New Media

When a neighborhood’s resiliency derives so much from affordability for the working class, artists and small businesses, should a neighborhood deliberately avoid making improvements? Deliberate sabotage of a community seems rife with risk and the threat of unanticipated blowback.

But for the funky, vital neighborhood of Commercial Drive in Vancouver, gradual improvements will just keep adding to the trend of gentrification that has made home-ownership for lower incomes totally out of reach and made some local business owners concerned about their long-term future. Without more massive infusions of subsidized housing, how can the Drive retain its character as the neighborhood becomes irresistible to Yuppies? My comments in the Granville Magazine blog post, When livability and resilience collide

Can Commercial hold back gentrification? If it can’t, is it possible to retain the neighbourhood’s distinct character? These were the sorts of questions that participants were dealing with at the recent Drive to Resilience forum on envisioning the future of Commercial Drive, hosted by the students in the Semester in Dialogue program at SFU. Those in attendance included residents, local business owners and representatives from various neighbourhood organizations who were guided through a day-long exercise in collaborative problem solving.

Much of what participants discussed revolved around developing more support for affordable housing, help for artists and small businesses, and even programs to support the integration of the area’s homeless and marginal people into composting efforts. In this sense, much of Commercial Drive’s character seems dependent on low rent and subsidies for those with low income.

Ironically, the characteristics that define Commercial Drive may have actually become more pronounced due to the gentrification of areas like Kitsilano, which has sent artists and working-class holdouts fleeing for the Eastside. But in a few more years, rent increases for residents and businesses may conceivably turn the area into a slightly more mellow version of South Granville—with its Le Chateau, Pottery Barn and Chapters stores—sending purists and the area’s poor fleeing for some other as-yet ungentrified corner of the city.

If the consensus from neighbourhood residents and Vancouver-area citizens who make the Drive their second home is to preserve a working class neighbourhood and artist refuge in the midst of a rapidly growing, trend-setting cosmopolitan metropolis, the simplest way to keep rents down is to disincentivise certain yuppie types from moving into the neighbourhood. How to do that without going so far that you actually put the area into decline is tricky.

How Does Commercial Drive Retain This?

Everybody and his blog is shouting from the rooftops about the Canadian dollar’s rise to parity with the US greenback.

Frankly, I’m not all that convinced that this is a good thing, particularly for people like me that rely on foreign clients for part of my income. If our currency goes much higher, our international friends are going to go elsewhere.

But I’ve also been hearing a lot from people who are concerned that Canadians are going to undergo the same housing slump that has hit the US. I don’t see it happening, though. In particular, the housing market right here in Vancouver seems set for even more insane prices.

Oh, the housing cycle will eventually take us down. But international investors looking to park their money somewhere are probably going to keep propping up our local housing prices for a little while longer. They won’t want to put their money into the radioactive market to our south, at least until the worst of the fallout subsides. Besides, the Olympics aren’t even here yet.

Patience, first-time home buyers. The time is not yet ripe. But soon…

Who knew it was such a bargain to live in a city where a run-down shell of a house goes for half a million bucks?

Just days after giving another tearful lament about real estate prices in Vancouver, one survey now shows that the cost of living here is actually quite reasonable… compared to London and Tokyo. We barely even made the top 100 most expensive cities, placing seven points behind Toronto’s rating of 82.

It’s good to keep things in perspective, I suppose. But a good price on a litre of milk and a loaf of bread still doesn’t put me into the West End.

Then again, I’m certain there are some big problems associated with placing dead last on a survey like that. Be thankful for what you’ve got.

A two-storey home in Vancouver now costs the average Canadian about 70 per cent of their pre-tax income – not including the down payment.

That kind of home is now worth a figure creeping relentlessly upwards to $700,000. That basically means I could win the lottery, buy a very nice house in central Vancouver, and probably still count on having to work until 55.

To locals intent on getting a piece of land somewhere close to the center of our fair city, the latest real estate buzz is not exactly news. Most of us hard-core urban dwellers who aren’t doctors, lawyers, or people who steal the financial identity of doctors and lawyers have pretty much given up on the dream of a nice house with a white picket fence. Perhaps that will come in retirement, as we cash in our tiny city condos in our old age to buy mansions in Kelowna in sort of a reversal of the usual downsizing retirement trend.

Forget about affordable housing for the poor. How about affordable housing for urban professionals?

There’s rent control… and then there’s getting stuck in a real estate time warp.

Vancouver City Hall just hiked the lease rates on False Creek condos by an average of over 700 per cent (according to a report in 24 Hours). That’s a pretty disgusting cash grab. But when I read a little further down the article, my sympathy started to dissipate.

One guy affected by the hike saw his rent jump to $785 a month. I was paying that much for a bachelor apartment two years ago.

Meanwhile, he’s been paying just $102 per month for who knows how long. I’ve had phone bills bigger than that.

The people affected clearly weren’t paying anything close to current market value. These rates were set in 1976.

There will be the inevitable backlash from poverty activists concerned about affordable housing. It is a growing problem in this city as developers tear down the rentals to put up expensive condos for a big profit. It is definitely a contributing factor to the scourge of homelessness in this city. At the very least, these people affected by City Hall should have been given three months notice before the new rates kicked in to find alternate housing.

But Canadian citizenship doesn’t entitle anybody to live wherever they want. If these people want to live in False Creek for $102 a month, they’re welcome to look around for an available cardboard box.

Otherwise, they can do what human beings have been doing throughout history when the place they are living becomes unsustainable: move.