GENTRIVILLE OR POORHAVEN?

In the Downtown Eastside, controlling the drug culture is one thing
everyone can agree upon. After that, the fight is on.

Put in a resource centre for drug addicts on Powell Street? Get a
dot.com company to set up in the vacant Woodward's building on
Hastings Street? Hey, talk like that will get your head bitten off in
the notoriously polarized politics of the Downtown Eastside.

The reason is that each newly proposed development, like the little
green and red plastic markers on a Monopoly board, is read closely as
a sign of whose vision for the neighbourhood is winning or losing. And
a very serious game this is, because millions of dollars and the fate
of thousands of longtime residents are seen to hang in the balance.

At its roiling core, the debate is about gentrification. A gentrified
neighbourhood is one colonized by more affluent newcomers, causing
longtime residents to move someplace cheaper. Whether you think that
would be a good or bad thing for the Downtown Eastside depends quite a
bit on where you're coming from (and where you've been).

Sample the viewpoints of real-estate developers, government planners,
social workers, artists, poverty activists and others working in the
neighbourhood, and you quickly realize that no one expects to see
bulldozer-style "urban redevelopment" in the area, the sort of
neighbourhood obliteration that almost occurred when activists
defeated a freeway set to cut through Gastown in the 1960s. Nor do
they find plausible New York's recent approach to Times Square, where
single room occupancy hotels (SROs) were razed by the dozens, their
residents pushed elsewhere while corporations worked with city hall to
install a Disneyfied downtown for tourists.

Still, ask people for their visions of a "better" Downtown Eastside 10
years from now, and two profoundly different visions emerge.

To Gentrify...?

Let's call the first scenario "Gentriville."

Seen from perspective of many realtors, other businesspeople and
residents in Gastown and Chinatown, city policies have conspired to
maintain a ghetto next door, which discourages investment and the
potential of the larger district to thrive.

Their revival scenario for the Downtown Eastside starts with the
Woodward's building playing home to a Simon Fraser University
performing-arts centre or a beehive of tech firms and condo dwellers.
Maybe, even, the old edifice is levelled to make room for a snazzy
mixed-use development -- the most unabashed would-be gentrifiers don't
tend to sentimentalize the old landmark.

On the streets, police begin enforcing laws just as they would in
Kitsilano. And, because the mayor has managed to wangle new drug
programs out of provincial and federal authorities, dealers and users
are soon off the street, sent to jail or rehab or Riverview mental
hospital. Wherever they go, it's far from the Downtown Eastside and
they don't come back, because the new policies discourage it. No new
services for drug users are installed in the Downtown Eastside, and
once addicts have finished their far-flung treatment regimens, they
are hooked up to jobs nowhere near Main and Hastings.

To lower the neighbourhood's uniquely high ratio of social housing,
some SROs are closed, their owners allowed to turn them into tourist
lodging, condos, whatever. Displaced residents are moved to facilities
in other neighbourhoods where social housing is exotic (think
Kerrisdale) or innocuous (think False Creek). And any remaining SROs
are improved from the "flophouse" or rooming-house model to
self-contained mini-apartment units with bathrooms and kitchens.

Meanwhile, a raft of tax breaks, low-interest business loans and
land-use incentives are having their effect, transforming the economic
landscape around Hastings Street. A certain stripe of young person,
the so-called "risk-oblivious" in real-esate parlance, swarm in to buy
or rent cheap, funky, market-priced housing because they are looking
for exactly the kind of edge and vibrant street culture the Downtown
Eastside affords. (Indeed, marketers have already named one such
existing project, at the foot of Main, "The Edge.")

As property values rise, so do rents, which means a lot of old-timers
have to move someplace cheaper. Eventually home-owning newcomers
become, as they have elsewhere, a political force to be reckoned with,
demanding from city hall more amenities and better police protection.
For that to happen, the few hundred market-housing units in the area
today would have to be increased to at least 3,000, given that there
are more than 6,000 units of social housing in the area now.

