[Wamvan] DTES Groups Outraged that Pantages Owner Calls Neighbourhood a ‘Dead Zone’

[Harsha W.]

http://dtesnotfordevelopers.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/media-release-dtes-outraged-that-pantages-owner%E2%80%99s-calls-neighbourhood-a-%E2%80%98dead-zone/

DTES Outraged that Pantages Owner Calls Neighbourhood a ‘Dead Zone’,
Community Calls Marc Williams ‘Offensive and Ignorant Liar’

July 28, Vancouver Coast Salish Territories – Downtown Eastside residents
are outraged at Pantages site owner and condo developer Marc William’s
recent PR blitz declaring the DTES a “dead zone” with “no activity in the
past 30 years except drug dealing.”

According to Wendy Pederson of the Carnegie Community Action Project “The
DTES is an alive community, people live here. How can Williams get away
with such poor-bashing statements? Williams is lying when he says that no
one will be displaced. Condos displace low income residents by pushing up
land values and rents. Williams knows this and the City of Vancouver knows
this. The City will be violating their own ‘without displacement’ policy
if they allow this development project to proceed.”

“Williams is trying to come across as some philanthropist who will ‘save’
this neighbourhood. In reality, he is erasing the vibrant community of 400
residents who live on the block, the dozens of homeless forced to sleep on
the street right in front of the site where he wants to put up condos, and
the life-saving services and community hubs all within one block,” says
Harsha Walia of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

William has claimed that the condo development will be “affordable” for
artists in the Downtown Eastside. Dalannah Gail Bowen, however finds this
claim ridiculous. “It might be affordable for an artist who makes $70,000
a year – those are not the artists in the Downtown Eastside.  Williams is
trying to co-opt and use DTES artists to legitimize his plan as something
that will supposedly benefit us. As artists, we don’t want condos, we want
social housing and community-driven art spaces for ourselves and our
neighbours.”

Williams, who owns Worthington Properties, bought the Pantages site in the
heart of the Downtown Eastside and is now proposing a condo and commercial
development titled Sequel 138 on the lot. This week, the Sequel 138
proposal was unanimously rejected at the City of Vancouver’s Urban Design
Panel.

Over 40 organizations and 1200 DTES residents have signed a DTES Community
Resolution opposing condos at the old Pantages Theatre site. The
resolution calls on the City to stop the Sequel 138 development permit
application, for Marc Williams to sell his lots to the City at the 2010
assessed value of $3.7 million (not the inflated price of $9 million that
he had posted), for the City to buy the Pantages parcel and designate it
for 100% resident controlled social housing with low-income community
space on the ground floor.

Fraser Stuart, recently homeless and board member of the DTES
Neighbourhood Council, explains his opposition: “We still have hundreds of
homeless people. If social housing were limited to those units renting at
the welfare rate, the addition of this project will mean that market
housing will outpace social housing by an astounding rate of 11 to 1. We
are calling on any potential buyer to boycott this project because it
means low-income community destruction. Buying condos in Sequel 138 is
unethical, do not do it.”

According to Dave Diewert with Streams of Justice: “Dropping market
housing onto this block would be a gentrification bomb in the heart of the
Downtown Eastside, setting off a tidal wave of increased rents, land
speculation, more condo projects, upscale businesses, and enhanced
security and police presence. We have witnessed these impacts on the area
due to Woodward’s, and Sequel 138 will unleash similar forces.”

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Harsha Walia

https://twitter.com/HarshaWalia
https://www.facebook.com/nooneisillegal
http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/author/dtes-power-women-group