “[There were] pristine, brand-new, all-concrete docks and sewage connections for everyone. But they didn’t want to allow the [liveaboard] people back in.”
Back on land, people are still conflating house prices with property prices. Exhibit A: Big Fat Deal: $4.5 million for a surfer shack near Kits that Norman Bates would love to rent. Because the only people who would rent right now in Kits are psychotic?
Tangentially related: a photo that accidentally sums up Vancouver.
Survey of the day: We want to hear from you about liquor in Vancouver.
Brace for more major US daily papers “columbusing” Vancouver’s DTES. This week, it’s the turn of the LA Times: Hip meets heritage in Vancouver, Canada’s revitalizing Gastown, Railtown and Chinatown. For what it’s worth, Gastown was revitalized more than 40 years ago. The re-revitalization, if that’s even a thing, started about 16 years ago.
Speaking of heritage, outraged Instagram user Irwin Oostindie successfully relates the unrelated by juxtaposing the doomed Lao Tzu mural in Chinatown with the construction of the neighbouring condo that will eventually hide it:
It’s a fair point, I guess, and it’s certainly a nice mural, but let’s be absolutely clear: it’s only a few years old. Does its imminent demise really constitute the destruction of cultural heritage? I don’t know, but if there’s a stand to be made in Chinatown, it will certainly require a more thorough googling of random Lao Tzu quotes to find one that is as applicable as it is appropriate. To wit, “If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.”
Related: Condo as Colonialism.
I’ve been saying that the suburbs are killing us for years. But when Jon Stovell, the same developer who turned the Burns Block SRO in the Downtown Eastside into expensive ‘microlofts’, says that Vancouver is losing its soul, it comes across as self-serving and disingenuous:
“We’re afraid of change, and if we don’t address it soon, Vancouver’s just going to become a tomb for money and a neighbourhood for the super-rich.”
Despite his protestations, my Saturday included brunch in Gastown followed by hours spent wandering the new, permanent home of Eastside Flea. Afterwards, I cheered on the opening weekend of the East Van Baseball League drinking beer that was brewed around the corner. We’re living in a tomb, Jon! A fucking tomb!
And yet I didn’t see a one single Lamborghini! I must be hanging out in all the wrong places… Chinese Scions’ Song: My Daddy’s Rich and My Lamborghini’s Good-Looking. I’m not saying that bike thieves should receive better training so they can start setting their sights on luxury cars but…
Meanwhile, Michael Gellers asks if Vancouver really running out of land? It’s almost like nobody in charge of things has ever played Sim City 2000.
Which begs the question, should we even plan at all?
Bummer of the day: Ryan Barron identified as skateboarder in hit-and-run fatality.