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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.

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Today Vancouver city council passed a motion to rezone 800 Griffiths Way, a North False Creek property adjacent to the Rogers Arena. The property is owned by Aquilini Investment Group and will be used for three market rental towers totaling 614 units of market housing on top of commercial and office space.

According to Connor Donegan of the Vancouver Renters’ Union, the housing will be “severely unaffordable for working people in Vancouver.” Units will be priced at $2,000 per month for 900 sq. ft. units. During public hearings for the project, renters pushed the city for rent caps on a large number of units.

Opponents to the project were joined by COPE in criticizing the city’s decision to forego normal development fees and taxes, amounting to a $35 million loss for the city. According to page 16 of the city staff’s policy report for the project, the exemptions were approved because the developer decided to build rental instead of condos. Condo marketer Bob Rennie estimates that in Vancouver up to 60% of market condo units currently rent and are not owner-occupied.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: On June 29th the Georgia Straight published this piece by Latino activist, Mainlander contributor, and COPE Executive Richard Marquez. However, after receiving a call from Howard Blank, Vice-President of the Great Canadian Gaming Corp., the Straight‘s editor decided to pull the piece shortly after posting it.

The Straight gave two reasons for their hasty decision: firstly, that Marquez didn’t interview Blank directly, secondly, that he failed to give quotes from workers at the Hastings Race Course. According to this troubling view of what constitutes a publishable piece of journalism, writings under the heading ‘news commentary’ must now take the form of exclusively-verifiable data, micro-managed by popular media’s ongoing loss of social critique, analysis and anything that cannot be reduced to either a fact or a soundbite. In this case, the expectation that journalists can freely gather information from precarious migrant workers is especially naive given that those who speak out are currently being blacklisted by their employers and denied re-entry visas to Canada.

The Mainlander is publishing Marquez’s censored article as a continuation of our attempt to present an alternative to the outer limits of ‘journalism’ in Vancouver. In addition the piece is being published to support the basic point made by Marquez that not only is the exploitation of migrant labourers common in Canada, but that it is the law. Contrary to what the Straight assumes, the burden of proof lies with Canadian employers like Great Canadian Gaming to show that they are pro-worker, not on journalists to “prove” that they are not — something which nonetheless is not difficult based on today’s interface of mega-corporations and federal labour laws.

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What began in 2006 as an immigrant-sponsored sojourn for then-impoverished 19-year-old Mexican jockey Mario Gutierrez has now become the stuff of modern-day Canadian folklore. Five years ago Gutierrez came to race thoroughbreds at Hastings Race Course in Vancouver. Since then he’s raced over 2,000 times, earned over $7.7 million in profits for owners, and with his Triple Crown run injected a huge money shot into the city’s gaming business. “Mario’s been able to reach out to everybody, people not even thinking about racing, to sort of make it an entertainment option,” said Howard Blank, vice-president of the company that runs the Hastings Park racetrack, Great Canadian Gaming Corp.

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Preparations at Vancouver’s Hastings Race Track are underway for the televised broadcasting of the 144th Belmont Stakes in New York this Saturday, June 9. Once a racist internment camp during World War II, the Hastings track has since been transformed into a free haven for ruling class corporate interests, profitably linked to the Vancouver gambling economy. Noticeably, not a single historic plaque is mounted at the site to commemorate the unjust imprisonment of Japanese Canadians of that era.

Instead, on Saturday, a forty-foot screen will be mounted on the Hastings Track infield projecting a live simulcast of the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel of the Triple Crown, to thousands of bettors and horse racing fans in attendance. The star attraction for most Canadian and global media outlets is I’ll Have Another, a three-year old thoroughbred colt who has already won the prestigious Kentucky Derby (the first jewel), the Preakness Stakes (second jewel) in May, and now vies to snatch the always elusive Belmont Stakes to make I’ll Have Another the first U.S. Triple Crown winner in the 21st century.