Jose Guadalupe Posada, “Calavera de Don Quijote”
Mexican printmaker & political cartoonist (1852-1913)
This week another high-end destination restaurant has opened in the heart of the Downtown Eastside, this time in the main floor of the low-income affordable York Rooms hotel at 261 Powell Street. Cuchillo, which means “knife” in Spanish, is a “modern pan-Latin” 93-seat restaurant serving a typical mishmash of appetizer plates and premium cocktails that easily prices out the low-income DTES community. The restaurant space was a long-decommissioned Japanese bathhouse, one of five in the neighbourhood that once served as communal gathering spaces for a thriving working-class Japanese Canadian community. Now redeveloped into a high-end destination restaurant for tourists and condo dwellers, Cuchillo makes a clear statement to the low-income residents of the York: your days are numbered.
York Rooms was recently purchased by Steven Lippman, adding to the many single-room occupancy hotels in the DTES that he has aggressively acquired. Lippman is an infamous landlord and real estate developer who has been been accused of discriminatory renting, aggressive acquisitions, and complicity in illegal evictions. His business model is painfully simple: acquire cheap rental housing, evict the residents, renovate the space and raise the rents. Earning his initial fortune by founding Whistler Water, he is now founder and president of Living Balance International, a real estate firm that owns over 30 properties and over 300 SRO units in the DTES, including the illegally evicted American Hotel. Self-described as an “entrepreneur with a soul,” for the last six years his focus has been exclusively on aggressive real estate plays. Now he’s become a professional gentrifier and eviction specialist who has made millions off the displacement of Vancouver’s poorest citizens.
Lippman’s many victims