Photo credit: Murray Bush, Vancouver Media Coop
“There was no one in this building for as long as anyone can remember. Then we came along. We worked hard at fixing it up. People moved in upstairs. These guys criticize, but they don’t offer any solutions of their own.” -Brandon Grossutti, President of Pidgin Restaurant Ltd, quoted in the National Post, Feb 21st 2013
As is often the case in public debates on the Downtown East Side, media coverage of the new Pidgin restaurant has been characterized by historical amnesia. Uncritical repeating of the imperative and beneficial claims of gentrification has ignored longstanding issues, their context, and most of the relevant facts. Despite Brandon Grossutti’s proclamation that there was “no one in the building” when he “came along”, the DTES community remembers well that the 21 Doors development which houses Pidgin used to be affrodable housing for low-income families. Until March 2008, that is, when its tenants were evicted for the renovation and conversion of the property into market condos to be flipped for quick profit.
While Grossutti has made himself the public face of the business, appearing in numerous media interviews, he is not a solitary small business owner beset by a “poverty industry” as The Province suggests, but rather one of several high-profile individuals with a financial stake in the project. The owner of the 21 Doors development which houses Pidgin, Robert Fung, is listed as one of many “partners” on the restaurant’s website, and is implicated in Grossutti’s “we.” While the media has chosen to depict Grossutti as a well-meaning restaurateur that has stumbled into a conflict not of his making, the extent of his personal financial involvement remains obscured, and the presence of significant real estate capital is undeniable.
As unusual as it may be for a restaurant to boast a “president,” Mr. Grossutti is no stranger to the title. The second key fact which has eluded media accounts is Grossutti’s venture capitalist career before his adventure into the restaurant business. Grossutti is the president of Integrated Algorithmics, a financial services firm he co-founded with Stefan Moser in 2005. He created the company after working as the Software Development Manager at Vancouver-based Wolverton Securities, one of Canada’s oldest venture capital firms. This brokerage has been operating on the Vancouver Stock Exchange for over 100 years, and remains privately owned and managed by the Wolverton family. Grossutti is also the Managing Director at Knowledge-Based Telephony Systems, an Alberta-based telecommunications company. His career at Wolverton lasted over a decade, apparently only coming to a close in 2012 to attend more closely to his passion for fine dining. Finally he is also registered as the owner of the website for a personal consulting company called Sildon Image Consulting, which provides wardrobe and personal shopping services. The contact for this last company (which declares, unironically, that “image is everything”) is Silvia Kim, another employee of Wolverton Securities.
Integrated Algorithmics is about as arcane as its name suggests, but further investigation sheds light on Grossutti’s current scuffle in the DTES. The company provides IT services specialized for private brokerages like Wolverton Securities that are engaged in a relatively new financial practice called “high-frequency trading” (HFT). This is a trading strategy which exploits ultra-high-speed computing and proprietary software to perform rapid analysis of stock market data and respond with trades in a tiny fraction of a second. Current market players, including Grossuti’s Integrated Algorithmics, boast reaction times faster than one millisecond.
This high-frequency trading technology outperforms humans with its near-instantaneous responses to market movement, allowing computers to profit by doing extremely frequent but small trades (on the order of thousands of trades per day). It is a relatively new practice, exclusive to a few well-connected brokerages, though it has been growing rapidly: HFT volume in the USA increased 164% from 2005 to 2009. Despite its small profile, the nature of the practice makes it disproportionately influential. While high-frequency trading operations account for 2% of the firms operating in the equity order market, they constitute 73% of order volume.
From high-frequency trading to gentrification
The rise of high-frequency trading has much to tell us about how businesses operate, and why it is naive for the City of Vancouver to stake its housing strategy on market-based policies and their attendant gentrification.
