Photo co/ the Western Front
Some great news was released yesterday via the Georgia Straight: the Western Front Society, an arts nonprofit that's been operating in Vancouver for the past 43 years, is buying their building in Mount Pleasant. Thanks to $1.5m that's being given to them through the City that's coming directly from the Community Amenity Contribution of a nearby condo tower being built, their future in the neighbourhood has been locked in for the long term regardless of how high rents go.
Artist Hank Bull and Western Front Society director Caitlin Jones. Photo by Tessa Vikander via The Georgia Straight
The massive contribution (a "CAC" as they're called) isn't a charitable donation as much as it's a fee that the City of Vancouver charges to developers when they add more density to an area. Throw a few hundred more people into the mix of a neighbourhood? Those new residents are going to need more services and somebody needs to pay for them. In this particular case the City decided that in order to rezone the property at the corner of Kingsway and Broadway the developer, Rize, had to put in $6.25m in CAC's. $4.5m of that was dogeared for "community based artist production space in Mount Pleasant and surrounding areas", and that money will be used to "secure/enhance/expand" existing artist production spaces as well as outright purchase of spaces (as in the case of VIVO, who recently had to move). Here's how the outlay of cash is going to look, and HERE is the City's report on it:
Western Front - $1,500,000
Grunt Gallery - $400,000
Arts Factory - $300,000
C-Space/VIVO - $2,300,000
TOTAL - $4,500,000
The remaining $1.75m will likely be put into infrastructure (to be honest I don't know exactly where it goes but think "fixing potholes", "garbage pickup" and "sewer upgrades for 500 new people who all take poops").
If you pay attention to the news you may remember the kerfuffle that happened back in 2012 when the developer applied to have the property rezoned. The issue divided the neighbourhood (and the city, as people from all over came to voice their opinions) and was on the front page of many of the papers. To boil it down there was a large group of people who didn't think there should be a tower there and a smaller group who thought there should. I was living in the neighbourhood at the time and found myself in the middle of it all - thinking back on it I actually put myself in the middle of it. I walked into the presentation space that Rize had set up where they were telling people about the project and what they hoped to do, and I picked up their materials as well as the City of Vancouver's Community Plan which had been approved in 2010. I researched the "no" side and their concerns, and I understood what they were concerned with but in the end I kept coming back to the Community Plan. Years of consultation with the neighbourhood go into these things, they hold hundreds of meetings with stakeholders and they get opinions from everyone. The Mt Pleasant one had been approved by council just 2 years before, it's 33 pages long and on one of them there's a rendering of what the neighbourhood collectively agreed should be on the corner of Kingsway and Broadway (HERE is the plan, it's on pages 25 and 26): a condo tower. Perfectly located on a major corridor at a transit hub, where a train will hopefully one day roll past, where the density should be concentrated if you ask most city planners. I'm not an expert and have never claimed to be, but I participated as a concerned citizen who knows that more density's got to go somewhere in our city; we need to add as much new housing stock as we can, as a small piece of the puzzle of addressing affordability.
I was quoted as saying to City Council that "I make my living off of this [my job at Vancouver Is Awesome], so you could say that I have a vested interest in the continued ‘awesomeness’ of Vancouver,” and "as the population of Mount Pleasant continues to grow, I feel it would be a giant step back for the neighbourhood and the city as a whole if this rezoning application doesn’t get approved", and I was happy when it did.
However the majority of speakers at the hearing opposed the project, and some people hated me for speaking in favour of it. There were some who accused me of getting paid to speak or that I had some sinister ulterior motive, and even more who simply hurled insults at me online and attacked my character. To this day, almost 4 years later there's a contingency of them that continues to harass me, viewing me as some sort of enemy to be taken down. This was my first foray into engaging in issues at City Hall and I can tell you that there are a handful of really angry, sad people out there looking for somebody to blame their unhappiness on, but they won't keep me from engaging in the future. We all do what we feel is best for our city, and while we don't always agree on what we feel is right we shouldn't let the angriest people win. Good policy should win.
So let's get back to this super-happy-funtimes news: Western Front and a few other local groups are getting funding to stay in the neighbourhood long-term, and that's incredible. I still can't afford to buy in this market myself, and I would absolutely love to buy at Rize Mt Pleasant if I had the money to make it happen, but I continue my journey in life as a renter in our expensive city. And that'll have to do.
