Hitting Gold on Vancouver’s Skid Row
August 19th, 2008 Categories: Downtown, Vancouver Housing Market, Vancouver Real Estate
Maclean’s recently published this article on the most notorious slum in Canada getting a millionaire makeover - Vancouver’s Skid Row in Downtown Eastside.
The Pacific Hotel on Main Street is coming down. Next door Ginger the new condo building is selling for as high as $900,000. The unthinkable is happening….Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is quietly disappearing. The sold signs are everywhere - most along Hastings Street, ground zero of the city’s drug and homelessness crises.
In the past 24 months hundreds of lots have changed hands as developers and speculators snap up deeds to the Vancouver’s so-called final frontier. And some of Vancouver’s biggest players have bought in, including Holborn, the group behind the $500 million Residences at Ritz-Carlton: Westbank Projects, developers of the Shangri-La, the city’s tallest tower and Macdonald Development Corp, which hopes to erect the Downtown Eastside’s first high rise. Concord Pacific is building a glass tower along Hasting’s seediest stretch. Then there’s Salt, a chic charcuterie in Blood Alley.
Yep, there’s gold in them tar blighted alleys!
The neighbourhood turned the corner in 2003 when a resolution to the Woodwards Building was reached. When completed in 2009, the $350 million redevelopment will stack 536 market condos atop 200 units of social housing, making it the most radically inclusive project in city history. The million square foot complex will house a grocery store, a gym, London Drugs, the local office of the National Film Board, and SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts and the TD Bank - the first bank to move into the hood in years.
The Woodwards project unleashed a wave of gentrification. This spring hundreds of low income tenants were evicted as landlords cashed in on the boom. One fifth of the hood’s low rent residential hotels have been sold. What’s to become of the residents? Some are going east, but they wont disappear completely. There remains 10,000 units of low income housing, plus some 200 social service agencies within the 10 blocks that make up skid row.
Do you know skid row originally referred to the path that loggers used to skid logs to the mill and the term may have originated in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside?
Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside will never be another Yaletown but then, says Bob Rennie “no-one wants another Yaletown.”
What do you think? Will everyone be able to co-exist amicably? Have you bought into the hood, or would you? And why?As an investment or would you move in? Leave a comment.
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