High-frequency trading firms and real estate developers both “go where the spreads are widest,” in the words of James Overdahl, former US Security & Exchange Commission (SEC) economist – that is, where the largest profits can be made. In the real estate world, speculators target neighbourhoods where the rent is lowest compared to the citywide average – a margin which urban geographers and gentrification scholars call the “rent gap.” In Vancouver, the “spreads are the widest” in the Downtown Eastside. The building that houses Pidgin was first targeted in 2008 by real-estate speculator Robert Wilson, who proceeded to evict its 40-odd low-income tenants. At the same time Wilson purchased a dozen other low-income hotels in the Downtown Eastside, and made-off with millions by “flipping” the buildings. Like a high-frequency trader, Wilson played the game to extract personal profit, regardless of its human or social impact. Grossutti’s recent entrance onto the restaurant scene with Pidgin was not so much a change in profession as a re-application of the principle of profiteering from the stock market to the low-income housing stock.
What we also learn from high-frequency trading is that profit extraction can be highly destabilizing. The disproportionate and chaotic influence of high-frequency trading burst onto the public stage in the 2010 “Flash Crash”, where the Dow Jones industrial average lost 9% of its total value for no discernible reason, only to “recover those losses within minutes.” The event was the biggest one-day point decline in the Dow Jones’ history, and triggered an SEC inquiry into how and why it occurred (*see footnote). It concluded that high-frequency trading magnified the impacts of market actions, creating a market “so fragmented and fragile that a single large trade could send stocks into a sudden spiral.”
While high-frequency trading is certainly profitable, the question of whether or not it provides any value to the market as a whole remains a point of contention. In October 2012, American gas traders, former HFT executives, and Canadian brokers collectively spoke out against HFT firms, insisting they were destabilizing markets and distorting prices. In November, the U.S grain industry took the unusual step of chiming in to say the same was being done by HFT firms to grain futures, arguing that the practice was making markets increasingly erratic and irrational. These criticisms were especially remarkable in that they alleged that HFT firms were exploiting the practice’s “market making” influence to manipulate markets, create volatility, and exploit resting orders by less sophisticated market players, a practice colorfully known as “banging the beehive.” When you bang the beehive, a lot of people get stung, and one person ends up with all the honey.
Similarly, real-estate investment in Vancouver has become a game for a group of well-connected profiteers, an end-in-itself, producing an unstable housing market teetering on the brink. Head city planner Brent Toderian, before being fired by Vision Vancouver, warned that in the Downtown Eastside there was “so much speculation, so much land was changing hands,” that prices were spiraling out-of-control. The immediate economic result was inflation of land-values and rents, while the human result was that poor people were evicted – including from 334 Carrall itself. This speculation was enabled by signals from city council that laissez-faire deregulation of the property market was the new order of the day in this most vulnerable of neighbourhoods.
Deregulation is the problem, not the solution
Despite these substantial criticisms of high-frequency trading and subsequent government promises for regulation targeting the industry, the practice remains out of the purview of the SEC. In Canada, the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada is considering imposing self-regulation due to the number of abusive practices associated with HFT, and regulators are contemplating significant action soon. But instead of taking responsibility for their actions, traders and speculators have claimed to be the solution for the problems they created. After the Flash Crash of 2010, high-frequency trading firms continued to insist in the face of plentiful evidence that their practices were not a cause, and that if anything high-frequency trading “substantially improves market liquidity, narrows bid-offer spread, lowers volatility and makes trading cheaper for other market participants.” (Here is a summary of comments made to the SEC.) Meanwhile, here in Vancouver our real-estate industry calls for abolition of the property transfer tax and the cutting of “red tape” at city hall as “solutions” to the housing crisis.
But it falls to government to ensure that the activities of businesses, all the way from a gentrifying restaurant to a high-frequency trading firm to the largest of energy companies, are not adversely affecting its citizens. Without proper regulation and oversight, business can and will remain oblivious to the social harms their private operations create. While it is helpful when DTES business operators willingly embrace “a little humanity,” as gentrifying restaurateur Sean Heather prescribes, it is more helpful still when our government requires them to do so.
Pidgin has stated that in opening their restaurant they wanted to “[start] a conversation, one that is overdue.” Though much still needs to be discussed, this conversation has already been happening for a long time: it does not begin or end with this one block of Carrall Street, though Pidgin’s appearance has certainly raised the volume. And for the conversation about Pidgin in particular to have any benefit at all, I’ll suggest it should begin with an acknowledgement of shared principle: that if our politicians abdicate their social responsibility to businesses, the majority will suffer, while an elite group of well-connected “market makers” profit at our expense.
