Can upscale condos balance low-rent housing?

New buildings could revitalize the Downtown Eastside, the city says, but others worry poor residents will be displaced
WENDY STUECK
June 25, 2008
The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- As Vancouver activists battle a proposal to plunk high-priced condominiums on the city's skid row, another debate is humming in the background: whether such developments could help revitalize the neighbourhood without displacing low-income residents.

That's the position taken by the city, which says developer Concord Pacific's proposed Greenwich condominium project at 58 West Hastings is consistent with policies that call for a mix of housing types in the Downtown Eastside, and require any low-income units lost as a result of development to be replaced on a one-to-one basis.

Restricting private development won't necessarily protect low-income housing or its most vulnerable residents, heritage consultant Donald Luxton said yesterday.

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Housing group turns up heat on bedbugs

Vancouver complex to include 'sauna'to zap pests infesting belongings as frustration rises over cost of outbreaks
WENDY STUECK
June 17, 2008
The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- Bedbugs can go a year without a meal, hide in tiny cracks and survive chemical campaigns to kill them.

But they don't do so well in heat, which is why a housing complex under construction in Vancouver will include what's been dubbed the "bedbug sauna," a room where furniture, clothing and other belongings can be heated to a point that kills Cimex lectularius, the common bedbug enjoying a worldwide resurgence.

The idea was born of frustration with the rising cost of treating bedbug infestations and the desire to find some way to get rid of them that wouldn't force people to throw away their belongings, says George Simpson, operations manager for RainCity Housing, the non-profit group that has ordered the bug room for a 92-unit complex now under construction.

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City council scraps social housing plan

Businessman balked at '20 per cent' requirement
Mike Howell, Vancouver Courier
Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Businessman Toby Barazzuol wants to make it perfectly clear that he is not opposed to more social housing built in the Downtown Eastside.

But Barazzuol, owner of Eclipse Awards International, does not think small businesses such as his should also have to be in the social housing business.

That was the situation he faced four years ago when he wanted to add a second storey to his business at Heatley and Alexander streets. He discovered that a city requirement under the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer District plan dictated that 20 per cent of the addition had to be devoted to social housing.

He said the requirement effectively would make him a landlord with tenants. The thought of needing to hire a non-profit to operate the units or managing it himself led him to scrap expansion plans.

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Condo towers on the march in Downtown Eastside

TREVOR BODDY
tboddy@globeandmail.com
The Globe and Mail
Friday, May 2, 2008

Accompanying a hundred or so housing protesters marching through the grimmest blocks of East Hastings last week, I found myself thinking of the 1964 movie Cheyenne Autumn. It was director John Ford's last Western, a grand epic of the homeless and destitute Cheyenne as they sought a place, and way, to live after being displaced by white settlements in the 1870s, a cruel tragedy that went unnoticed in polite salons back east.

This is Cheyenne Autumn for affordable housing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. In all my years of writing about the cities of the world, I have never seen a neighbourhood so stressed, facing so huge a range of external forces and difficult internal choices as the Downtown Eastside right now.

The rate of change here is cinematic, with every week a hoarding springing up to announce a new private housing project, while down most blocks, we are reminded that our provincial government has bought 650 "single resident occupancy" (SRO) hotel rooms for renewal as housing for the poorest of the poor.

Government press releases for this welcome initiative do not mention that this figure represents barely 15 per cent of the welfare-level accommodation in the neighbourhood, according to Wendy Pederson, one of the organizers of last week's march (which was triggered by a new Concord Pacific plan to build nearly 200 condo units at 58 West Hastings).

Ms. Pedersen says 250 SRO rooms closed permanently last year, and 900 more have been priced out of reach, because the area is now attracting students, seniors and so-called cultural creatives, without low-cost housing options elsewhere in the city.

Thus it is not only condo purchasers but also low-income Vancouverites who are now competing with the homeless for housing in this single, 20-block area. The bottom line, according to the Carnegie Centre Community Action Project, is that 1,300 out of 2,900 rooms in the Downtown Eastside will soon be "inaccessible to people on welfare."

