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!”

Did the Olympics kill the San Francisco Pawn Shop?

The San Francisco Pawn Shop is dead. After 50 years, its doors on Hastings St. across from Save On Foods will shut at the end of August.

Jeff, the owner, confirmed the closure to a Downtown Eastside pensioner who dropped in this morning to see about a watch. The pensioner knows Jeff, whom he says took the place over from his dad. "You still see his dad, Mitch, working in there, part-time."

"They sold the property to people from Hong Kong", the pensioner explains. "Concord Pacific, people from Hong Kong." That's a huge lot; it goes right back to the alley, the pensioner explains.

People on the Downtown Eastside will miss the San Francisco Pawn Shop, the pensioner believes. "People would go in there with all kinds of stuff", he recalls chuckling, "TVs, radios, clocks, watches, diamond rings."

But the San Francisco Pawn Shop owners may have gotten out of the business at the right time. The population of low-income residents who rely on a pawn shop to get through the month, is shrinking on the Downtown Eastside. The upcoming 2010 Olympics has jacked up property values and roughly 12 buildings that have provided cheap rooms to poor people have or are being sold for re-development.

The pensioner believes that with the sale of the San Francisco Pawn Shop property, things are going according to plan for the right-of-center City Council. "They want the area cleaned up by 2010, for the Olympics. They don't want people coming here and seeing all those poor people."

As the Olympics come, the San Francisco Pawn Shop goes. The paper work for the pawn shop property has been completed, the pensioner says. "It's a done deal."