The Arrogance of Profit: Metro Vancouver’s Redevelopment Proposal for Heather Place

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This is the first part in a series by Nathan Crompton on the redevelopment of Heather Place, an imperiled affordable housing development in central Vancouver. The second part of the article, titled “The Politics of Repairs,” addresses the politics of negligence and disrepair at Heather Place and similar housing projects in Metro Vancouver.

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For thirty years, Heather Place has been the largest affordable housing quarter in Vancouver’s Fairview neighborhood. Acting as the heart and the anchor of Fairview – both geographically and socially – the two-block development provides family housing for almost three-hundred parents and children in 86 separate apartments. VGH support staff, single mothers attending university, artists, service industry workers, and a large number of Canadian immigrants all live at the foot of the Vancouver General Hospital thanks to the housing of Heather Place. “As a microcosm of Vancouver,” Heather Place resident Julie Okot Bitek says, “we also represent the world, having at Heather Place people from all corners of the earth.”[1]

Vancouver curator and filmmaker Amy Kazymerchyk grew up at Heather Place and remembers the diversity and community. By six years old she could speak six languages and would visit neighbors by ducking in and out of the project’s interlocking buildings. With its overlapping 2- and 3-bedroom apartments, connected together by a unique network of elevated walkways, Heather Place is something of an architectural anomaly. Next to generic retail-inspired residential construction, its buildings are distinctly well planned. In more ways than one Heather Place has served as an affordable housing stronghold in Vancouver, safe from the rent increases, shock evictions, renovictions, and negligent landlords of Vancouver’s private housing market.

Today, however, the 86 homes of Heather Place are at risk of demolition. Since last February, the developer-backed politicians and home-owning bureaucrats who control the Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation have made the decision to collaborate with private developers to demolish Heather Place. Fifty-eight of the eighty-six affordable units will be lost forever in the redevelopment plans, to be replaced by three towers of condos, market suites and unaffordable rental housing.

Re-financing the Housing Bubble: Strategies of the Neoliberal State

In the four years since the financial crisis of 2008 brought a North American-wide collapse in housing prices, the Canadian government has successfully taken measures to bring real-estate prices back to their pre-crash levels. Following in the tracks of the American effort to rescue financial capital, the past four years have seen a joint effort by all levels of Canadian government to re-inflate the housing bubble by deregulating finance, extending new lines of direct investment into real-estate and lowering interest rates. The Canadian government has effectively called on the real-estate industry to lead the economy out of the recession, facing down typical historical patterns in which real-estate is the last industry to recover from system-wide crisis. Next to resource extraction, the only real growth industry in Canada since 2008 has been real-estate.

Yet today, as in 2008, the real-estate bubble is reaching a “tipping point,” according to a recent report by Canada’s Royal LePage. In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, housing prices have climbed to unprecedented levels, with Vancouver prices reaching up to 11 times the city’s average family income. The Bank of Canada has identified the Vancouver market as “ground zero” for the coming financial crisis, and from its perch at a distance, The Economist observes Canadian housing is “more overvalued than it was in America at the peak of its bubble.” All forms of debt are multiplying, but household debt in particular is currently higher in Canada than it was in the United States prior to the subprime crisis, with debt-to-income ratios reaching 153 per cent.

Federal exit from recession

In the two years following the global recession, federal banks across the world lowered interest rates in an effort to loosen the credit crunch and stimulate new rounds of investment. In September 2010, Mark Carney and the Bank of Canada lowered interest rates to 1 per cent, where they have since stayed. By the summer of 2011, the Canadian housing economy was showing obvious signs of escalation, and by June local prices moved well above their pre-recession peak. Having not only stimulated but “over-stimulated” the housing economy, Carney began issuing strong warnings about the unprecedented risk-exposure of Canadian mortgages. In reality, the central bank actually did everything in its power to continue the growing flow of cheap, low-interest money into the real-estate economy. Out of fear of exacerbating the underlying weakness of the recovery itself, the Bank of Canada took the position of searching out ways to buoy housing finance.

The Persistence of Anti-Asian Racism, Part III | The Politics of Space

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION| The first part of Nathan Crompton’s three-part essay introduced the history of anti-asian racism in Vancouver, while the second part focused on contemporary versions of scapegoating in Vancouver culture. But if racism and scapegoating are used to hide reality, the following essay asks a simpler question: what is the reality it hides? Behind the “empty signifiers” of culture and its discourses, what exactly is happening on the ground in Vancouver?

Despite constant invocations of “the Chinese” in debates on the housing crisis, a full third of all people living in poverty in Vancouver are Chinese. Today, in the shifting world of the city’s diverse neighborhoods, the gentrification of East Vancouver is in fact having its most direct effect on immigrants and racialized communities. Crompton draws from countless academic publications and recent demographic studies to reveal that the complex diversions of scapegoating conceal the racial and class divisions that define contemporary Vancouver.

Ground Zero: Mount Pleasant

The signs are difficult to ignore for anyone taking a walk down Main Street. Since at least 2008, the Mount Pleasant neighborhood has experienced a renewed wave of gentrification. Major shifts in the movement of capital have brought a sea-change in the number of rental apartments upgraded, renovicted, converted into strata condos, or altogether demolished to make way for new condo towers. High-end storefronts and promotional materials from the local BIA give an impression of a settled middle-class neighborhood, and the image depicted by local boosterism is slowly in the process of matching up with a new reality. But yet the hype also tells us surprisingly little about the neighborhood. At this stage of gentrification, image-making still lacks control over the world it might hope to represent. A vast majority of residents in the North Mount Pleasant area are renters (70%), most of them first and second-generation immigrants (58%).[1] Despite being put in the unforgiving cross-hairs of gentrification, and despite superficial appearances suggesting urban lifestyle and conspicuous consumption, Mount Pleasant is today a proud and alive immigrant neighborhood.

The Persistence of Anti-Asian Racism, Part II | ‘Political Economy of the Empty Signifier’

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION | Since publishing Part I of this three-part series, other publications have followed suit, with similar columns appearing in the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Courier. The articles signal a recognition that the phenomenon of affordability-scapegoating is quickly losing ground in Vancouver. There is a growing realization that, to quote Pete McMartin, “race is the unspoken issue surrounding real estate prices.” At the same time, those short articles fit into a mode of commentary increasingly associated with Vancouver: oblique and evasive, identified by an ability to ask questions rather than provide answers. Either by the practice of method journalism, faux-naïveté, or the constraints of journalistic neutrality tinged with what Am Johal calls “the epidemic of politeness,” such writing cannot help but come up short of its target. Here in Part II, Crompton shows that while racialized scapegoating relies on unsubstantiated anecdotes, the economic facts clearly show that Asian buyers are not responsible for Vancouver’s housing crisis. Crompton argues that the responsibility lies squarely at the feet of Vancouver’s local ruling-class and its neo-liberal policies.