The April 22 protesters convened at the premises of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, where boxes of bananas were being given out to hungry addicts, streetwalkers, unemployed teenagers and indigent seniors. Watching the demonstrators brought home to me another reminder of Cheyenne Autumn: how the ratio of aboriginal and Métis people among Downtown Eastside residents increases yearly.

The concentration of poverty in the Downtown Eastside is the result of more than a century of established public policy. For example, from 1900 through 1975, it was virtually the only area of the city where bar, tavern and beer parlour licences were issued. Injured and laid-off workers from the natural resources industry were parked there to drink away their lives, thanks to multiple bylaws passed by multiple city councils.

Vancouverites now have the temerity to feign surprise about "problems getting out of hand down there," and prescribe condos-as-cure. There is nothing like the Downtown Eastside anywhere else on this continent for a simple reason: it is an artificial slum - the direct result of failed public policy united with a long-standing civic tradition of hiding our problems, rather than confronting them.

Rage about all this was in the air during the April 22 march, amid fear from residents and activists that their concerns about the Concord Pacific development plan would not be heard.

Area planner Rick Michaels and Vancouver director of planning Brent Toderian offered soothing words, but Mr. Toderian says he is nonetheless "inclined to support" the Concord Pacific application when it returns to the Development Permit Board in several weeks.

Mr. Toderian offered his assurances on responsible Downtown Eastside development in a recent interview. "We do not practice 'form follows finance' in my department," he told me.

The Concord Pacific project is mid-rise, and sympathetic to the late 19th-century heritage district context.

But a few blocks away on Pender Street, developer Rob Macdonald is pushing for the first high-rise condo tower in the Downtown Eastside, 90 or perhaps 120 metres high, according to some media reports.

Mr. Toderian says that, in his view, "the door is still open" for condo tower applications in the heart of Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside. I think this a huge mistake, and our chief planner concedes that this openness has created a rush of developers and real estate agents expecting permission for the tower format to march eastward.

It is City Council, not planners, who will determine the fate of towers amid the city's largest concentration of heritage buildings.

According to Mr. Toderian, "If developers have paid too much for land here, that's their problem."

And his, especially in an election year.

Like the Cheyenne in the John Ford movie, a line in the sand has been set by community and heritage advocates. Stay tuned.

Condo project targeted by activists

Concord Pacific building at Hastings and Carrall stalled by Carnegie Community Action Project
Frances Bula, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, April 24, 2008

VANCOUVER - A Concord Pacific project in the booming Downtown Eastside has become the first to be targeted by local activists who are gearing for an anti-condo war.

The 154-unit Greenwich condo project -- which is being built near Hastings and Carrall in the middle of what has been the city's drug market, scavenging centre and residential-hotel enclave -- has found itself temporarily stalled as area advocates protest a technical glitch in the approval process.

But those advocates say they're willing to try to make a test case out of the project to highlight concerns about the onslaught of condos in a neighbourhood that has been traditionally the home for the region's poorest.

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DEVELOPMENT TSUNAMI COULD SQUEEZE MORE INTO HOMELESSNESS

The situation is ominous in the Downtown Eastside. Real estate development is destroying the community, and will continue to generate homelessness and death. We need to get the word out to political and civic leaders, and to citizens in general: freeze the development of market housing in the DE; increase construction of non-market housing for those living in inadequate housing and those who are currently homeless!

Silence is not an option.

CARNEGIE ACTION ASKS FOR URGENT MEETING WITH VANCOUVER CITY COUNCILLORS

Read more on the Save Low Income Housing Coalition website.

There are benefits to changing neighbourhoods

If addicts and the mentally ill fare better in mixed-income communities, the Downtown Eastside should welcome development
TIMOTHY TAYLOR
The Globe and Mail
December 17, 2007
Vancouverites are very aware of the homeless people in their city. Best estimates put the number at 2,300, so it's impossible not to notice. Unsurprisingly, 25 per cent of Vancouverites responding to a survey earlier this year said they thought solving the problem should be a top priority for the city.

