City Admits Screwing Up on Condo Project for Downtown Eastside

The City of Vancouver admits it screwed up. And today groups fighting gentrification in Vancouver in the lead up to the 2010 Winter Olympics fought back.

The Carnegie Community Action Project and other groups in the Citywide Housing Coaltion held a rally to express outrage that the City had evaded the legally required consultation process for a 7 story condominium development on the Downtown Eastside. Rick Michaels, the Director of Planning delegate for the City of Vancouver, has already apologized for what he calls an “inadvertent shortfall in the notification process for this application,” and an “incomplete notification process”, according to Wendy Pederson (in photo above with red loud speaker), a full time paid organizer with CCAP.

"The City of Vancouver may have been trying to sneak this proposal past us," Pederson said.

CCAP and the Citywide Housing Coalition, groups fighting loss of housing stock for low income people and pressuring governments to keep their promise to provide social housing as a legacy of the 2010 Winter Olympics, today held the consultation that they say the City of Vancouver was legally required to hold but didn’t. About 50 community members and housing advocates gathered today at the offices of Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users on East Hastings and marched to a vacant lot at 58 West Hastings Street owned by Concord Pacific, Canada’s largest developer. The proposed project is called “Greenwich” and contains 154 market housing units, from two-bedroom to studio units. No social housing or other community amenities are currently proposed to be located on the site.

“This project got a rubber stamp from the city, even though it doesn’t comply with the Downtown Eastside housing plan,” noted Pedersen. “How can the City approve this project without talking to the elected officials that set the plan, or the community that relies on that plan?”

Joyce Rock of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House was equally disappointed in the approval, suggesting it would lead to displacement: “In what other neighbourhood in Vancouver would the City tolerate 32% of residents being at risk of displacement because of new development?” A meeting scheduled for today by the City to approve additional density for the site was cancelled after CCAP wrote to the planning department to express concern about the lack of notification that the project was moving ahead.



Taking a jab at the City’s lack of a consultation process for the Greenwich condo project, protesters jotted down answers to questions such as "What do we need on this site?” on three huge signs at the vacant lot where the proposed project is to be built. In the above photo, Jean Swanson, an organizer with the Carnegie Community Action Project, can be seen getting the process underway.

(In the center of the above photo, Citywide Housing Coalition leader Mel Lehan, wearing the red and black jacket, talks to a protester at the site of the proposed Pacific Concord condo development.)

Pederson reminded protesters at today’s rally that the City has also not given up their plan to build highrise towers on the Downtown Eastside. If they go ahead with that, she told the crowd, “we’re hooped!”

Bill's Confectionary Sold

Charles and Faye didn’t tell their long time customers that they were selling Bill’s Confectionary, the corner store at Carroll St. and Powell. That’s because you can lose customers when you sell a business and they didn’t want the “diehard customers” to leave, says a source who knows them personally.

It’s not that customers didn’t know Bill and Faye were leaving. It’s just that Charles told a few long time customers that he and Faye were going on a cruise. “Maybe you won’t want to come back after that cruise,” a customer joked. Charles just laughed.

Charles and Faye, a Chinese-Canadian couple, ran Bill’s confectionary for a couple of decades. Charles’ father, Bill, had run it before him when it was located across the street. The store was on the Downtown Eastside, across from the Gassy Jack statue where Gastown starts. So they had a real mix of customers. They had poor people, some of whom could get credit there and pay up on welfare cheque day. And they had better dressed customers dropping in from the bars, restaurants, and galleries in Gastown, or out walking the tiny designer dogs they lived with in the condos being built as the neighborhood is gentrified.

For a few months now other Chinese people, a couple of women and a man, have been supposedly substituting for Charles and Faye. One long time customer repeated asked if Charles and Faye were coming back. He recalls the Chinese man working the cash register assuring him, ""Yeah, yeah, they're coming back. They're on a cruise."

