Vancouver March for Housing, April 2009 (photograph by Elvin Wyly) The Vancouver (Revanchist) Special Martin Kozinsky [email protected] Geography 350, Fall 2012 The Vancouver (Revanchist ) Special* * 1 proven to rhetorically produce class marginalization. The Revanchist City: In The New Urban Frontier , Neil Smith coined the term ‘revanchist city’ to explain the uncomfortable duality between different societal groups and the physical manifestation of prejudice within the modern city. It is the emotional and revengeful response by the upper-middle and ruling class to the feeling of helplessness and loss of control when clashing with the “teeming masses” embodied by 2 identifiable racial, criminal, gender, or class groups. Smith argues that the cleanup of New York’s homelessness in the 1980s exemplifies how the city avoids addressing the root issue of homelessness by creating policies of displacement. In an effort to take back parks, subway stations, and other public spaces 3 for the upper classes, the city criminalized squatting, panhandling, and other deviant activities. The root issues are intentionally obscured by the spatial manifestation of undesirable persons, such as squatters, and the resulting political discourse . Smith suggests that this strategy is also part of a broader trend of 4 “increasingly market-determined public policy” as the economy influences political decisions. These legislative changes exemplify how the revanchist city uses social and political rhetoric to villainize a particular group, described as “physical, legal and rhetorical campaigns against scapegoats, identified in terms of class, race, gender, nationality, sexual preference, this reaction scripts everyday life, political 5 administration and media representations of the contemporary US city with increasing intensity.” Smith argues that the revanchist city is a useful lens through which to understand why a city alienates its minorities in the name of taking back the city and further its market-oriented goals. While not explicitly 1 This title plays with the term Vancouver Special; drawing a parallel from the ubiquitous, generic housing designs that shaped much of Metropolitan Vancouver’s development throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s, to what I will argue has become Vancouver’s new plan for housing that systematically marginalizes lower class individuals. 2 Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. (London: Routledge, 1996), 212. 3 Smith (1996), 224. 4 Neil Smith, “Social Justice and the New American Urbanism: the Revanchist City,” The Urbanization of Injustice (New York University Press, 1997), 117. 5 Smith (1996), 227. Martin Kozinsky Page 2 of 10 engaged by Smith’s book, I believe social housing can also illustrate the manifestations of the revanchist city in Vancouver. Vancouver, British Columbia looks to its progressive social housing as a source of pride since the creation of False Creek South in the 1970s, which is considered to be a very successful experiment in mixed- 6 use housing. Because of its success, the city has provided incentives for developers to reproduce this concept through the building of public amenities and social housing. These incentives usually come in the form of rezoning property to allow for taller and denser development which shifts the potential ground 7 rent value above the capitalized ground rent value. This discrepancy represents massive gains in the redevelopment of land and helps us to visualize the motives behind why the city conducts itself in terms of social support policy. On the one hand, social housing has been the cornerstone of municipal political campaigns; for example, “Mayor [Gregor] Robertson has made affordable housing a top priority, with an aggressive, ten-year plan to provide thousands of affordable housing units for Vancouverites of all ages, 8 while ensuring that existing affordable housing is protected.” However, I would argue that the city employs a ‘Newspeak’ social policy which Jean Swanson describes as a revanchist tool to discriminate against social housing. Swanson borrows the term Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984 and uses it to describe the use of rhetoric, employed by political talking heads, to negatively manipulate the public’s 9 perception of individuals on welfare, a process she often terms ‘poor bashing.’ Considering Swanson’s argument in conjunction with potential capital to be gained in redevelopment, I believe one can understand the manifestation of Vancouver’s revanchist attitude towards social housing. I will argue that policy decisions made by the City of Vancouver have favored developers and led to the victimization and 6 See Mark Kear, “Spaces of Transition Spaces of Tomorrow: Making a Sustainable Future in Southeast False Creek, Vancouver, Cities 24(4) (2007), 328-329; See Thomas M Thomson, The Death and Life of the Little Mountain Housing Project: BC’s First Public Housing Community. (M.A. dissertation, University of British Columbia, 2010), 41-43, 171. 