Vancouver, BC—As the fight over gentrification heats up in the Downtown Eastside, Megaphone is releasing a special issue on Friday, April 19th that raises awareness and gives a voice to the issues affecting the community. Megaphone’s third-annual literary issue, Voices of the Street, covers complex topics such as housing, addiction and mental health. It also looks at how people in the community come together to support each other. Each of the articles is written by marginalized writers who participate in Megaphone’s writing workshops. “Voices of the Street tells the real stories of the Downtown Eastside,” says Sean Condon, Megaphone’s executive director. “At a time when the neighbourhood is going through some major changes, these stories give us an insight into what we can do to support this community.” Megaphone runs a series of free, weekly writing workshops at treatment centres, social housing buildings and community centres in the Downtown Eastside and downtown Vancouver. It has also started a bi-annual community journalism workshop with SFU Woodward’s for Downtown Eastside residents. “Taking Megaphone’s writing workshop showed me I have a story to tell,” says Sid Bristow, who participated in the community journalism workshop and whose article, Welfare Wednesday, is published in this year’s Voices of the Street. Sid also sells Megaphone at the corner of Cambie and Broadway. He says “it feels good getting my story published, knowing I have a chance to tell other people what it’s like to survive on the streets.” Megaphone vendors will be selling Voices of the Street for $5, along with regular issues of the magazine. This special issue also features photographs from the Hope in Shadows calendar project. Megaphone’s launch event for Voices of the Street will be on Friday, April 19th at Cafe Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial Dr.) from 8-10 p.m. -30- To schedule an interview with Sean or Sid, please contact: Sean Condon Executive Director—Megaphone 604-255-9701 sean@megaphonemagazine.com About Megaphone Magazine Megaphone is an award-winning magazine sold on the streets of Vancouver by homeless and low-income vendors. Published by the non-profit Street Corner Media Foundation, vendors buy each issue for 75 cents and sell them on the street for $2. They keep all profits.
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Vancouver, BC—As the fight over gentrification heats up in the Downtown Eastside, Megaphone is releasing a special issue on Friday, April 19th that raises awareness and gives a voice to the issues affecting the community.

Megaphone’s third-annual literary issue, Voices of the Street, covers complex topics such as housing, addiction and mental health. It also looks at how people in the community come together to support each other. Each of the articles is written by marginalized writers who participate in Megaphone’s writing workshops.

“Voices of the Street tells the real stories of the Downtown Eastside,” says Sean Condon, Megaphone’s executive director. “At a time when the neighbourhood is going through some major changes, these stories give us an insight into what we can do to support this community.”

Megaphone runs a series of free, weekly writing workshops at treatment centres, social housing buildings and community centres in the Downtown Eastside and downtown Vancouver. It has also started a bi-annual community journalism workshop with SFU Woodward’s for Downtown Eastside residents.

“Taking Megaphone’s writing workshop showed me I have a story to tell,” says Sid Bristow, who participated in the community journalism workshop and whose article, Welfare Wednesday, is published in this year’s Voices of the Street.

Sid also sells Megaphone at the corner of Cambie and Broadway. He says “it feels good getting my story published, knowing I have a chance to tell other people what it’s like to survive on the streets.”

Megaphone vendors will be selling Voices of the Street for $5, along with regular issues of the magazine. This special issue also features photographs from the Hope in Shadows calendar project.

Megaphone’s launch event for Voices of the Street will be on Friday, April 19th at Cafe Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial Dr.) from 8-10 p.m.

-30-

To schedule an interview with Sean or Sid, please contact:

Sean Condon

Executive Director—Megaphone

604-255-9701

sean@megaphonemagazine.com

About Megaphone Magazine

Megaphone is an award-winning magazine sold on the streets of Vancouver by homeless and low-income vendors. Published by the non-profit Street Corner Media Foundation, vendors buy each issue for 75 cents and sell them on the street for $2. They keep all profits.

