In
the poorest urban neighbourhood in Canada, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES),
gentrification has been on the move for decades. Plotting these new
developments on a map of the DTES and walking along the now unfamiliar streets
reveals gentrification for what it is: a form of structural violence.
Gentrification
is the social, economic, and cultural transformation of a predominantly low-income
neighbourhood through the deliberate influx of upscale residential and
commercial development. Encouraged by municipal development policies, economic
incentives for investors, and the mythical pull of the creative city, urban land
is purchased and developed at low cost for middle-class buyers. As urban
theorist Neil Smith writes, “As a generalized urban strategy, gentrification
weaves together the interests of city managers, developers and landlords,
corporate employers, and cultural and educational institutions.”
Despite
pockets of low-income housing, the transformation of Gastown and Victory Square
into a tourist destination with trendy restaurants and boutique shops is almost
complete. On the western edge of the DTES is the massive mixed development at
the old Woodward’s site with over 500 condos, SFU art school funded by
notorious mining giant Goldcorp, and retail stores. This has set off a tidal
wave of gentrification within a few blocks, with four new condo developments
(Paris Annex, Paris Block, 60 W. Cordova, 21 Doors) and countless restaurants and
bars, including those owned by barons Sean Heather (Irish Heather, Salty
Tongue, Shebeen, Penn Bakeshop, Everything Café, Fetch Kiosk, Bitter Tasting
Room, Salt Tasting Room, Judas Goat) and Marc Brand (Diamond, Sharks and
Hammers, Boneta, Sea Monstr Sushi, Save on Meats), overpriced coffee shops, and
designer stores. In symbiotic fashion, retail stores and cultural sites proliferate
alongside new housing, rendering the area more welcoming and familiar for
wealthier consumers.
In
the southern sub-area of Chinatown, recent condo projects have been established
(V6A, Ginger, Strathcona East, Keefer Suites), and the city approved Historic
Area Heights Review allows for increased building heights, green-lighting a
17-storey condo and retail project. On the eastern front of the DTES, a massive
352-unit housing, commercial, and light industrial project is in the
pre-development phase. At the former Pantages Theatre site, right in the heart
of the low-income community at Main and Hastings, is the proposed Sequel 138
project, with 79 condos. As on the western edge of the DTES, accompanying all
these condo projects are a plethora of restaurants, coffee shops, hair salons,
fitness centres, furniture stores, art galleries, organic food stores, banks,
and specialty clothing outlets that have opened atop already inadequate
low-income services and stores.
The
processes of neo-liberal urbanism that fuel this kind of gentrification are
rooted in the colonial doctrines of discovery and terra nullius, as well as
more modernized forms of transnational globalization. As Smith further articulates,
“Gentrification has become a strategy within globalization itself; the effort
to create a global city is the effort to attract capital and tourists, and
gentrification is a central means for doing so.”
In
the DTES, Salient Group condo developments on Hastings and restaurants along
Carrall Street are falsely advertised as existing in neighbouring Gastown. This
simultaneously erases the very existence of the vibrant DTES community (indeed,
the immediate defence of many developers is, “I am not displacing anyone. There
was nothing here before”), and imposes the invading impulses of capitalist
production and the dominant classes. Marketers deliberately align new gentrifying
sites with the architecture of upscale neighbourhoods, producing an image that
effaces the social and cultural reality of the existing community. The logic of
middle-class entitlement to settlement and its attendant low-income displacement
is particularly insidious given that the disproportionate number of Indigenous people
in the DTES is itself a legacy of colonial dispossession and attempted
assimilation of Indigenous communities.
The rabid nature of gentrification is cyclical – both a result and a cause of the extreme housing crisis in urban centres like Vancouver. With Vancouver consistently named one of the most unaffordable cities in the world, powerful developers are on the prowl for the last urban frontier in which to build high-density housing. This trend towards condo-ization, pitched as “affordable” for young professionals, increases real estate speculative values and drives up rents, which in turn displaces long-term residents. Areas such as Mount Pleasant, Kensington/Cedar Cottage, and Grandview Woodlands are experiencing rent increases as high as 45 percent, forcing out working-class families and seniors. And so we have one of the inherent paradoxes of capitalist globalization in the urban context: the trajectory of infinite development within a finite city.
This
capitalist accumulation (which Andrew Witt and Sean Antrim refer to as rent
“extraction”) is incentivized by the policies of the municipal government.