Footnote: A further investigation of high-frequency trading practices by Nanex LLC, a software company not unlike Grossutti’s, determined that high-frequency trading was responsible for an exponential rise in quote traffic in the last decade that resulted in a 10-fold increase in cost per transaction. This increased data per transaction imposed additional costs on stock quote processors, requiring increasingly expensive communications and processing equipment to handle the exponential increases in quote traffic, pricing smaller, conventional players out of the market analysis business. And this technological gulf compounds the challenge of imposing regulation on HFT, as “the technology that regulators have to monitor market abuse is far, far behind the technology used by traders,” according to Stephen Piron, director of BrightSun Group, a UK financial technology company.
Richard Marquez
February 28, 2013 at 12:07 am
Where is the racial, class and gender analysis here? Who were the former displaced residents? Disabled people on PWD, or unemployed, disproportionately aboriginal tenants? Even the US housing crisis expedited by real estate speculators and gentrifiers
Wendy Pedersen
February 28, 2013 at 9:52 am
I met two of the rental tenants who were evicted in 2008 by Robert Wilson, both white and one was a security guard and the other a volunteer at Carnegie. Now the top units in this building sell for $380,000, I’m told. The police gave the volunteer at Carnegie tickets for selling her household belongings on the street in order to raise money in the lead up to the eviction and the second was a single dad trying to retain custody of the 2 kids who were living with him. Rider kept in touch with him for awhile. He ended up paying $300-$400 more a month after the eviction and he worried that would make his ability to keep his kids less certain. With a lot of persuation, we managed to squeeze Ada into the top of a waitlist into the Ford Building. Not sure what happened to other tenants or who they were.
River
February 28, 2013 at 11:49 am
This article conflates complex neoliberal economics jargon and a corporate witch hunt into an article that’s somewhere between academic masturbation and a gentrification suspense novel. Connecting the dots in some implied conspiracy of investors, high frequency trading robots and a government that has turned its back resulting in the gentrification of the DTES. Sorry but I’m sick and tired of the “us against the world” rhetoric that has come out of publications like the Mainlander on behalf of the low-income residents and their interests which it claims to hold at heart. Cities have been left holding the bag while senior levels of government offload more and more responsibility to them without matching funding, housing being one of those things. The “land lift” that comes from development shores up some of this growing deficit, so what can we do about that? Instead of demonizing small businesses who are at the end of this line why not go to the front of the line and examine the stupendously unequal relationship between Federal->Provincial->Municipal governments and how that translates to cities being forced into the “entrepreneurial” from “managerial” roles they now find themselves in. Government’s haven’t abdicated responsibility, they’ve been screwed over themselves by other governments and are now in a ridiculous and unsustainable position. This is how social housing has become dependent (in the eyes of many municipal govs) on density bonuses, density transfers, community amenity contributions, development levy costs etc. You spend all this time trying to figure out the history of some business guy and intertwine it with automated global financial transactions to the point where it sounds like some global conspiracy to gentrify the DTES. It’s simpler than that, and far more local. These are people who live here, Robert Fung, low-income residents, the people who started Pidgin, we should be banding together in our communities to pressure all levels of government for changes but instead we write articles that paint developers and restaurant owners like they’re a cabal of elite power mongering fiends. How about a little more time focusing on what we could do moving forward instead of playing private investigator and spending time researching what you feel you can use to vilify people who could otherwise be your ally if only you took a minute to see them as human beings and not theoretical abstractions or cogs in a process?
Rian Harrison
February 28, 2013 at 2:00 pm
Many find research more persuasive than analysis.
Rose
February 28, 2013 at 3:13 pm
Thank you for this comment. All my thoughts and more about this article, couldn’t agree with you more.
Tyler
February 28, 2013 at 8:41 pm
What a poorly written article. Pretty simple planning and executing here, “Let’s see how much information we can gather on the web and try to piece together an image of the owners being money hungry capitalist.”
Well, I’ve had the pleasure knowing Brandon Grossutti for over 15 years. We attended school together, were roommates for over 5 years and to this day he continues to be a good and trusted friend.
