The city administration has made many mistakes in how it has approached the development of neighbourhoods, but none is more troublesome and telling than its rezoning of Chinatown.
No neighbourhood would believe itself anything but unique. But the case of Chinatown is as persuasive as any in articulating how our city was created, how there were sacrifices made along the way, how people demonstrated compassion in sheltering each other from the storm, and in turn what our obligations are to honour those distinctive contributions to our culture and to our community.
Correctly, often angrily, many argue the city’s rezoning of the district will bring with it a diminution of the district’s identity – that the effort to “bring new life,” as the city suggests, tosses aside the existing lives in the process. Too much hustle, too little heritage.
Also read: City’s Chinatown residents fight 12-storey tower plan
While there are many nearby examples to cite, the Beedie Develpment Group’s proposal to build a 12-storey complex on an empty lot at 105 Keefer Street has become a towering tipping point in the much larger struggle to preserve historic character while serving a larger public purpose.
The project illuminates a pattern that has created chronic disillusionment in the community about how the city fails to find acceptable options for developer and neighbourhood alike and treats any exercise of building as a zero-sum game in which one side wins and one loses.
Repeatedly the city’s scent for cash shrouds its sense for people. Today it’s Chinatown, but there have been others, and there will be others if something doesn’t break the cycle of planning without the necessary conversations and consultations.
It is valuable to note that the Beedie family has conscientiously served Vancouver as developers who have given back enormously as they were rewarded to strengthen the city. Their generosity to education and health, in particular, has few peers. They are in the crosshairs of the dispute but wrongly targeted as villains. They are only working by the rules the city has created and encouraged for them and others.
The problem is with city hall.
Last week’s series of public hearings on the project – now into its fourth iteration – told much about the gap between the Vision Vancouver-dominated council’s deeds and words.
On paper, the city espouses a respect for diversity and history as vital elements of building and sustaining community.
In mid-May, amid self-congratulatory fanfare, it unveiled a plaque that recognized Chinatown’s national significance in welcoming immigrants to Canada. The irony of doing so on the eve of public hearings into the proposal was not lost on anyone.
The National Trust for Canada identifies Chinatown as one of the 10 most endangered districts in the country.
Of the 800 housing units built in Chinatown since Vision Vancouver assumed power, only 22 were non-market units – hardly evidence of a commitment the ruling party claims.
The core problem appears to be as much what is departing as what is arriving – those seniors who can no longer afford to stay. There is little doubt that new restaurants and the low-rise buildings have added social and economic activity, but it’s all a matter of degree.
To mix my metaphors and commingle clichés: the Beedie proposal is not so much the straw that breaks the back as it is the thin edge of the wedge. The composition and scale of the housing prompt concerns it is a precedent for an open season for developers to gentrify through higher-density buildings that could be anywhere.
The city has spent unwisely before on pet projects. It could spend wisely here to mop up the mess it has made. Making the developer whole here would be a rounding error on its mishaps. Beedie shouldn’t have to pay the price for a process the city shouldn’t have perpetuated.
It’s time to take a step back, let the developer find another place for the proposal, and more considerately honour one of our city’s formative cultures bound to be through demographic change our most dominant in short order. •
Kirk LaPointe is Business in Vancouver’s vice-president of audience and business development.
