gentrification

[Sam Pawlett]

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> Sam, I visited Vancouver - that's where you are, right? - for the
> first time last fall. I was staying at 56 E. 5th Ave, which has been
> a pretty funky working class/light industrial neighborhood, but my
> host told me it was being filled with folks like him - artists,
> writers, bohemians, the avant garde of gentrification. And downtown
> was truly a gentrifier's paradise, with warehouses being turned into
> condos, Planet Hollywoodish theme joints everywhere, movie sets
> everywhere, etc. (I saw one warehouse-to-condo conversion that had a
> sign in the window advertising the contractor as "rebuilding downtown
> Denver" - an actual transformation was doing double duty representing
> one in a TV movie!) Of course, downtown east side still looks like
> the poorest neighborhood in Canada I was told it was, but otherwise
> the city seems to be going this way too. Is my impression correct?

  To some extent yes, but I live in the middle of it all so I may not
notice it as much. Some of the great neighborhoods like
Strathcona(Downtown Eastside), Main St (where you were staying) and
Commercial/Victoria Dr. are still too poor to support the boutiques and
restaurants/bars usually associated with gentrification not to speak of
high rents. There are some good neighborhood/community orgs that require
chain restaurants etc. to sort of hide and blend in a bit and put a lot
of pressure on to keep rents affordable and make sure there is enough
good, cheap housing. They've been mildly successful, though it's fast
becoming either Hard Rock Cafe or skid row.

  There was a big wave during the Expo 86 world's fair when thousands of
people were thrown out of their apartments in the downtown eastside to
make way for luxury towers, sort of what happened in Atlanta during the
Olympics. A lot fo the gentrification efforts in Vancouver have been
abysmal failures, thousands of square feet of empty office space,
hundreds of unsold, unoccupied warehouse-style apartments etc. 

 Is
> there anyplace in North America this isn't happening?

I think its a matter of degree, some places are worse than others.
Gentrification and urban rot reflect the widening gap between rich and
poor.I've found that the best urban areas are where there are many
people living downtown (low rents) and
where there are lots of colleges and universities (like Montreal).

 Seems like in
> addition to the old model of suburbanization we've got a
> transformation of older city cores going on at the same time - a mix
> of concentration and dispersal that it's hard to describe in a single
> phrase.
> 
Yep, there are contradictory processes going on. C. Parenti analyzes it
quite well, so does David Harvey in his early work.

Doug, overall what did you think of Vancouver?

Sam P.