When the ends kidnap the means

A student attends a debate, digs up facts from the library, and gains clarity from a homeless musician, all in one day’s pursuit of a thesis on Vancouver’s condo construction bonanza.

by Patrick Vert

I’ve never used the phrase “war on the poor” before, but I will now. I spent this morning taking pictures of condo ads and development sites, providing visual context for what I have been investigating at the library. I have come from Queens University in Kingston to work on a master’s thesis on gentrification in Vancouver. In my lonely hours buried in the stacks, I uncovered a bone fide government figure on the number of high-priced condo units already built inside or encroaching on the downtown eastside area, procured from deep within a Department of Urban Planning document: 8,000. Yikes.

My self-guided walking tour fixed on Coal Harbour, False Creek, and both sides of Cambie Street. Cambie has literally divided the proverbial “right” and “wrong” sides of the tracks in Vancouver since time immemorial. Respectively, the West and East ends have divided middle and upper class settlers from the labourers they employed, almost from the time of the city’s founding. Those labourers were mostly Italians, Sikhs, Asians, and Canadians. Today those class lines are still evident. The Fairmount Hotel still warns its guests of the “undesirables” that lurk about, and should they choose to venture into the “historic” neighbourhoods of Gastown and Chinatown, a chauffeur will be provided.

Incidentally, these are two places that the City wanted to bulldoze to the ground in an infamous 1960s beautification project. Funny how City Council sentiment changes, but their capitalist bottom line doesn’t. Come see Vancouver! Spend your money here! Better yet, move into our condos! The Gateway to the Pacific Rim! I managed to track down the Vancouver press’ first use of this phrase “gateway to the Pacific Rim,” in an 1891 souvenir edition of The World. Reading this history, one quickly gets the impression that this city was practically founded on whoring itself to private investors.

By now most of us are familiar with how a low-income neighbourhood can be apprehended and turned into up-scale loft apartments, especially if there’s any kind of an artistic community there. And by now we are also familiar with how starved-for-cash municipalities try to use international circuses like the Olympics in order to attract private investment and prestige. And at least on some intuitive level, we may all be familiar with how this competition for investment creates an economy of reckless real estate, insurance, and currency speculation. But in my short years as an urban and economic geographer, I haven’t encountered something quite on the scale of gentrification taking place in the great Vancouver.

Here is a sampling of slogans I’ve jotted down from my morning walking tour: “An Urban Oasis” (located appropriately in the east side, amidst the dreaded “undesirables”);“Yaletown’s last true luxury condo space;” “Build Your Own Dream ‘House’;”and my personal favorite, “Come see what you could be missing.” Yes, many Vancouver residents will definitely be missing out on this elitist bonanza.

Moving on to the “wrong” side of Cambie, I saw a boarded-up lot that proclaims to the community in bright colours “We want your input on this development site! Watch for dates at the end of June.” Some justifiably cynical citizen graffitied, “Social Housing Now.” Across the street, retail space has been left vacant and boarded up to prevent squatters and the homeless from actually having a space of their own. The broken neon “restaurant” sign is almost cliché, with an upside-down “s” hanging precariously above the sidewalk. Below it the failed establishment’s slogan reads, “East Hastings Never Sleeps!” Indeed, the homeless never sleep in these vacant buildings. That’s illegal.

Later that evening, I attended an all-candidates debate on these very issues, hosted by Simon Fraser University and the Housing Cooperative Association. The conservative candidate didn’t show up, the NDP candidate affirmed their commitment to build more affordable units, the Green Party candidate wasn’t invited, and the liberal candidate bellowed on and on about a lame “555” program to allow people who can’t afford to pay their rent use that rent to go towards a fantasy mortgage, since after all, “it is everyone’s dream to own their own home.” As for the Q and A, all questions were taken White House Style: on a card, then screened and censored by two mysterious lackeys, affiliations unknown. I had two questions that were not read: Why should not a homeless person have the right to use a vacant building or lot space? Also, why is there such a condo bonanza in a city with such a dreadful affordable-housing crisis? The only question permitted invariably began with the words “What will your party do to . . .” Fill in the blank, wait for the rhetoric.

After this colossal waste of time, I talked with a homeless person who does a musical comedy act for spare change. I told him about this Q and A and asked him what he thought of the candidates’ platform on housing and homelessness. He responded, “What platform? It’s just another form of capitalist exploitation. They borrow this issue . . . ”

“Like a hearts-and-minds game?” I interjected.

“Yah, they have corporate interests, you know. Big corps. But you know all this stuff probably better than me, I’m just a bum and musician. Here I’ll play you a song.” He pulled out his harmonica and played the keynote music to Darth Vadar’s entrance march in Star Wars. Later in the evening I saw him in front of the train station, still working on his self-deprecating stand up act.

Any public opinion barometer will tell you that a significant majority of the city’s population is stark raving mad. By the time the Spirit of 2010 hits, Vancouver will be in for a meltdown. Let’s hope it doesn’t interfere with the sponsorship revenues. But who knows, maybe the City will succeed and Vancouver will become the world’s first members-only megatropolis. Isn’t that, after all, what municipal Councils would wish for in their wildest dreams?

In any event, all this is making for a rich thesis study. I will introduce it with this not-so-noble truth, from maverick journalist Eduardo Galeano: “Advertisers are the real urban planners.” Galeano, you are correct. The ends have been kidnapped by the means. Vancouver’s developers have been, from its founding, narrow in vision with little regard for the city’s true needs. The means of moulding an image for itself has always trumped these needs in the endless competitive speculation that there is money to be had. Every once in a while, as it happens with this sort of thing, the bubble bursts. We, the working poor, watch it hovering over our heads.

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