University lecturer and writer Matt Hern is the founder of the popular Car-Free Vancouver Day, which turns busy streets into pedestrian street festivals. He is an outspoken community activist, particularly concerning the increasingly high price of property in his long-time neighbourhood of Commercial Drive. He holds a PhD in urban studies, and he's written three books, including his latest, The book examines Mr. Hern's belief in cities as a good, necessary way of sustainable living, but re-imagined as places where change is guided at a grass-roots level rather than merely nudged along by market forces. Reporter spoke to Mr. Hern about the importance of affordable housing
As a city, how far behind are we in affordable housing or social housing stock?
I would say it's across the board - that whole range from totally assisted housing for the hard-to-house people right up to middle-income affordable housing. The rental market is the real problem. When you cut out one layer of that, you cut out affordable housing for families. And they push everybody else down the scale.
Are we turning into a resort town where you have rich people living alongside the worker bees?
It's a phenomenon called "global city." There's the theory that suggests when you get this agglomeration of very high-income earners, what they attract is low-income earners. Because when you look at the way people migrate around the world, the people who really migrate are the rich people at the top end who can move around a lot, and the really low-income, desperate people will go everywhere. Think about downtown Vancouver. As more and more high-end condos move in there, you get top-echelon earners. And those high-income earners require low-income earners, they need people to serve them coffee and clean their houses. So you have these two types of people together. But the people between those two echelons get peripheralized. The middle-class didn't go away, they just got pushed out further.
So what happens when you've got a lot of wealthy people and working-class people living in the same area?
A lot of security guards - that's an explosive area of the economy. The ratio of public safety employees to private in Canada used to be about two to one. Now it's about four to one, reversed.
I'm guessing if you are a low-income person living among the wealthy, you can't afford the accommodation so you're commuting to other areas a lot. Right?
Probably. So that's the collapse of low-income housing. You get this thing where low-income people in apartment blocks are easily displaced if someone wants to speculate on their property. The American Hotel for example. [The single-room hotel in the Downtown Eastside has been renovated and there is concern that rents will increase]
You can make profits. As Bob Rennie says, there's nowhere for downtown to move but east. All of a sudden, it becomes gentrified.
But gentrification is not pleasant for anybody, whatever the income. The charm disappears when the stores become generic and the prices too high. So is it always a class issue?
No, it just sucks. It's the homogenization of the working world. But why is it assumed, "Well, that's just life"? To me, the thing built into Vancouverism - as in the Larry Beasley model of Vancouverism - is the belief that, "Well, that's just the world. Everybody is after profit. There's nothing we can do about it." Why? Why is that assumed? It's not natural law that people are always going to be greedy and look for the profit motive, and the market always wins. Those are human creations. We can resist them.
Kerry Gold