This week Vancouver's general manager for planning and development poked his nose into the Downtown Eastside storm over gentrification. According to notes of Brian Jackson's comments provided to me by the city's communications folks, he said "there is no plan for displacement of the existing residents."
Now who among the lathered up activists and freaked out vulnerable residents of the most downtrodden neighbourhood in our city is going to take comfort from that?
The simple fact is that there are no simple facts except this: Like the rest of the city, the Downtown Eastside is undergoing significant change and there are no measurements beyond anecdotes as to what that will mean.
Advocates for the homeless predict the worst, point to a longtime decline in this city of low-cost housing dating back to the days when there were cheap rooming houses in Kitsilano and Commercial Drive. They point out that as a result of the Woodward's project, those broken down buildings across the street on Hastings that provided substandard live-work space for artists - willing to put up with no hot water and intermittent toilet service - are now slated for redevelopment.
People who support the changes say that improvements in the quality of buildings and commercial development will mean a healthier community for all concerned.
But before we get too far into what is undeniably a complex issue, let's step back a bit. The angst in the Downtown Eastside is just the latest example of people expressing fear that the place they consider their community is changing. Their sense of belonging is being threatened. This observation comes from Andy Yan, the clever young researcher who toils in the employ of architect Bing Thom.
You can draw a straight line from anxiety by West End folks over spot zoning for the city's STIR program that produces more rental units to the concern over loss of the Waldorf Hotel as a cultural venue for the city's hipsters, to the major backlash when the park board launched its clumsy attack on the current structure and control of the city's community centres.
In each of these cases, citizens saw threats to their sense of belonging, to their sense of community. Add to that, concerns about the foreign ownership of property. Yan was a panelist at the real estate forum that took place a week ago at Simon Fraser University.
According to a survey prepared by the Vancouver Foundation and presented at the conference, three out of four Vancouver residents who had an opinion agreed with the statement: "There is too much foreign ownership of real estate here."
How much is too much has never been quantified and to listen to Yan, it is not simply about the price of real estate in what is now the second most expensive city on the planet. It is more the feeling that people are being squeezed out of their communities. They no longer feel they belong. But again, there is no hard evidence. We can't say for certainty who is buying up all those condos and just how many of them remain vacant. And we can't say with any certainty how many houses are being bought up by people who do not live here.
If you think this is all about race, as the Vancouver Sun's Douglas Todd pointed out in his coverage of the event, the Vancouver Foundation found that among city residents who speak Chinese in their homes a margin of three to one agree "there is too much foreign ownership of property here." But both Todd and Yan agreed that what we lack here are concrete facts. What we have instead is what we are getting in the Downtown Eastside about gentrification and displacement: Anecdotes, suppositions based on examples or fears or rumours.
Yan makes this point about that: "The plural of anecdote is not data." And while Yan admits he didn't come up with the line himself, it certainly gets to the point. We need more than convenient anecdotes, certainly if we are to deal with the fear of loss gripping the Downtown Eastside.
At this point what Brian Jackson plans and what local residents believe they can expect are not even close.
