Vancouver City Hall: 15-Storey Condos for the Downtown Eastside?

Anti-condo postering on the walls of the Pantages Theatre,  152 East Hastings, Vancouver

Fight the Height: Opposition to City Hall’s Historic Area Height Review

More Woodward’s style social-mix condo towers may come to the Downtown Eastside after city staff present council with rezoning policies that will include height-increase allowances in some of Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhoods.

Council will hear the recommendations, as well as presentations by delegations, at 2 pm tomorrow. The report, “Historic Area Height Review”, recommends 15-storey towers for areas such as Main and Hastings, Gas Town, China Town and Victory Square.

Like Woodward’s, any development in the DTES will have to include 20 percent social housing.  But some anti-poverty activists say that twenty percent is not enough. Last Friday, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council (DNC), a group of 600 DTES residents, set up a table with “Fight the Height” pamphlets and a “Ten Sites” petition in front of the Pantages Theatre on East Hastings. 

“Right now what we are trying to do is get the city to purchase 10 sites in the DTES for one-hundred percent social housing,” said Fraser Stuart, a DNC board member who’s been waiting for social housing for 19 months.

The Downtown East Side Neighbourhood Council petition outside the Pantages. January 14, 2011

The ten sites on the DNC’s list are: the Pantages Theatre, the old police station on Main and Hastings, a Buddhist temple at 301 E. Hastings, space above the Downtown Eastside/Strathcona branch of the Vancouver Public Library, and seven empty lots around the DTES. 

“There have been no properties purchased since Sam Sullivan,” said Stuart.  “So the nice words of the [current] mayor about ending homelessness and all that, well, he’s done absolutely nothing to end homelessness.  As a matter of fact, he’s made it worse.” 

Councillor Ellen Woodsworth Responds


COPE councillor Ellen Woodsworth said that city council has made some strides in the fight against homelessness, but that more collaboration is needed from the provincial and federal governments.

“I did fight very hard to get housing over the library. I will keep pushing for those 10 sites,” she said in a telephone interview Friday afternoon.

She added that Mayor Gregor Robertson obtained provincial money to develop 14 social housing sites that the city already owns, as well as to fund cold weather emergency shelters.

“So he has been committed to housing and homelessness,” Woodsworth said.

“Social mix”: progressive compassion or regressive poor bashing?

The legendary Pantages Theatre, located Hastings near Main, is at the geographic centre of the Downtown Eastside.  Now boarded-up and graffitied, the Pantages embodies the neighbourhood’s past glory and current struggles.  Charlie Chaplin graced its stage in 1912.  Last year, Heritage Vancouver put it on its list of Top Ten Endangered Sites.  The current owner, Marc Williams of Worthington Properties Inc., tried to sell the building to the city but was turned down.  He now plans to bulldoze it and build condos.

“If the project here at the Pantages goes through, we are looking at approximately 500 residents in the Regent Hotel, the Empress and the Balmoral, who would be facing major rent increases,” the DNC’s Stuart said, pointing at the single-occupancy-room hotels that dot this stretch of East Hastings.  “Same thing that’s happened with Woodward’s.”

The ripple effect of high-end condos in poor neighbourhoods has been researched by Jean Swanson and the anti-poverty group Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP).

“In our neighbourhood, the biggest gentrifier is Woodward’s, which some people are putting forth as this great model of social mix,” Swanson said in an interview.  She added that Woodward’s condo owners have separate amenities and separate entrances from the social-housing residents, so “social mix” is a misnomer.

According to Swanson, the ripple effects of million-dollar condos can be devastating in the DTES. Everything becomes more expensive, from food and basic amenities to land that could be purchased for housing and social services. Gentrification also causes a shift in the power structure. 

“You see more security guards harassing people. Some richer people, some of them, start going to council and saying, you know, we don’t want anymore social housing in our neighbourhood, we don’t want social services.”

The notion that poor neighbourhoods need an infusion of “the gentry” to become viable is nothing short of “poor bashing”, according Swanson.

A City Hall study on the social effects of Woodward’s is due out next spring. CCAP and the DNC are asking council to wait for its results before endorsing rezoning that would usher more condos into the DTES.