Let me tell you a few things about Brandon. He grew up poor, living with his Grandparents in the suburbs of Windsor Ont. Boxing from a young age, he rose to become a junior provincial golden gloves contender. In his mid teens he reunited with his mom and moved to Vancouver. During high school he slept in the living room on a couch in their small West End apartment.
Upon graduation he moved out. He held various jobs such as being a line cook at Earls, Commercial fishing and working in the Canadian Coastguard. Not happy with that, he paid his way through school to earn a degree in computer programing (or something close to that, mind my memory gaps) From there he got a job at Wolverton and within months was running the it’s IT dept. He was not a greedy stock broker, he was a computer geek.
Yes…. Due to his hard work ethic, Brandon did make a bit of coin. Most of it acquired from the programs that he developed.. but then, he also lost most of it with the financial downturn.
Refusing to give up, he dug himself out of the hole and set about realizing his life-long passion of opening a restaurant. Pidgin (I’ve never been a fan of the name) was originally planned as more subtle affair but due to Brandon’s ambitious nature, the project grew from there.. ( I guess to become this big evil entity as described in the aforementioned article.)
I see the reasoning behind the anger due to gentrification. It’s not all life failures and crack addicts down there, something that I learned from speaking with the Pidgin protesters. However putting this on one restaurant and demonizing an entrepreneur is unfair. I cannot see it being very advantageous to furthering the cause and raising support.
fred
February 28, 2013 at 11:12 pm
wait, whats wrong with a corporate witchhunt? (it sounds like a pretty good thing to me!) but i suggest renaming it a “corporate manhunt”
kim hearty
March 1, 2013 at 12:30 am
thank you Tyler. As a hardened professional antagonist, it’s true that i never did feel sorry for Brandon – until i read your comment. It takes so much gumption to triumph in the face of adversity like that. What a scrappy, hard-luck underdog, punching above his weight! I have so much hope now. He’s bound to recognize himself in the struggles of the residential school survivors, sex workers and disabled seniors of the DTES, and stop pricing them out of their neighourhood. Any day now!
Rich City
March 1, 2013 at 12:49 am
Sorry, the DTES has “banding together” for some time now telling multiple levels of government that displacement through speculation and gentrification is not acceptable – and that a housing crisis is dire. Upper class folks have shown little interest in protecting this (and other) low-income communities from the pressures of gentrification because they are often the very ones that often benefit from these processes. This is not some abstract conspiracy. People with money (capitalists) that want to make more money take part in gentrification because it yields high returns. Grossutti is in to making money, just like every developer in this city is into making money. They are driven by profits first and foremost, not social justice. Let’s be honest. And it’s until we acknowledge that the interests of people (low-income/working class/middle class residents) and those with significant amounts of capital (capitalists, developers, ‘entrepreneurs’ etc) are inherently opposed. They cannot be reconciled. Please, let’s dispense of this warm and fuzzy (neo)liberal rhetoric that (social) entrepreneurs will be the heroic bearers of social change. Charity has been a longstanding element of the wealthy’s tactic to disarm critics, build image, and attempt to push the state from interventionist/redistributive tendences which can actually deliver social justice (not charity).
Gentrification is well-documented in many, many cities, and while the details may be different, the processes are similar. And folks like Grossutti are actively taking part in these processes and find significant support from the development industry. You’re right, it isn’t some big conspiracy. This is how urban development occurs – but the point is, it need not occur like this.
More importantly, the effects of gentrification are not solely playing out in the DTES. Rising land values, speculation, and rising rents are pushing the most middle class of households out of this city. This occurs through both the actions of private capital and the state – through retail and residential development and gentrification and (re)zoning policies. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that senior levels of government be off the hook in addressing issues of equitable economic development and social housing provision, but importantly, gentrification depends on the very rhetoric that people like Grossutti use (“there was no one here as long as anyone can remember”). And hello, the massive amounts of ‘fictitious’ capital generated from Wall Street/Bay Street/City of London and a post-1980s deregulated financial industry (and yes Grossutti is implicated in this) that found it’s way into housing markets and development is highly destabilizing and reason for critique. This type of financial activity that Grossutti’s involved in and the greed associated with it need not be defended.