To serve the new clientele, laundromats, groceries, hardware stores
and the rest open alongside cafes and clubs. And Hastings Street, with
it's high-quality heritage buildings, becomes a neon-lit investor's
bonanza.

By the way, if you thought ending the war on drugs would turn Hastings
Street's environs into North America's opium emporium, think again.
One high-profile proponent of drug legalization, a businessman who
lives in the Downtown Eastside, spun this vision: "End the war on
drugs. Dispense all substances throughout the region in controlled and
regulated ways, and you undercut the criminal structure of the
Downtown Eastside, ending the hooking, drug dealing, rip-offs and
fencing of stolen goods there.

"Business returns. Not the cannabis cafes, though. They'll be along
Davie Street, Commercial Drive, wherever the tourists are, just like
in Amsterdam.

"As money comes back into the Downtown Eastside, ultimately you won't
have the poor and the dispossessed living there. They won't be able to
live here, and that's good. It's better they are displaced all over
the region, rather than concentrated."

A more succinct embrace of gentrification for the Downtown Eastside
would be hard to come by.

Or Not To Gentrify...?

Look at the same neighbourhood now through the eyes of people who have
long made it their home, as well as the social activists who identify
with this low-income constituency. They see a Downtown Eastside hemmed
in by upscaling neighbourhoods.

City Hall has granted owners in Chinatown and Gastown new incentives
to upgrade their heritage buildings. Along the water, where the
business district, Gastown and the eastern fringes of the Downtown
Eastside meet, spillover from a new convention centre will raise
property values another big notch. If the Downtown Eastside
gentrifies, where would residents go? Cities need neighborhoods where
people can live cheaply without being banished to the hinterlands, as
is happening in, say, Silicon Valley.

Call their scenario, then, "Poorhaven." To them, a "better" Downtown
Eastside in 10 years means you've made it a safer, healthier community
for the struggling poor, even as you bring in new business and market
housing.

Advocates for Poorhaven, unlike those for Gentriville, welcome into
their neighborhood services for addicts who live there and seek a way
out of their misery. If detox and treatment centres, methadone clinics
and needle-exchange wagons become part of the character of the
neighborhood, so be it, as long as such "harm reduction" curbs the
area's health and safety woes.

With the drug scene under control, the government turns its attention
to jobs, given that some 90 percent of SRO residents are unemployed.
City Hall awards tax breaks to businesses that will train and hire
people on welfare, the way GM Place, by agreement, already has. Beyond
that, the government agrees to buy goods -- everything from chairs to
artwork to food -- made in the Downtown Eastside.

With more tax breaks, creative zoning and government subsidies, up
spring lots of projects like the Four Sisters cooperative at Alexander
and Powell. Many Four Sisters residents have been able to get off
welfare and land jobs because the mixed-use development provides them
not only housing but child care. That model on a grander scale is what
many Poorhaven proponents want for the empty Woodward's.

Not that they are against bringing more market housing into the
neighborhood. Indeed, most agree that it's essential. Most would be
happy to see lots of "risk oblivious" move in and liven up the
neighbourhood. The key is whether their arrival would force current
residents out. In Poorhaven's dictionary, the dirtiest word of all is
gentrification.

Which is why not a single SRO would be converted to cool little lofts
or any other use, no matter what else goes on in the Downtown
Eastside. That is the position taken now by many housing activists,
who oppose even the city's current "one for one" goal of replacing any
lost SRO rooms with social housing built elsewhere. In Poorhaven,
since there would be little incentive for SRO owners to fix up their
aging, century-old piles, more government money would go to improve
them for their current residents, as has been done through the
Portland Hotel Society.

Gentriville Or Poorhaven, Either Vision Presupposes Bold New Policies,
and some dicey politicking to the wider citizenry. The Gentriville
scenario asks other neighbourhoods to absorb residents of the Downtown
Eastside. The Poorhaven version has taxpayers ponying up more to make
life better in someone else's neighborhood.

Which is why neither side expects their vision to materialize without
a fight. In the meantime, they slug it out, one Monopoly piece at a
time.