Killing Granville Street softly

Granville Street is emblematic of how ecnomic forces blindly strangle the life such streets have historically created

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

The suburbanization of downtown continues unabated. A recent article by Francis Bula in The Vancouver Sun illustrates how the process unfolds. A family owned company—D Bonnis & Sons Ltd—has bought sizeable chunks of the 700, 800, and 900 blocks of Granville Street. At the corner of Robson and Granville they built what became the home of Future Shop and Winners. Now comes news that the Seymour side of the 800 block Granville will become home to a new yuppie residential tower.

What does this do to the street? Well, according to Bula, Bonnis & Sons “recently doubled the rents for some properties.” So Cheap Thrills, a used clothing store, saw its rent increased over the term of the lease from $7,000 to $14,000 per annum. Cheap Thrills will close. A local leather shop also closed. And a representative of Granville Books, a warm home to all book and magazine perusers for as long as I can remember, told Bula that they’re “hanging on until [the] lease expires next year.”

Bula keeps a straight face as she quotes a Bonnis & Sons source saying “For us, it’s important that diversity and eclectic uses remain. . . . We want to keep some of the edge.” But rising rents remove edge. The Sugar Refinery on Granville closed after years as the home for innovative local bands. Granville Street is now full of domesticated drinking and dancing spots. Rising rents crush the spirit of adventure and replace it with the culture (and economics) of the lowest common denominator, “safe” new outlets for FM rock bars, sports bars, Chapters Books, franchise outlets etc.

Historically, cities were seen as a dangerous place where different classes, races, and religious groups resided one on top of the other in a stew pot of hybridity. But the pattern of development in Vancouver over the last 30 years has increasingly led to homogeneity in the downtown core, not so much in terms of ethnicity (though surprisingly in this area too to some extent), but more in terms of income, class, type of work, age, and education.

Every urban development plan—from a single lot to whole sections of town—implies an ideal city. For big marketers and developers—the Bay, Future Shop, large development firms—the city is a place to exponentially increase sales. For these institutions the ideal city inhabitant is a well-paid professional caught forever on the hamster wheel of working and spending. In Vancouver, successive city governments—the current one is an ideal model—have organized and facilitated the accumulation of capital largely by socializing the costs of debt projects like the RAV line, the Convention Centre and the Olympics, while at the same time co-ordinating new mega-development projects. These long-term capital investments benefit property owners and large businesses, and are paid for disproportionately by the average citizen. “Socialize debt, privatize profit” is the cry of modern capitalism. The public investments and private developments raise the value of property, which in turn raises the cost of housing. Rising housing costs effectively remove blue collar workers, most of the elderly, refugees, poor people, single parents, artists, musicians and students from the area. The ultimate outcome of this vision is urban homogeneity and suburbanization.

Granville Street used to be a street of theatres, residential hotels, bars, and restaurants. Granville and Davie was once a working class area catering to local residents, long-time West Enders and others in the downtown area. Four residential hotels—The Nelson Place, The Cecil, The Austin and the Blackstone—have all closed. The Blackstone is now a Howard Johnson’s hotel. The Nelson Place, which catered to a largely native clientele, is now a Comfort Inn. The Austin is now a Ramada Inn and has some cutesy bar on the street; so all are now owned by international hotel chains. Three gay bars in the area closed (The Castle, Faces, and Playpen Central). There used to be blue collar residences and work in the warehouses of old Yaletown, in the local rail yards, and in the light manufacturing along the north side of False Creek. All gone now.

They planned it this way

Between 1970 and 1995, according to a 1995 City of Vancouver Report, the area’s stock of low cost housing was nearly halved, from 2,307 units to 1,240 units. The 1970s are the decade to look at for changes that are only now finishing the street. Two mega-developments promoted by the City are largely to blame.

First, the City introduced the suburban mall into the heart of Vancouver. The Pacific Centre Mall removed pedestrian traffic from the street and trapped it in that sterile consumerist bunker underground. They placed a large tombstone on this consumerist grave in the form of two black towers on top (at Georgia and Granville) and a windowless white box perched on the side (now the Sear’s store). The City orchestrated the whole travesty by assembling over $10 million in land for the deal in the 1960s, and then cutting Cadillac Fairview deveolopers a sweet deal for it.

The second cause of decline, also originating in the 1970s, was the push to develop False Creek North, now known as Yaletown. According to John Punter, in 1975 the BC Ministry of Recreation commissioned a study to look into an international fair to celebrate Vancouver’s centennial in 1986. In 1979, the BC government bought “71 hectares of False Creek North, paying Marathon realty $30 million cash and an equivalent sum of downtown properties, along with other undisclosed assets.” As we all know, Expo 86 came and went and Yaletown is the legacy, fattening many corporate bank accounts here and in Hong Kong. That government assembled the land on which the whole development rested.

It was post Expo 86 development in Yaletown that sealed Granville’s fate. The City saw it coming from far away, as documented in a number of City studies on the street. One, prepared for the City by Burgess, Austin and Associates in 1989, stated that the Downtown South “will be influenced . . . both in terms of loss of units to redevelopment or upgrading.”

Some see property development solely in terms of aesthetics: How does the building look? How does it fit in to the area? But development affects everything: what types of work will be available, what type of culture will take root, who will pay, who will benefit. Many applaud the density the new developments have brought to downtown Vancouver, but few seem to recognize the type of city the developments create.

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