I’m tired of the neoliberal fantasy that everyone can harmoniously come together and talk it through and work everything out. That has never happened under capitalism and it never will – and it’s only because people have realized these very different class positions (and acted on them) that progressive politics and more ‘tamed’ forms of capitalism have ever existed.
tyler
March 1, 2013 at 5:07 am
No problem Kim.
I could not stand by and watch a good person being slandered.
Now, wether or not you were being sarcastic with your praise, I feel you did a wonderful job of summing the point I was trying to make.
Great comments from River and Rich.
Allister Bigrig Parker
March 1, 2013 at 11:08 am
Major differences between this comment and the article: one is full of information that can be verified by an outside source, the other is a baseless statement which may or may not be true. For all i know “Tyler” is someone who also has an invested interest in Pidgin (and could be involved in Brandon’s “Image is Everything” Sildon Image Consulting) and is dropping this fictitious information to distract from the facts.
However, it’s also equally possible that what Tyler says is true (despite reading like an essay), but y’know… assuming you’re not lying, that doesn’t change the fact that what Brandon is apart of is unethical and immoral. If anything, if he did come from a lower-middle class background it only makes this situation slightly more sad, because clearly he didn’t learn from his own experiences, and has forgotten how to empathize in the processing of “making it”.
Framing Brandon as some kind of modern “Horatio Alger” story does not alter his place as a gentrifying force, nor change that he clearly cares more about making money than siding with the people who are struggling & have so much less than he currently does. Ultimately, whether this comment is true or false is unimportant, because we can all -see- what Brandon is doing right now and understand he’s apart of something destructive to the livelihood of the DTES low-income residents.
Stefan
March 1, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Many facts in this article are simply false. Integrated Algorithmics has never existed as a business. It was an idea that never got off the ground. There was no “high-frequency trading” or “service provided”, nothing. Brandon, nor anyone else, ever made a penny from Integrated Algorithmics. It simply did not exist. Please do not slander Brandon with false statements without doing your research.
Stefan
March 1, 2013 at 3:06 pm
Allister…the information in this article cannot be verified by an outside source because it is simple false. Integrated Algorithmics has never existed. The author of this article obviously did not do his research because anything written about Integrated Algorithmics is not true.
tyler
March 1, 2013 at 10:21 pm
Allister. Everything I wrote was true. I was concerned that my statements would come off a bit too story like but that’s just how I write. Can’t help it.
Allister Bigrig Parker
March 1, 2013 at 10:43 pm
I’m saddened to hear Brandon is the kind of person to lie on his linked in account.
Allister Bigrig Parker
March 1, 2013 at 10:51 pm
That’s nice, but i think you failed to understand my take away point: the truth or untruth of your story isn’t important, because the fact is what he’s -currently- doing is fucked up. Embarking upon an entrepreneurial venture that contributes to the gentrification of the DTES & displaces the neighborhood’s low-income residence? That is pretty scummy stuff. It doesn’t matter what his past is, because the quality of his character is reflected in the context & nature of his actions (or more specifically that of PiDGiN).
Nicholas Ellan
March 1, 2013 at 11:45 pm
Hello Stefan, I definitely owe you a response, given that you are the Stefan Moser I referenced in my article. I don’t wish to slander Mr. Grossutti with false statements at all, so let’s address this so I can correct things accordingly.
The main point of my article does not hinge on where the money was made, but how it was made. (We can disagree as to whether algorithmic trading generally and high-frequency trading specifically constitute profiteering at the expense of less sophisticated market actors, but I obviously interpret it as such.) Whether or not your startup Integrated Algorithmics was successful, I take it as evidence that Wolverton Securities’ “programming initiatives’, under the management of Brandon Grossutti, included these types of practices. Hence the spin-off of a freelance firm claiming expertise in precisely that. If it is not true that he was in charge of Wolverton’s IT operations and those included high-frequency trading practices, that is something I would like to address and we or someone from Wolverton should speak further on that.
Finally I must note that whether or not Integrated Algorithmics existed “as a business” its website existed for a full eight years, until right after this article was posted, and both of you credited yourselves as co-founders. I’ll accept that as an oversight and I appreciate you correcting the record.
tyler
March 2, 2013 at 3:24 pm
Think what you want Allister.
