From idea to conception, the Empire State Building was built in 1 1/2 years, the Eiffel Tower in two. Social housing in Woodward’s? 25 years
Pete McMartin
Sun
Woodward’s closed its doors in 1993, but the idea to convert the building to include social housing was born years before. Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG, Vancouver Sun
From its birth as an idea to its completion as the first link across the country, it took 14 years to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.
It took the same amount of time to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
From the day its investors assembled the land to the day it opened, it took 1 1/2 years to complete the Empire State Building.
It took two years to build the Eiffel Tower.
Here’s something funny: A 25-metre-high replica of the Eiffel Tower was built to support the famous “W” that stood atop the old Woodward’s building. From the day the old Woodward’s building closed its doors in 1993 to the day of its reincarnation this month, it took 17 years for the new Woodward’s building, and a new “W” resting atop a new replica Eiffel Tower, to be reborn. If you add on the years the idea was first floated to convert the former Woodward’s building into a residence with a social housing component, it will have taken 25 years from start to finish. For some reason that eludes me, people felt this was a reason for celebration when it opened its doors this month.
In those 2 1/2 decades, little in the neighbourhood has changed for the better. Drugs are still omnipresent. The number of homeless are still legion. Crime, disease, the problems of the mentally ill … the grim litany continues apace 25 years down the road.
It is the accepted wisdom that poverty is the Downtown Eastside’s biggest problem, but that is nonsense. The Downtown Eastside’s biggest problem is paralysis. Despite the balm of hundreds of millions of tax dollars applied to the neighbourhood in those 25 years, despite the steady accretion of layer after layer of social welfare agencies (so many that the provincial government finally ordered an audit last year to find out exactly how many there were), despite the tireless work of charities and churches and foundations, the sore continues to fester.
But, oh, the tail-chasing social welfare debates and failed experiments over those 2 1/2 decades! And the moralizing designed to frustrate anyone who dares think of the Downtown Eastside as anything other than an enclave for the poor, the poor who always seem to be beset by the horrors of gentrification, which is a word the socially sensitive gentry use to express their horror of gentrification. Mount Pleasant can be beset by gentrification, Commercial Drive and Yaletown can be beset by gentrification. Even nearby Strathcona can be beset by gentrification. Change has touched them all. But a pestilential war zone located next door to the downtown of a city completely reinventing itself? Never!
Meanwhile, in all those years, Woodward’s did nothing but languish. In the campaign to incorporate social housing into its redevelopment, any suggestion of commercial enterprise wasn’t just rejected, it was demonized.
When Fama Holdings bought the building in 1995 and announced plans to build 350 condos and two floors of commercial space, the then president of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association offered the view that the developers should pay for any social housing to be built in a low-income area like the Downtown Eastside because, after all, “they’re the ones making fortunes.”
The blitheness and entitlement of that statement typified the welfare culture that had established itself firmly in the area. The developer, in response, replied that if the neighbourhood wanted social housing, maybe it should ask the government, whose duty it was to provide it.
At this ideological impasse, the provincial government stepped in. In 2001, the province, that is, taxpayers, bought the crumbling building for $22 million. In 2002, there was the famous squat of protesters demanding the building be saved and developed into social housing, followed by the famous squat eviction of the protesters by the city. Then in 2003, the city, that is, the taxpayers, rode to the rescue and bought the building from the province for $5 million. Then, after a couple of years of massaging plans into just the right socially responsible mixture, construction began in 2006.
Construction took four years. It cost $400 million. There’s a couple hundred non-market units, over 500 market units, retail space, a downtown campus for SFU and other government flotsam and jetsam for ballast. Something for everybody.
And after all this angst and decades of delay and truly gargantuan expenditure of public money, and this bending-over-backwards to satisfy the insatiable appetite for social housing, what ran on the op-ed page of The Sun on the week the new Woodward’s building opened? Jean Swanson, coordinator of the Carnegie Community Action Project, fretted in print that the new Woodward’s will have the effect of driving out the homeless population living on the street and the resident population living in single-room occupancy hotels because, she felt, it would make them feel “uncomfortable.” In other words, they will flee in the face of gentrification.
In the Downtown Eastside, no one will ever get it right.
In the Downtown Eastside, change will never be good.
In the Downtown Eastside, the one constant we can always be sure of, even after 25 years of stagnation, is complaint.
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