BC Housing subsidizes Pantages Condo project | The Mainlander

socialhousingbc:

The Mainlander, November 30, 2012:

Should BC Housing subsidize a Downtown Eastside (DTES) condo developer when our neighbourhood has 850 homeless people and 3500 living in crummy hotel rooms that need to be replaced? Is Condo King Bob Rennie, also on the Board of BC Housing, behind a sweet deal that will probably increase property values two blocks away from his own office?

These are two questions that shocked Downtown Eastsiders are asking after learning that BC Housing plans to loan up to $23 million to condo developer Marc Williams. Williams plans to build 79 condo units plus 18 social housing units (only 9 will rent at welfare rates) at the site of the old Pantages Theatre, 138 E. Hastings. He calls the project Sequel 138. According to The Province, the loans will be at 1.29 % interest, much lower than the going rate from a bank.

Over 40 organizations, housing providers, artists, and social workers have joined 2,200 DTES residents in signing a Community Resolution opposing condos at the old Pantages Theatre site. The Resolution states: “We would not want to be complicit in a project that will further displace, impoverish, and police residents of the Downtown Eastside and make people feel more unwelcome in their own neighbourhood.”

The groups want the city to buy the Pantages site and use it for resident controlled social housing that people on welfare can afford.

Building condos in the Downtown Eastside causes gentrification. Condos increase property values. Rents and taxes for hotel rooms and local businesses go up. New businesses serve new, richer residents. Police and security guards harass and ticket low-income people to keep them away from the new upscale businesses, and the streets become zones of exclusion for low income people.

It’s especially important to stop the Sequel project because it is in the Oppenheimer area of the DTES, an area that requires 20% social housing for most new developments. If Sequel can succeed despite this requirement, other developers are likely to proceed with more condos and gentrify the heart of the DTES. The city has also said in its DTES Housing Plan that the Oppenheimer area should have more than its share of new self-contained social housing. This can’t happen if the area is overrun with condos, due to unaffordable property values. […]

Fuck Yeah Canadian Politics: How the BC government funds gentrification

Tues Dec 11 2012 – Today at 2pm, the “Downtown Eastside not for Developers” coalition is holding a demonstration against the government bailout of the Pantages condo project on the 100-block of East Hastings. News was recently leaked to the Province newspaper that BC Housing has bailed-out…

With Best Intentions: Yoga, Gentrification and Solidarity in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside

livebreatheyoga108:

A very interesting article on the gentrification of Vancouver’s East Hastings neighbourhood and how power and privilege are asserted in the language we use to describe the people of this neighbourhood, despite good intentions to offer them accessible yoga.

MEGA-NEWS: DTES planning process not working for low-income people

On November 8, over 50 people attended a meeting at the Carnegie Community Centre to discuss whether the Downtown Eastside Local Area Planning Process (LAPP) was working for low-income community members. The general consensus was no. 

“Everybody here who’s involved with LAPP is spending tons of time at bureaucratic meetings and reading reams of paper that the City churns out,” says Jean Swanson, coordinator of the Carnegie Community Action Project, adding 10-12 members are spending 160 hours a week on the LAPP. “Could this time be spent more effectively doing something else?”

Committee members acknowledged they spent less time organizing demonstrations and grassroots campaigns against gentrification than in previous years because of the LAPP. They cite the approval of the condo and commercial development at 955 East Hastings as an example of a failure to organize strong opposition. 

“We’re getting screwed by the process, and the people who are screwing us are the developers and people who have contracts, investments, and properties tied up in the Downtown Eastside,” says Ivan Drury, former co-chair of the LAPP and a member of the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council.

But that doesn’t mean low-income committee members will be quitting the LAPP. Instead they vowed to create a “people’s plan” within the LAPP by focusing on grassroots, peer group campaigns to improve living conditions in the Downtown Eastside (DTES), stopping further development in the neighbourhood, and developing their own plan for the future of the DTES by consulting with low-income residents. 