Kevin
March 2, 2013 at 8:09 pm
Seems to me that the Brandon G wanted to open a restaurant and the property owner likely exchanged free or decreased rent for a percentage of the company. Sounds like a common enough practice, often undertaken by those who can’t quite fully finance their startup. After speaking with protesters outside this restaurant and receiving little but tangential rhetoric, I decided to look for the information that they claimed supported their action, but they could not quote or provide. They pointed me here, and I must say, this is ridiculous. I have been left with the impression that this group and those protesting, though probably being of good intent, are little more than small minded reactionaries. If you want to change the system so that it works, quit wasting your time on targeting small businesses and target legislation, build cooperatives and purchase the properties and keep the rates low. Start thinking how to make it work with what we have, instead of complaining about others and providing not more than abstract concepts on reform. If you want it to get done, DO IT YOURSELF! Research, Plan, Act. If you refuse, then don’t bitch, you’re just as much a symptom as any other.
(I do appreciate the need to inform the public, I simply feel that extremists and reactionaries do more harm than good.)
Kevin
March 2, 2013 at 8:15 pm
I should have added, Do you folks know what the word ‘Pidgin’ means? Kind of worth noting, imho.
We're in this together
March 2, 2013 at 9:49 pm
So someone with an axe to grind makes up their mind what their conclusion is, then cherrypicks and spins their research to support it. They did spend a few minutes on the Internet, but, REALLY? You compare opening a small restaurant in the Downtown Eastside to high-frequency stock market trading? Grow up. Sinking a bunch of money into a small business that you can probably never sell or move is not a get-rich-quick scheme. And of course we’ll brush past any of the owners’ genuine attempts to employ and do business with the community. And we will all pretend this is the only building we could possibly build social housing in. My question is this: What is the protest vision for the DTES? Is there any space in that vision for a business that creates jobs, makes money, and pays taxes to the city hall that supports social programming?
Richard Marquez
March 3, 2013 at 1:08 am
So, what about the nexus of white supremacy and anti gentrification here? Just asking again and wondering why no replies include this central analysis?
Edward
March 3, 2013 at 3:50 pm
As I met Brandon a few years ago through boxing I can confirm that he was a boxer. Whether or not he is part of some big global conspiracy as the article tries to suggest, I saw nothing that indicated he was….except he had good reflexes, almost…REPTILLIAN!
Edward
March 3, 2013 at 4:52 pm
What do you want to happen down there? Zero outside investment? No outsiders moving in because it displaces what you deem as “true DTES residents”? Should we build a wall to keep out rich people and let it truly become an Escape from New York-esque distopia? I fail to see how anything Pidgin is doing (or gentrification in general) is hurting people to the level of the drug dealers and petty criminals who directly prey on the individuals of the DTES. I think you’d have a hard time finding a renter anywhere in the lower mainland who hasn’t been displaced by the rediculous condo frenzy that is happening everywhere- I have been evicted to make way for development twice since the Olympics were announced. Its hardly a problem unique to the DTES
I’ve read the Carnegie Action Plan and reads like the 21st century version of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khGmp7MJ2MI Unrealistic fantasy about a place where the drug users police themselves, park benches don’t have bars, marauding whitecaps fans are more dangerous than crystal meth and students aren’t welcome because they might displace a real DTES resident who should have the right to veto any development that they don’t like.
Kevin
March 3, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Richard, I looked back to try to find your comment because I could not recall it. I found it up at the top, and I have to say, that someone might reply to you if you were a little clearer on what you wanted. My understanding is you wanted to know stats regarding the tenant demographics and such. Well, Wendy left some info, which I can’t verify atm, so take that for what it is. I have gone and asked the protesters for statistical data to support this action against pidgin, but they have none, and actually had the balls to ask me to do the research and writing for them. So I doubt you’ll get a reply in the form you’d like.
I’m going to check a couple times for things which require my reply, but after that, I will not be accessing this site again. Good luck to those who need it.
Setar
March 5, 2013 at 3:29 am
These comments are interesting. It appears that a few people have devoted a lot of effort to making noise in an attempt to discredit the protesters and their backers on technicalities without actually addressing the issues.
It carries a distinct reek of…what’s the word…oh, yeah, astroturfing.