Lately customers have been getting some straight answers. One of the women working in the store confirmed this weekend that the business has been sold.

What became of Charles and Faye? They took a trip to South America to attend a family wedding. They also bought a house which Charles says he might flip. He is thinking of starting another business. He readily admits that he “misses” running the store.

I wonder how much Charles and Faye got for the store. I knew a guy who worked on security in Glory Foods next door, the one run by Koreans. He says the Korean woman there offered Charles a million dollars for his store and he just laughed.

Army and Navy Will Stay Open

There was a rumor on the Downtown Eastside a while back that the Army & Navy store was closing. Not true. We checked with a staff person and she said there are no plans to close the store.

The rumor may have originated with the sale of the parking lot used by the Army and Navy.

Volunteer of the Year Barred from Carnegie Center

Ada D. returned to Carnegie Community Center yesterday after being barred from this City of Vancouver building for two weeks.

Ada (pictured in bottom right of above photo), a middle-aged woman with long brown hair originally from Newfoundland, was barred when another kitchen volunteer, Dominick, alleged that he had seen her take some sugar home. If she stole sugar once whose to say she wouldn’t be stealing, as the song goes, “sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at supper time.”

Last year Ada got the Carnegie Volunteer of the Year award. Translation: she had put in hundreds of hours of labor in the Carnegie kitchen for 80 cents an hour in food vouchers. She once spent 12 hours in the Carnegie kitchen preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. CUPE members who work in the kitchen and assign work to volunteers would have pocketed well over $200 for those Thanksgiving hours.

Not only is Ada a hard worker, but in a neighborhood where people are often identified by what they don’t do, she is known as a person who does not use street drugs. You won’t see Ada smoking crack. I wonder if she could have worked that into her defense: “I steal but I do not inhale.”

When you are barred from Carnegie, you can’t just walk back into the building when your sentence is up. You have to go to the office of the Security boss, Skip, and act contrite. Skip was the guy who supervised the barring of homeless Bill Simpson from the Carnegie Learning Center, when he was accused of blogging about union members locking the poor out of services funded for them. But the word at Carnegie was that Ada would have no difficulty getting permission to re-enter the building because her name is linked to two magic words: dish washer. Carnegie is always short of dishwashers who will work for 80 cents an hour.

In the months before getting barred, Ada had been getting peeved about the fact that, even though she would do her scheduled dish washing shifts, she would be button-holed by staff to do another shift when she would drop by Carnegie to socialize. Ada didn’t always mind doing another shift of dish washing but, being a Newfoundlander, she was thinking for herself; she thought staff should give volunteers extra vouchers to compensate for grabbing them at the last minute to do a shift that wasn't theirs. She started saying this out loud to other volunteers. A long term Carnegie member commented that if she said that within earshot of CUPE members, it could cause her problems.

You nevah, nevah say the niggahs deserve mo’ whattamellun.

But Ada’s position in relation to Carnegie staff is getting stronger. “She’s getting her DB 2”, one member said under her breath. That means she’ll be getting the Disability welfare rate, a little over $900 a month, putting her on the top rung of the welfare ladder. Not only that, but she just got into subsidized housing. Her emerging relationship to Carnegie staff was best summed up by a Carnegie member who knows her: “She don’t have to suck hole to them anymore.”

Colin Hansen "Rewarding" History of Sexual Harassment at SFU

Colin Hansen is rewarding sexual harassment. That’s how a former SFU student views a visit by BC’s Minister of Economic Development two weeks ago to the Downtown Eastside, to deliver $13.3 million in cheques to the Simon Fraser University Center for the Contemporary Arts. The cheques delivered on March 28th are part of a promise by Premier Gordon Campbell last year to give $49.5-million in special funding to the School for Contemporary Arts on the Downtown Eastside.

When delivering this special funding -- over and above regular funding -- Hansen made no mention of the Center’s special history, twenty years of evading investigation into the alleged operation of a sexual harassment ring of male professors. It is a history that has been festering much like that of native residential schools abuse or pedophile priests festered for decades.

