Vancity in the Downtown Eastside: The Gentrification Drive of BC’s Largest Credit Union

DTES delegation talks to Vancity VP Linda Morris (Photo Credit: Murray Bush, VMC)

EDITOR’S NOTE: Vancity provides funding both to large-scale gentrifiers and to anti-gentrification groups in the DTES. Vancity is an organization that seeks to best reflect the diversity of their membership, and its clients range from low-income renters all the way up to global corporations and developers. Currently, however, one side is being shoved aside by the other. As Nathan Crompton and Maria Wallstam write in this article, DTES residents are being pushed away not only from the negotiating table, but from their very neighborhood.

Vancity, BC’s largest credit union, was started in 1946 in response to the lack of financial services available to working class Vancouverites living east of Cambie. Since then, Vancity has cultivated a tradition of honouring its roots and providing financial funding to working class and poor people’s cooperatives, grassroots movements and organizations across the province. In BC’s poorest neighborhood, the DTES, Vancity has provided financial backing for essential services such as Pigeon Park Savings, United We Can and community groups such as the DTES Women’s Centre, Purple Thistle and the Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP).

COPE officially breaks with Vision, pledges to run mayor in 2014

Yesterday COPE members voted in favor of a slate of candidates pledging independence from corporate parties like Vision Vancouver in next year’s municipal elections. Over four hundred COPE members attended the party’s annual general meeting at the Maritime Labour Centre. In addition to selecting a full slate of Independent candidates for COPE’s executive, members passed a motion confirming that in 2014 COPE will nominate a mayor and majority of candidates on parks board, school board and council. This decision opens many new possibilities for residents and organizers from diverse communities across the city to run for up to 27 positions next year.

The meeting saw the largest turnout for a COPE general meeting in recent history. At the June 26th meeting in 2011 – where the first organized ‘COPE not Vision’ campaign was initiated – there were 200 members in attendance. The following year the party’s AGM brought out 300 members. In the month leading up the meeting, COPE staff were forced to move the AGM location due to a surge in membership, and over 400 people filled the Maritime Labour Centre yesterday.

Homeless Dave on sixth day of hunger strike against gentrification and displacement

At noon on Friday March, 22nd, Homeless Dave began a hunger strike in support of housing rights and social justice in the Downtown Eastside. The strike was announced in front of the controversial Sequel 138 development site at Main and Hastings, where a developer is planning to build unaffordable market condos using a financial subsidy from the BC Liberal government.

Homeless Dave, who is now housed and goes by the name “the artist formerly known as Homeless Dave,” has put three demands at the front of the indefinite hunger strike: that the city decline the development permit for Sequel 138; that the former Main Street police station be used for social housing; and that the Downtown Eastside be declared a “social justice zone.” “We’re not about smashing windows,” stated Dave, “we’re about smashing the old broken paradigms and building new paradigms that are more just and equal.”

Ending the False Debate about Save-On-Meats

Currently there is a debate raging about the pros and cons of Save-on-Meats in the Downtown Eastside. The latest is a polarizing sandwich token program to help feed the poor. According to the plan, restaurant customers can purchase tokens from Save-on-Meats and donate them to people in the neighborhood. Critiques have been made here, here, and here, as well as at The Mainlander, with Peter Driftmier’s “Beggars Can’t be Choosers” (Peter used to be a sandwich maker at Save-on-Meats).

The reception of these debates runs a winding path but gravitates to the falsely-posed question of whether people “like” or identify with the entrepreneurial genius behind Save-on-Meats: Mark Brand. “The frontier,” Neil Smith wrote in his New Urban Frontier, “represents an evocative combination of economic, geographical and historical advances, and yet the social individualism pinned to this destiny is in one very important respect a myth.” Mark Brand, treated as either a hero or villain of the urban frontier, enters the field of mythology and becomes a new Jim Green figure for our time, garnering a similar respect for balancing “social” and business concerns (if Green started in politics and moved into business, Brand seems to finish where Green left off and moves back into “politics”).