First, public funds and public services are divested from low-income
neighbourhoods. Then, private capital is allowed to develop these
neighbourhoods with a high return of profit. The global accounting firm KPMG
named Vancouver as the world’s most business-friendly tax climate. For example,
two of B.C.’s richest billionaires, Brandt Louie and Jim Pattison, received tax
exemptions ranging from three to ten years for their investment in Woodwards.
In the past two elections, funds for Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Vision Vancouver
party came primarily from real estate developers. Studying the tedious
bureaucratic processes of zoning, tax policies, and development permits all illuminate
how the government functions as the political pillar for the expansion of real
estate’s capitalist interests.
Many
DTES residents describe the impacts of gentrification as deeply traumatic.
According to a recent Carnegie Community Action Project report entitled
Upscale: the Downside of Gentrification, affordable single-room occupancies
(SRO) are increasingly scarce. More than half of SROs now rent higher than a
person on welfare, disability, or pension can afford. New retail shops and
restaurants are zones of exclusion, offering goods and services beyond the
means of the predominantly low-income residents. Public space has become more
uncomfortable and hostile with increasing policing and private security
surveillance, as well as constant reports by low-income residents of feeling
judged by many of the new owners and consumers in the neighbourhood. As one
DTES resident told Save-On-Meats owner Marc Brand in a meeting, “I was treated
like a piece of meat in your restaurant.”
In
cities like Vancouver that purport to be progressive, the violence of
gentrification is masked behind a three-fold ideological discourse aimed at
giving it an air of reasonableness. First is “urban renewal”. This presumes
that the downtrodden ghetto will be uplifted and revitalized through social
entrepreneurship and trickle-down investment, a now widely discredited theory
at the global level.
Second
is the language of “affordability.” When peddled by developers such as Marc
Williams, Jon Stovell, Robert Fung, and Westbank, it does not mean affordable
for current residents. Rather, the affordability is pitched to higher-income
buyers and customers such as young artists, students, and professionals, the
canaries for whether a neighbourhood will successfully be gentrified.
The
third is “social mix”. While it sounds inclusive, in reality it means that
people with higher incomes are at liberty to utilize their social capital to
alter the demographics of a low-income community. On the one hand, low-income
services such as shelters and food banks are systematically expunged from
higher income neighbourhoods (why not enforce social mix in rich areas like
Shaughnessy?). On the other hand, space in low-income neighbourhoods that could
be used for community-based actualization is appropriated by those with greater
power and wealth. As geographer Loretta Lees writes, “The rhetoric of ‘social
mix’ hides a gentrification strategy and in that a hidden social cleansing
agenda … Over the longer term, poor people suffer more from the loss of benefits
of living in a poor neighbourhood than they gain from living in a more affluent
one.”
Above
all, what these “community-friendly” justifications obscure are hierarchical
structures and the asymmetry of political and economic power – decisions are
made in private boardrooms, privately funded organizations promoting urban
development, and the offices of city hall. Gentrification ultimately normalizes
power: the power to mobilize financial and cultural capital; the power to
purchase land and market goods and services; the power to occupy space and
determine its accessibility; the power to shape and control the social and
cultural landscape. This power is operative regardless of the personable
façade, co-opted language, and token gestures of alliance promoted by some of
the newly arrived gentry.
Like
many other forms of power, gentrification’s most potent hold on us is the idea
of its inevitability. Even some in the left are either complicit or apathetic
in the face of it. In spite of this, we believe we have the power to transform
the pre-packaged profiteering of gentrification through genuine low-income and
working-class solidarity that opposes the trend towards normalization. We can
boycott condos in the Downtown Eastside, refuse to frequent stores and cultural
sites that are inaccessible to the low-income community, and demand rent
control and real affordable housing for all tenants in the Lower Mainland.
Though
the tentacles of gentrification are most impacting poor and homeless people in
the Downtown Eastside, the rental rat-race is rapidly destroying and displacing
neighbourhoods across our city. It is our collective responsibility to urgently
articulate and fight for a vision for community autonomy and self-governance
that rejects the commodification of our basic survival.
//Harsha Walia and Davie Diewert, orgianlly published Feb. 24, 2012 on rabble.ca
//Graphics by Sarah Vitet
//Harsha Walia and Davie Diewert, orgianlly published Feb. 24, 2012 on rabble.ca
//Graphics by Sarah Vitet
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