As a result, you might have expected the recent agreement between the city and the province to develop 1,200 units of subsidized housing by 2010 - aimed specifically at getting people off the streets - to meet with unmitigated enthusiasm.

But no. At the special city council meeting held last Wednesday to hear public input on the matter, only one speaker I heard - Darrell Burnham of the Coast Mental Health Foundation - thanked the city and noted that moving more than 1,000 homeless people off the streets would make a big difference. Among the rest, the mood rarely rose above guarded skepticism.

To backtrack, the agreement calls for the province to fund construction of 1,200 units of social and supportive housing by 2010. The units are to be built on 12 sites across the city, from Dunbar at 16th Avenue to the 600 block of East Broadway, and are intended in significant part for people with drug addictions or mental illness.

Interestingly, the knee-jerk, not-in-my-backyard response was not on display Wednesday night. I spoke with a strata council president who lives across the street from one of the proposed projects. He has significant concerns about concentrating people with addiction and mental health issues in one facility, up to 35 people in that case, but not with the principle of social housing in various parts of the city, even his own.

Where dissatisfaction reliably arose instead was with the perceived inadequacy of the city's response. Speaker after speaker berated the council for not building 3,200 units, a number identified as a priority in the city's own Homeless Action Plan of June, 2005.

The criticism has merit. We have the fiscal surpluses allowing us to make certain investments now. Education tops my list. But if 3,200 new social housing units was a good target 2½ years ago, then with more money and more homeless people we can hardly justify a lower target today.

But a thornier issue was raised with another common criticism. This relates to the preservation of the existing subsidized single room occupancy (SRO) hotels on the Downtown Eastside. There are currently 6,000 of these rooms in 136 buildings downtown, a stock protected by law and considered vital in containing homelessness. That said, many of the buildings are over 100 years old and in terrible condition. The city considers them "insecure and inadequate," a point on which many residents would agree.

Nevertheless, the city's plan to replace them - in part through renovation, in part by moving social housing elsewhere in the city and allowing redevelopment of the increasingly valuable real estate in the area - is the source of much dispute.

Even the city's commitment to replacing the SROs one-to-one with better social housing does not convince many activists and residents, who argue that there is a unique community spirit on the Downtown Eastside that must be preserved. It's a place where people know and support each other. It's a place that some people genuinely do not want to leave.

I'm sympathetic to an argument from the standpoint of community. And clearly there are people with special needs on the Downtown Eastside who can only be helped in their own neighbourhood.

But if developers are thought to be "poised on the periphery of the neighbourhood with their bulldozers and chequebooks," as one speaker had it, and if "bringing in the rich" will only disperse poverty through the city "like a cancer," as someone else put it, then those arguing on behalf of the Downtown Eastside would appear to see no possible benefit from letting the neighbourhood change its profile at all. And here I strongly disagree.

One of the consistent themes that arises in discussions about housing people with addictions and mental illnesses is that they tend to do better in situations where the population is of mixed income. That's the rationale for moving these housing projects out into neighbourhoods like Dunbar in the first place.

As Mr. Burnham said to me in a separate conversation: "People who have lived on the streets respect and value housing so much, that when they finally get into a safe and decent place, they work very hard to keep it."

He's describing the positive effect he has seen among his membership as they have moved away from the Downtown Eastside and into more mixed-income environments. But a reverse phenomenon is also possible. New interest in the downtown among new groups - artists and small businesses, restaurants and, yes, even developers - could provide for a managed increase in the income mix there and throw off similar benefits.

Looked at that way, you could say that the Downtown Eastside needs change and investment for the same reason that the West Side needs to pony up and take its share of social housing.

Because Vancouver does better as a whole when we all step out of our respective ghettos and take ownership of the city more broadly.