As part of the city’s Digital Strategy, the City of Vancouver is planning to build a Technology Centre in the heart of the DTES. The Technology Centre is a strategic gentrification catalyst that will put thousands of low-income housing units at risk. The Digital Strategy is on council’s agenda today, April 9th, 2013, as Homeless Dave enters his 19th day of Hunger Strike demanding housing and social justice at the former Police Station.
City planners and politicians are currently proposing that the city-owned building at 312/324 Main Street be used as a Technology Incubation and Acceleration Center. The former police station building is vacant following the VPD’s move to the former Vanoc building near Boundary Road in January, 2013. Moving expenses alone cost the city $10m of taxpayer money, and yet the municipal government is considering further subsidies to incoming entrepreneurial tenants at the 300 block of Main Street.
On Wednesday, March 27, residents across the city joined together to walk 14.5km across Vancouver for Welfare Justice. The walk was organized by the Raise the Rates coalition to highlight the need for a significant increase in welfare rates as well as a comprehensive anti-poverty plan in the lead-up to the provincial election this May. The walk commenced at Christy Clark’s office on West 4th Ave in Kitsilano and ended almost 8 hours later outside Adrian Dix’s office at the Joyce Street skytrain station.
Homeless Dave joined the walk for Welfare Justice on the sixth day of his hunger strike against displacement and gentrification. Welfare and housing are intimately connected and as Vancouver’s low-income housing stock erodes, people on income assistance are being hit the hardest. In 2012 alone, 426 SRO units in the DTES became unaffordable for people on welfare. A recent article by Seth Klein shows that despite government press releases, the actual increase in the social housing stock in BC has been negligible since 2006.
Heather Place is a non-profit housing complex built in 1982 by the Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation (MVHC). Today it includes 86 homes, two thirds of which rent to tenants at non-market rates while the remaining third of tenants are subsidized on a rent-geared-to-income basis.[1]
In 2010 it was publicly announced that Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation was contemplating either the demolition or repair of Heather Place. In a letter from September 29th, 2010, MVHC Manager Don Littleford explained to tenants that the difference between Heather Place and other housing complexes that have been repaired is that at Heather Place, “the land under the buildings is very valuable.” In February of 2012, Terra Housing Consultants advised Littleford that redevelopment plans “would generate approximately $7,000,000 in additional value.”
Littleford is pitching the planned densification of the site as a contribution to the city’s affordable housing stock. Yet in his own words, “market rents for new suites will be substantially higher.” In a letter to MVHC, City of Vancouver Rezoning Planner Karen Hoese informed Littleford that, “City-wide policy supports consideration of new affordable housing and other public benefits such as child care” but that Littleford’s Heather Place proposal “does not provide a directly identifiable public benefit.”
Significantly, the planner decided that replacing 26 of the 86 non-market units cannot be considered a public benefit of rezoning given that the current zoning requires these units.[2] The public benefit of non-profit housing would be lost if 60 non-market units were replaced with housing at “substantially higher” rates. Nonetheless, Littleford and Vancouver’s politicians have thrown their support behind the redevelopment plan.
BC Rooms hotel, across the street from the proposed condos at 557 E. Cordova, was where MLA Jagrup Brar stayed during his welfare challenge in 2012.
The Vancouver Development Permit Board will hear yet another Downtown Eastside condo project proposal on Monday. The low-income community has already spent much time and energy on futile trips to City Hall to protest their displacement by more and more condo developments in the DTES. All protests have fallen on deaf ears – at both Development Permit Board and City Council public hearings. In lieu of protest in person this time, our frustrated community is sending our opposition by email to see if it will help Development Permit Board members and City Councillors to actually consider the reasons why people oppose the 24-unit condo project at 537 E. Cordova. Perhaps their reading abilities are better than their listening ones… Wishful thinking we know, but if you are interested in joining this opposition, please send a letter to mayorandcouncil@vancouver.ca or go to the Development Permit Board hearing, Monday March 25, 3pm at City Hall Town Hall meeting room. While we continue to come up with other strategies for protest, we support all efforts to continue speaking in person. Register to speak by calling 604-873-7469 or lorna.harvey@vancouver.ca.
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Daniel Boffo is a young developer born into a family real estate development company far from poverty and the streets.
That’s why, at last month’s public information meeting about the condo project he wants to build on the block between Oppenheimer and the UGM shelter, I was astonished to hear him compare himself to people on welfare living in nearby SRO hotel rooms.
Herb Varley, a young Nuu-chah-nulth and Nisga’a man who lived in a hotel down the street for two years, told Boffo that hotel residents are there because they have no choice. “No one wants to live in hotels,” he said, “but the other option they have is the street. If you build a condo here, it will push up land and rent prices and you will push those people out on the street.” Daniel Boffo didn’t flinch. He said that people don’t get to choose where they want to live; “I want to live in a mansion on the water and I don’t get to do that.” Then he said that if low-income people want to be comfortable in other places besides the Downtown Eastside they should get out there and stop being prejudiced against higher income people.