Stefan
March 5, 2013 at 8:00 am
That is a very unsatisfactory response. You haven’t explained why you conjured up a story based on a few tidbits that you read on the Internet and then made no effort to corroborate your story. You clearly did not do your due diligence that is expected of ethical journalists and chose to publish the article anyway. Your readers expect more from you than this. Your readers expect you to do your research, corroborate your story, and publish an article based on verified facts. Instead you chose slander and defamation over the truth and are continuing to do so. It saddens me that you’ve taken an important issue like homelessness and lack of affordable housing, and have cheapened it by turning to false, slanderous, personal attacks.
lindsay
March 5, 2013 at 10:29 am
there was a whole lotta sarcasm in kims comment.
Rorschach
March 5, 2013 at 7:36 pm
Discredit? I doubt any of the protesters could get an unsecured credit card.
Allister BigRig Parker
March 5, 2013 at 9:43 pm
Haha! That’s SO true, Rorschach! I bet they can’t even get a secured line of credit on one of those overpriced condos in the DTES as well! It’s almost as if they’re POOR and angry about being forced out of their neighborhood by gentrifiers!
Rorschach
March 6, 2013 at 7:20 pm
I suspect it is more that they are angry about being poor and the rich are their ‘scapegoat.’ Rather than acknowledge that life isn’t fair or that they screwed up (or more than likely some combination of both), they persist in an infantile delusional state where they think that life is fair and that it is the purpose of some parental authority figure, the state/the powerful, to make things fair for them.
Allister BigRig Parker
March 7, 2013 at 10:19 pm
It’s true! The article is missing an analysis of the way neoliberalism, colonialism, immigration & racism intersect, but… ah! If folks are curious & all, here something to chew on: http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2010/Schatz.pdf …its an academic paper called “Unsettling the Politics of Exclusion: Aboriginal Activism and the Vancouver Downtown East Side”
Rorschach
March 8, 2013 at 2:34 pm
Yeah, I hate exclusion, like how leaseholder residents on reserves don’t get to vote in band council elections.
Frank
March 9, 2013 at 9:48 am
Restaurant owners are supposed to provide good food, not low-cost housing. That is the responsibility of the government.
Kevin
March 10, 2013 at 2:52 pm
Well, I’m taking issue with the protesters because of my experience with them, that is “a few people have devoted a lot of effort to making noise in an attempt to discredit the” owner of pidgin “and their backers on technicalities without actually addressing the issues.” — see what I did there? That’s why I have such a distaste for soundbites and rhetoric, they work on both sides of an argument most of the time.
People seem to make statements like yours without addressing the issues I brought up above. I have now been advised that some of these “Protesters” are doing this for a school project. I haven’t been able to verify that yet, when asked they redirect the topic as they have done so many other times. I believe firmly in activism, I am a believer in democratic socialism and voted for socialism until I moved to BC last year and no longer had an available candidate. I have taken roles to make change and met with the Chief of Police, the Mayor and several community groups in regards to excessive force and racism in the city where I grew up, as just one example. Changes were made, and the chief resigned the following year, and the new chief began enacting significant reforms. Sometimes we can get change when we learn how to work within the system.
Everything we consider a problem is part of a system that (generally speaking) grew organically, and is heavily influenced by the basic biological function of natural selection. Resource acquisition is a primary function in mate acquisition and ensuring the success of offspring. Spend some time and you’ll realize that most of the shitty parts of society are such because they provide a means for a select few to maintain a hold of resources. Natural for them to want that and maintain it. All of can live alot more comfortably than the average citizen in the 2nd world even when we are significantly poor. In reality, it seems that most of these “protesters” are just mad at the system and trying to attack it. My response is to grow up. As I said above, the primary business owner of Pidgin is just a guy. You can argue about whether his source of capital was appropriate, but in the end he was a coder who was given a challenge and he succeeded, then he sought out a property owner he could exchange a percentage for reduced/free lease space. Nothing slimy in that.
Target the actual pieces of sh*t that _deserve_ it, or you risk undermining not only your own argument, but those who fight for the same issue. That means you’re impacting my ability to have my activism taken seriously by being a bunch of f*cking douchebags. Sorry to use bad language, but that’s how I’m coming to feel about this group “protesting”.
