How ironic that the same week TEDTalks announced it’s moving to Vancouver because this is such a diverse, vibrant, turned-on city, we have yet another flare-up in the Downtown Eastside (DTES).
It draws attention to our world-class failure to resolve the crippling poverty mental health and drug abuse issues in that neighbourhood. Easy on the self-congratulation, Vancouver.
Media attention has focused on the new Pidgin Restaurant, serving high-end patrons who gaze out over the crazy dysfunction that defines community at Pigeon Park across Carrall Street. Or at least they did until the windows were frosted over to protect them from flashlights shone in their eyes by the Downtown Eastside Not for Developers Coalition. That group’s goal is to “protect” the DTES as a government-financed “social justice zone” where only the very poor and the agencies that support them are welcome. No developers!
Many of the cutting edges of gentrification in the DTES have always struck me as bizarre. An influx of SFU and film students – healthy, active, low-income, community-minded – fits with a gradual transition of the neighbourhood. But the uber-high-end bars, condos, restaurants and design stores? Why here? They serve only to needle the bleeding gap between lower income people and the well-to-do.
Equally I have never understood the complete disdain of the self-appointed spokespeople for the DTES for anyone who isn’t in social housing, as though no lower-income people appreciate the benefits of a mixed community.
I remember when the private film theatre at 516 Main Street was applying for a liquor licence so it could afford to host more community and industry events.
“We don’t want these type of people coming into this area,” screamed the voices from the nearby Carnegie Community Centre. Yet you rarely hear DTES advocates protesting drug dealers and pimps coming into the area.
Yes, gentrification causes some housing displacement. Notwithstanding massive B.C. government investment in new and upgraded social housing units, the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) counts 426 private hotel rooms whose rents in the past year have risen to the point where welfare recipients can no longer afford them. The CCAP report shows 404 rooms around Woodward’s lost to closure or rents above $500 per month, compared with 125 new units at Woodward’s.
But in their zeal to protect the poor they’ve locked themselves into advocating for a monoculture of low-income, government-dependent people and the myriad agencies that serve them. DTES resident and Community Builders’ Group spokesman Gordon Wiebe calls “a social housing desert.”
Wealth and change are coming to the DTES, and only those blinded by politics think they can stop it. No political activism can move the DTES further away from downtown or from forces eager to invest in its future – for better or worse.
To make those investments better, not worse, the greediest developers have to be steered into more community-appropriate projects, and the community representatives have to accept that new condos with additional low-income units are better than no new low-income units.
A starting point might be accepting that not all social housing residents in the Lower Mainland want to be in the DTES, and that it’s possible to make up elsewhere what’s being lost in the DTES.
Building a healthier DTES community is not going to be achieved with a brilliant new idea coming out of a 15-minute TEDTalk. It’s tough work and requires tough people willing to compromise and work together. Strident positioning does not solve problems. It just hardens attitudes. •