7 See a discussion of rent-gap theory in Loretta Lees, T. Slater, E. Wyly, Gentrification . (New York: Routledge, 2007), 53. 8 “Mayor Gregor Robertson,” City of Vancouver, http://vancouver.ca/your-government/mayor-gregor-robertson.aspx (July 2012). 9 Jean Swanson, Poor Bashing (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2001), 71-104, 192. Martin Kozinsky Page 3 of 10 dislocation of lower class groups and have chosen the following three distinct examples of Woodward’s, Little Mountain, and the Olympic Village to illustrate my argument. Woodward’s: After the closure of Woodward’s Department Store in 1993, it became a symbol of the decay taking 10 place in the Downtown Eastside (DTES). Activists claimed the space for a political squat, in what was soon dubbed Woodsquat, to protest the rampant gentrification, lack of affordable housing, and subsequent 11 dislocation of vulnerable individuals. This instigated interplay between the protestor’s demands for affordable housing and the city’s market-oriented housing goals that David Ley and Cory Dobson summarized as the “central role of public policy reacting to neighbourhood activism as well as the market 12 in setting the terms of reference.” Woodsquat became a prevalent obstacle to the city’s neoliberal market-focused development, especially while the city was in the midst of bidding on the 2010 Olympic 13 Games, and was shut down after 3 months under the pretence that it was a public safety issue. The squat had claimed Woodward’s and the city was uncomfortable with it; uprooting the squat can be understood as 14 the city`s attempt to regain control while undercutting the leverage gained by the protestors. By further justifying its actions with words such as ‘public safety’, or as former city councilman Jim Green stated, “[the squat] has been a difficult thing for our community … [and] for some of the merchants in the community,” 15 the city engages in poor-bashing the protesters. Despite the action taken against the squatters, the city’s revanchist attitude continued throughout Woodward’s redevelopment. The land was sold to developer Henriquez Partners and rezoned from the surrounding Downtown District (DD) to Comprehensive Development District (CD-1) “to facilitate the proposed large and complex 10 Comprising largely of individuals on welfare. 11 See Nicholas Blomley, Unsettling the City , (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20, 38-41; See Noah Quastel, “Legal Strategies at the Woodwards Squat: Liberal Rights and Social Wrongs”, West Coast Line 37(3) (Winter 2004) : 208-220. 12 David Ley and Cory Dobson, “Are There Limits to Gentrification? The Contexts of Impeded Gentrification in Vancouver,” Urban Studies 45 (2008), 2486. 13 Blomley (2004), 30, 42-44, 84. 14 For the significant of property ownership and squatting see Blomley (2004), 20, 39-41. 15 Quote from Emily Yearwood-Lee, “Woodward’s Squatters in Vancouver Pack up Belongings,” The Canadian Press , December 14, 2002. Martin Kozinsky Page 4 of 10 16 mixed-use development,” of which 400 units was mandated social housing. The new building was to address the concerns about gentrification by creating an inclusive space, filled with public amenities, to 17 juxtapose the DTES “gritty factor.” However, the reality of the project proved to be rife with deceitful rhetoric by politicians and the developer in an effort to marginalize the low class tenants to further their market interests. Nicholas Blomley describes the gentrification occurring in the DTES as a “class-based revanchism” and “public-private partnership” aimed to “abolish or weaken social transfer programs while actively 18 fostering the inclusion of the poor and marginalized into a labor market, on the market’s term’s.” Indeed the market’s terms were felt as threats made by the developer to cut the units of social housing; they 19 stated that “with construction costs still rising the provincial funds set aside might build only 80 units.” These threats enabled the developer to increase the height of the main structure and to include an additional condo tower of private-market housing, a fact that didn’t escape the notice of Swanson who explains: “at the last minute developers put in two condo towers … they said the rich needed to be there in 20 order to make the project pay.” Despite the liberties taken by the developer, the promised 400 units of social housing shrank by half, creating a stark contrast to the market units as the non-market units became a continually smaller proportion. However, the marginalization continued as it became