How about you all put together a concrete plan on what and how to change the system, then I can support you if it’s valid (expect peer review just like the rest of science). Otherwise, you’re just being small minded and self interested just like those who you complain about.
(I live in the DTES on a fixed income in an SRO. I have several medical problems which cause me to be disabled. I AM of the people being displaced. I question because that is what reasoned people do. Reactionaries and their ilk are the source of the evils of the world, not the solution)
Kevin
March 10, 2013 at 3:33 pm
Adding this here in case people don’t check the new post, but the protesters claim to have had 50 protesters put in 40 hours each. That’s over $20000 at minimum wage. Enough to begin developing the capital required for a social housing cooperative. Interesting that they never considered that.
Kevin
March 11, 2013 at 1:06 am
or how Brandon was barred from the meeting held at Carnegie Centre on March 10th, with the very intent of creating a circumstance to make him look bad….
James
March 12, 2013 at 1:18 am
Wow. This single person is responsible for all their problems as well as kicking them out on the street. What a monster! (counter-sarcasm)
Rorschach
March 16, 2013 at 1:33 pm
Actually, the notion that housing is a Governmental responsibility is an international socialist fiction that exists only in international covenant which has never been put to approval in a domestic legislative context—essentially, it is the sort of pie in the sky treaty/covenant that gets signed when a left-leaning government is in power because it “sounds good.” Socialists luuurve vanity PR. But when it comes to domestic implementation, it is often impossible, given the real world fiscal constraints on Governments. Imagine that there were an act of the legislature stating in obligatory terms that Government shall be responsible for providing housing to everyone—pretty soon the treasury would be emptier than it already is.
Kevin
March 17, 2013 at 10:59 pm
Well, Rorschach, it’s actually a legal obligation as a member of the UN and signatory on the Declaration of Human rights:
[quote wikipedia (for ease) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_housing ]
Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right to housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living.[1] It states that:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control”
So our government has a legal obligation to ensure adequate housing to its population. We do a decent job considering the amount of time we’ve had to work on it, but it could definitely get ALOT better.
I’d also like to add that I am a Socialist in the general sense. The biggest flaw I see is all biological lifes flaw which is inherent laziness, that is do the least for the greatest gain. We’re supposedly intellectually advanced life, so that should be surmountable. A true socialism can only exist when you have majority engagement, that is most people produce more than consume and concern themselves with the betterment of society. I don’t think humanities there yet, but to make claims that it can never work upset me. Socialism with a regulated ‘free’ market, imho, is the only truly sustainable form of social organization. All other forms lead to inevitable destruction. The reason that Socialist and Communist societies have had so much difficulty in succeeding is almost entirely due to 3rd party interference (militarily, economically, etc). And I have just gone on a wicked tangent…. oh well, ill post it any way.
Rorschach
March 18, 2013 at 11:17 am
“Well, Rorschach, it’s actually a legal obligation as a member of the UN and signatory on the Declaration of Human rights”
When was the UNDHR ratified in Parliament, either the Parliament at Ottawa or the Parliament at Victoria, in the BC context?
Brendan Caron
March 20, 2013 at 5:17 pm
The old pig in Hippie’s clothing routine.
Kevin
March 20, 2013 at 7:13 pm
http://www.international.gc.ca/rights-droits/policy-politique.aspx?view=d
http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/SEN/Committee/371/huma/rep/rep02dec01-e.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Canada
Next time, take time to google before asking me.
Rorschach
March 27, 2013 at 8:53 am
Which Act of parliament ratifies those treaties and creates domestic law implementing them? You haven’t linked to any statutes as far as I can see.
Kevin
June 5, 2013 at 7:08 pm
The Charter is the primary means of Canada’s compliance. Section 7 addresses the issue at hand iirc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_Seven_of_the_Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and_Freedoms
“Canada has been a consistently strong voice for the protection of human rights and the advancement of democratic values, from our central role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1947/1948 to our work at the United Nations today.”
http://www.international.gc.ca/rights-droits/policy-politique.aspx?view=d
learn to fucking google.
kap
January 14, 2014 at 3:18 pm
The politicians must love seeing all this energy and focus you people spend on this instead if them. The Harpers of the world can sleep easy as long as you people are flogging each other.sad