The sexual harassment ring that operated in the Center for the Contemporary Arts involved an element of fraud according to previous reports by the woman who dropped out of the Center for the Contempoary Arts when she lost her ability to concentrate after years of sexual harassment. She has also spoken previously about the persistent lesson taught by Visual Arts professors in the sexual harassment ring -- Jeff Wall, Greg Snider, and David McWilliam -- all of whom had spouses and children, about how to handle a female spouse: deception.

SFU President Michael Stevenson did not show up to accept the $13.3 million cheque from Hansen. Stevenson is well aware of the controversy surrounding his hustling of public dollars for the Center for the Contemporary Arts while concealing it’s alleged history of operating as a site for professors to “harvest” female sex partners. “It’s affecting his reputation, and well it should”, the woman says. “He should resign over the way he’s ducked this issue like it’s a game.” Stevenson sent Warren Gill, Vice President for University Relations, to pick up the cheque from Hansen. “A spin doctor”, the woman calls him.



Hansen presented the cheques from an outdoor podium at a construction site for new Center for the Contemporary Arts studios on Hastings St., directly across the street from the Center’s old visual arts studios (middle building in photo above) where sexual harassment had been rampant for years. But Hansen’s ‘out with the old, in with the new’ hoopla has not caught on with the woman who dropped out due to sexual harassment. “I have trouble even walking by there”, says the woman who lives in the low income Downtown Eastside neighborhood. “As the years go by, it doesn’t get any better. I make a point of not looking at the building.”

At the time he turned over the $13.3 milllion cheque, Hansen encouraged donors to support the Center for the Contemporary Arts' private fund raising campaign. A press release from Hansen’s office praised SFU Chancellor emeritus Milton Wong and businessman Michael Audain for making “leadership” donations. Leadership is not a word the woman would use.

Close But No Cigar

At a meeting at Carnegie Center on Vancouver’s low income Downtown Eastside on Thursday evening, Chair Margaret Prevost told Rachel Davis to “Shut up”. For many members present that about summed up what was behind this Special meeting to change Carnegie’s constitution: silencing Rachel Davis.

Davis and two others elected to the Board, William “Bill” Simpson and Sophia Friegang, had become thorns in the side of the hard line left-wingers on the Board who are in favor of free speech as long as it follows their script.

Simpson was completely off script. He was an outspoken critic of the Downtown Eastside poverty industry in which Carnegie Board members and staff tend to be immersed.

Although more politically aligned with the Carnegie Board than Simpson, Davis and Friegang became targets of overt hostility by the Board when they spoke out against the barring of Simpson from the Carnegie Center and Board meetings just two weeks after he was elected. Friegang argued that the Board was complicit in abuse of “human rights”. Definitely off script. She was ignored. She resigned.

Two down, one to go.

As Davis continued to sit on the Board, she became the target of tactics ranging from verbal abuse to a secretive meeting by Board members to discuss her advocacy on the Bill Simpson matter. She was sent a letter from the Board requesting her resignation. But she wouldn’t take that train to Siberia.

Shortly after Davis refused to resign, the Board called a Special meeting to pass a resolution to change the way Board members got elected. The timing left Carnegie members suspicious. “Why is this in front of us now?”, a man called out from the audience at the meeting.

If the resolution passed, it would do away with guerilla election tactics. Currently any member who hangs out amongst the low income Carnegie Center population can simply turn up on election night, get a pal to nominate them, give a three minute speech, and get elected if they’ve asked enough of their pals in the Center to show up to vote. The long term members of the 15 member Board, who rely on abysmally low election turnouts to re-elect one another year after year, are caught off guard.