“I think it’s true what people said about rallying numbers and making alliances, but we can’t just have numbers, we also need a vision of what’s to be done. We need to have a program and ideas that we unite around and that we fight for,” says Drury. 

“This group that’s been developing vision through the LAPP is developing as a leadership that can put forward some ideas to rally around.”

by Katie Hyslop

This article originally appeared in Megaphone Magazine #117.

Red Gate Arts Society continues fight for affordable arts space in Vancouver with fundraiser TOMORROW

by Jim Carrico

The Red Gate Collective has been homeless for more than a year. Their former location, a 15,000 square foot building devoted to recording, rehearsal, and visual arts studios, as well as flexible facilities for exhibition, performance and production, sits at ground zero of the gentrification of the downtown eastside, on the 100 block of West Hastings St. It is now being leased out at 8 times the rate they had been paying. 

Since their “renoviction” in Oct. 2011, two other buildings housing artist studios on that same block have met a similar fate, combining to a total of 40,000 square feet of cultural space that has been lost in that small corner of the neighborhood alone. 

In February of this year the Red Gate group discovered an empty City-owned building on Industrial Ave. and made a proposal to the City to lease the space at the commercial rate paid by the previous tenant. Despite assurances from the Vision council, the Cultural Dept, and other City representatives that alleviating the crisis in artist studio, production, and performance space is a top priority, after 9 months of waiting, submitting a formal proposal including budgets, timelines, and floor plans as part of a public RFP process, and then waiting again, no word about the building has escaped the fortress of City Hall.  

In the intervening months, at least 4 other unlicensed (aka “underground”) spaces have been shut down for bylaw, zoning, and allowable use violations. 

It’s becoming clear that, regardless of whether the expressed “good will” is sincere or not, the structural forces that have been pushing artists out of downtown Vancouver are still driving the agenda, with no end in sight.  

In support of their proposal to the city, the newly-formed Red Gate Arts Society raised over $7000 in an online ‘crowd-funding’ campaign and collected almost 1000 signatures from their extended community. This Wednesday, Nov. 21st, a benefit show is being held at Fortune Sound Club (147 E.Pender) with all proceeds going towards a new space for art, music, and community. For more information, visit the Red Gate website at http://redgate.at.org

Gentrification doesn’t lower crime, but crime goes down in gentrified communities for two reasons:

1. These areas receive far more police surveillance and monitoring than ever before. The crime does not necessarily end but ends up being contained in so called “trouble spots” in neighborhoods undergoing gentrification.

2. The communities with issues of crime, which the city has neglected to aid appropriately and fund adequately, eventually get pushed out of the city center.

Andrew  Padilla on Gentrification in “El Barrio” (via polumeros)

(via polumeros-deactivated20121030)

How To Train Your Ghetto (advice to a greedy young condo developer)

veryethnic:

Step 3:

If you haven’t already done it, write a cheque to anybody who could possibly have a vote on city council at any point in the next quarter century; individual candidates, political parties—don’t cut corners. The notion that you can give money to the same people who review your proposal is too good to be true. These people come cheap. They’ll rezone historic neighbourhoods for you. They’ll spend tens of millions ripping down viaducts to accommodate your new development.

Nails it.

This is great and totally worth a read.

littleblackmoose:

The long-time tenants of this building just got evicted. Part of a pattern in this city.

UPDATE: Just painted over. Didn’t even last a day. That’s what I get for being critical of city-developer policy.

Please re-blog if you’re not happy with the gentrification of Vancouver. Or if you just like the little ballerinas.

The Olympics and Social Cleansing

thegreatdamfino:

‘The story in each city remains almost identical.  Once selected, a city expends vast amounts of public resource to begin a program of forced displacement, rental speculation, urban renewal projects, demolition of public housing and gentrification. In fact, if there is one thread that runs through almost every Olympic event it is that the poor of each Games subsidise their own violent dispossession.’

Did you know that the Olympics is one of the world’s leading causes of displacement? 

Hey, this all sounds very familiar…