Kerfoot’s plan spells ethnic cleansing

The Whitecaps Soccer Stadium proposal is smuggling in a much larger plan to finally remove lower-value housing from the downtown east side

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Around ground zero of the many blocks of no-man’s land that is the abandoned quarter of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is the former Woodward’s building façade facing Hastings Street East and its caged-in, garbage-strewn, and sagging storefronts. About in the middle of that is the one doorway in the whole block on either side not covered in plywood. Last Friday, an 81/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper appeared taped up beside that one door and, in print too small to read from three feet away, it announced that the first Open House public consultation on the proposed new 15,000-seat Whitecaps Soccer Stadium was being conducted inside. Not surprisingly, turnout was slight.

The proposed stadium itself is a marvel both architecturally and legally. To be situated thirty feet above operating rail tracks that run along Vancouver’s waterfront, the proposal does not require the City to re-zone the industrial land per se, because the developer is not altering the use of the land itself, only the airspace above it.

If the ploy is successful, it has major ramifications for the fate of the highly-contested Arbutus Corridor, that strip of disused rail line that cuts north to south through some of the most highly desirable and highly priced potential condo-development land on the continent. A recent BC Supreme Court decision found that the City had every right to zone that land according to what the City perceived was in the public interest, but the rail company owning the land will almost certainly appeal as it continues to struggle to win the right to realize maximum profit on its holdings. Potentially, a successful soccer stadium proposal built over top of rail land would set a precedent that could be used to circumnavigate the Supreme Court and build condos in the air space above the Arbutus Corridor.

But the waterfront stadium proposal is more interesting yet. Greg Kerfoot, the multi-billionaire software designer, bought not only the land under the proposed soccer stadium (and then leased back use of the first 30 feet above it to the rail company), he also purchased all the land extending hundreds of feet to the east, stretching all the way from the foot of Richards Street to the foot of Main Street—waterfront, or nearly waterfront, property all. No plans for the remainder of the three-quarters of the land not involved in the soccer stadium have been announced.

Inside the Open House public consultation, there were representatives from the City planning department and from the Whitecaps Soccer club, but no one from the Kerfoot company that bought and owns the land. I asked the spokesperson, the president of the Whitecaps Soccer club, how many condos are envisioned to be going into the land east of the proposed stadium, but all he replied with was a denial of there being any plans to develop the land at all.

On the face of it, the Whitecaps Soccer Stadium is about as insane a proposal as could ever be imagined. For one thing, the proposed opening date for the completed stadium is sometime in 2009, meaning it is to be built at the same time as the following: the Canada Line rapid transit tunnel to the airport, the north perimeter road, the south perimeter road, the Port Mann Bridge twin, the extra Highway One lanes, the many Olympic facilities, the massive Southeast False Creek Olympic Village, the new Sea-to-Sky Highway to Whistler, and the omnipresent condos. This at a period in which construction trades are already complaining of a severe skilled-labour shortage in the Lower Mainland, and unemployment has sunk to a 30-year low, with few of these projects even breaking ground yet. Let’s not even mention the looming scarcity of journeymen tradespeople from around North America, as rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina begins absorbing all spare bodies.

There is, at the same time, a severe global steel shortage (rebar, in particular, is just about all used up), a shortage in cement, and record-high global prices for all commodities used in construction, all of which will only get much more expensive in years ahead as more storms strike at more populated regions around the coasts.

One year after the Olympics, when the highways, the subways, and Olympic facilities will all be finished, would obviously be the much wiser time to build a new soccer stadium. That is, if such a thing could ever be viable. But in Vancouver, that is highly doubtful. Though the local soccer fields are filled with kids every Saturday and the cafes are filled to overflowing with fans watching satellite games from around the world, there have never been very many fans of local live professional soccer. There could be an argument made that Vancouver should have such a soccer stadium, but no viable business plan for such a stadium could ever hope to succeed without subsidies and substantial tax breaks from municipal and provincial governments.

But it is unlikely that either the City of Vancouver or the Province of BC would ever agree to such politically unpopular measures, and so, both in its construction and in its operating plans, not much makes any sense in the Whitecaps Stadium proposal on its own.

Which is why, in this case as with icebergs, it is instructive to peer below the surface. Here is where the bulk of this proposal lies hidden far away. There is, The Republic suspects, no plan to build a soccer stadium prior to 2010. If one is built afterward, it would only be in the context of a major public amenity in exchange for the City allowing Kerfoot to build a string of condos on the land stretching east to Main Street.

Such a proposal put forward now would meet with major political resistance, because such a development would forever alter the character of the Downtown Eastside, and would put the final nail in the coffin of the city’s last remaining stock of lower-priced housing. Such a move could only be pulled off if there were at least an equal weight of public support in favour of the development, the kind of support only possible with a major public amenity being offered by the developer.

Enter the soccer stadium.

After a few years of tying the future of all soccer in Vancouver, from kids on up, to the prospects of a major downtown stadium, the development company might be able to count on a major public outcry to City Council if a day came when the company could accuse the City of killing soccer in Vancouver by refusing to allow the development of condos along the waterfront property, condos the company will argue are necessary in order to finance the wonderful gift of the stadium.

Great Canadian Casinos pulled the same stunt with the historic racetrack in Hastings Park. After buying the track, the company announced it would have to be closed unless it got permission to operate slot machines on the site, in order to finance the money-losing track. Because public support for the racetrack was high enough, and outrage over the closing of the track was great enough, City policy was breached and Council finally allowed slots in Vancouver, at Hastings Park—which is what the submerged business plan of Great Canadian Casinos was all along.

Because the Downtown Eastside is home to a majority of the city’s First Nation’s population who crucially depend on the lower housing prices there to remain in Vancouver at all, a deceptive plan that will undoubtedly increase land prices there, resulting in the loss of all lower-value housing, could be accurately described as a hidden policy of “ethnic cleansing.”

If instead Kerfoot came forward honestly with his whole plan for the land, which included a means of somehow retaining at least the same amount of lower-value housing in the district, there would be no need to attach such an ugly epithet to him.

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