Bill Simpson caught them off guard. He had been barred from the Carnegie Learning Center on the 3rd floor for allegedly blogging about Carnegie – that was a few months before he was barred from the entire Carnegie building – but on the day of the June 2007 election, he asked his acquaintances in the Centre, “What are you doing at 5 o’clock? Would you be willing to vote for me?” A troop of Carnegie members trailed him into the election and Holy Brazen Blogger, Batman! Bill Got Elected!

If the new resolution passed, there would be a gap of a month between the nomination of candidates and voting. Never again would the current Board, which has members such as Jeff Sommers who have sat on the Board for decades, be caught completely off guard.

At Thursday evening’s meeting, Board member Peter Fairchild spoke in favor of the resolution, saying that every year on the evening of the election, “A whole bunch of people wander into the room who have never been involved.” The proposed requirement that nominees wait a month before the election, he argued, would “give people time to consider whether they actually want to do it.” He insisted that the Board was not attempting to “restrict” participation.

“Would you close the door and lock it,” Board Chair, Margaret Prevost, sitting beside Fairchild, called out to the door man checking membership cards of people arriving late to vote.

Rachel Davis spoke against the resolution. The current system “encourages positivity” in campaigning, she said. “It’s only negative campaigning that this will make easier. . .It will give a time period in which to do it in, a whole month.”

Jeff Sommers spoke in favor of the resolution. He’s the Board member who last year spoke against the request by Davis and Friegang for a review of the barring of Simpson, arguing that everybody who felt they had been unfairly barred would want their cases reviewed. “If you want to talk about shutting down democracy,” Sommers said on Thursday evening, “it’s not letting people campaign. . . .We’re one of the few community centers that doesn’t allow campaigning.” But as Carnegie member Wilf Reimer has pointed out to members in the past, Carnegie is not funded as a community center; it is funded and supervised by the City’s Social Services Group.

Karl MacDonald said he could see both sides of the debate but his concern was this: “It could end up as a smear campaign against people who for one reason or another are not accepted…It could end up like Pink Floyd ‘Up Against the Wall’.”

Jean Swanson, an activist with the Carnegie Community Action Project who has been outspoken about the treatment of Vancouver’s homeless but has seemingly lost her tongue when it comes to the treatment of homeless Bill Simpson, spoke in favor of the resolution. “Listening to Karl made me think if we voted yes, we could have an All Candidates Meeting where people would get a chance to say what they’re all about and answer questions.”

Joan Morelli, an anti-poverty activist and 35-year resident of the Downtown Eastside opposed the resolution. “I think that this Board should do it’s best to be inclusive of everybody in the neighborhood. Making it easier for people to participate should be the rule. Now they’re told they have to come twice.”

A man with a grey beard who volunteers as a tutor in the Carnegie Learning Center, said, “If people want to run for the Board, they should be willing to come to two meetings.”

Board member Gena Thompson was concerned that members were accusing the Board of “taking their voice” with this resolution. “Frankly, I’m starting to get angry.”
But Peter Fairchild saw the glass half full: “I’ve never seen so many people in the room for a meeting.”

“Yes you have Peter!", yelled former Board member Michael Read from the audience. "When William Simpson packed the meeting!”

Apparently picking up on the distrust in the room, Fairchild and Whitty counted the ballots in front of the membership. Each ballot was held up for the membership – those with stellar eye sight — to see.

Despite the many people who spoke passionately against the resolution though, the majority of the 52 people who cast ballots voted in favor of it. But the resolution failed to pass. That’s because the bar is high for a change to the constitution; seventy-five per cent of voters must vote in favor.

When the result was announced, Jeff Sommers immediately piped up, “There’s enough support here that we can do it next time.”

“Who said you had the floor?”, called out Wilf Reimer who, along with Davis, had insisted throughout the meeting that Roberts Rules of Order be followed to curb people speaking out of turn and interjecting abusive comments. Sommers would eventually snipe, “Do you have to have a rule to take a piss?”

Davis says Fairchild later made a point of telling her that the resolution had failed to pass by just one vote.

(photo of Rachel Davis taken by Wilf Reimer)