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.
