For every new high-end restaurant that pops up in Gastown (L’Abbatoir), Chinatown (Bao Bei Chinese Brasserie) and the Downtown Eastside (DTES) (the Charles Bar), we hear the familiar lament that these unwelcome gentrifiers are ruining the neighbourhood.
Most recently, Sean Condon writes in the street paper The Megaphone that the Charles Bar isn’t what the Woodward’s occupiers had in mind when they camped out for three months on the soggy sidewalk to get more social housing in 2005. He told the Courier that DTES revitalization “is leaving people behind and in fact pushing people out.”
It’s true that rooms renting for the welfare subsidy rate of $375 per month are in shorter supply. For now, the missing low-rent rooms are not being replaced fast enough, but 1,100 more non-market rooms are on the way. I do know of a couple of people who recently bailed out of living at Woodward’s because they couldn’t get used to the street chaos they regularly encountered in the neighbourhood. I also share some of Condon’s frustration at seeing ultra-chic stores open in ultra-poor neighbourhoods – can’t there be something in-between that’s a little more compatible with the traditional neighbourhood?
Exacerbating divisions between neighbours is never a good thing, but every new investment in a faded neighbourhood like the DTES or Chinatown is a good thing. These restaurants bring new people into the neighbourhood, they create jobs, they provide vitality and they stimulate other commercial businesses to come on down and make this a more complete community.
New condos, even if they are in the seven-figure range with glass-bottomed swimming pools, are better than boarded up storefronts. The same Woodward’s development that created the Charles Bar also created 200 more social housing units, which is what the sidewalk protesters wanted.
None of these new restaurants or condos are going to remove any social housing. It’s here to stay, as are the social service networks and the loving caregivers that make the lives of the most desperate DTES residents a little more tolerable.
But compare this new investment with the reputed $3 million a day that is spent on social services in the DTES. For less than one day’s government spending, a new tax-paying restaurant can transform a street and give it new life, a new vision and new hope from the young film-makers, designers and artists who line up on previously abandoned sidewalks for high-priced drinks and scintillating tapas.
Before Woodward’s closed, the revered department store used to have a very high-end destination food floor. Chinatown used to have lots of restaurants, serving lots of price ranges, attracting people from all over the Lower Mainland. Who says it isn’t right to bring that back, fitting in the newcomers alongside the Army and Navy and Spaghetti Factory bargains?
“Stop gentrification” is too often a coded cry by social agencies to protect a dysfunctional, segregated status quo – better the devil they know than improvements they need.
Growing divisions in these evolving historic neighbourhoods have three possible outcomes: unhappy rich people will be scared away and move to the suburbs; poor people will move out; or street behaviours will change so that everyone can get along.
Rich people who moved in with realistic expectations will stay. Low-income people now have many more low-rent rooms owned and guaranteed by the provincial government. That leaves changing street behaviour, which has nothing to do with income (loutish behaviour is more characteristic of Granville Street than Carrall Street) and lots to do with lack of mental health and addiction services. It’s also about civility, respect and a recognition that new investment can enrich everyone’s lives, even those who can’t afford $7 beer.
Mixing incomes is always good, even if it takes a while to get the mix right.