Rundown Granville Street redone as a new tech hub? This is something of an old story now, having been featured in The Sun a couple of weeks ago, including this quote from Downtown BIA head Charles Gauthier:
There are more than 20 vacancies “concentrated primarily in the southern three blocks of Granville Street between Smithe and Drake” that could be used to house businesses favoured by the rising contingent of tech workers in the area, Gauthier said in an interview last week.
A twist was put on it by NY Times tech writer David Streitfeld, in this article on March 8th, describing the resentment tolerant San Franciscans were developing for the cashed-up Silicon Valley workers who were outbidding long-time residents for homes.
During the late 1990s dot-com boom, the office parks of Silicon Valley were another world to most San Franciscans, a place somewhere to the south that they needed never go. But increasingly Silicon Valley is rooted in the city itself, which makes it inescapable.
The consequences for people who do not make their living from technology are increasingly unpleasant. The city is bulging at the seams, adding about 10,000 people a year to a record 852,000 in 2014. A one-bedroom apartment goes for a median $3,500 a month, the highest in the nation.
Streitfeld was interviewed on CBC’s On The Coast on March 10th.
The spectre of evictions, which haunts so many American cities, was illustrated in the article, and featured in a wider-ranging essay review in the New York Review of Books by Jason de Parle entitled “Kicked Out in America!” Not so much a problem in Canadian cities, maybe, due to better tenant-protection legislation?
But back to Granville Street and Vancouver tech. There’s a (maybe tenuous) historical synergy between the street and tech, mainly a claim by novelist William Gibson that he had the idea for “cyberspace” and “cyberpunks” while watching people in the Granville Street arcades, leading to his 1984 Neuromancer. The Vancouver Heritage Foundation has wanted to put a plaque somewhere on Granville around Smithe as part of its Places That Matter program, but so far, I believe, has been unable to find a building owner willing to host the plaque.
And Vancouver tech itself has been very different from SF/Silicon Valley with its suburban campuses – tech businesses here have been a positive force in reusing heritage buildings, such as in Gastown and now in Mount Pixel aka Mount Pleasant. The old furniture stores along the south end of Granville near the bridge could adapt very well to those kind of tenants.
Update: this article about zoning, gentrification and San Francisco was linked from Frances Bula’s twitter feed.
The underlying issue is that those blocks of Granville aren’t attractive to young tech workers; they have other places to go. It’s not their goal to clean up the city.
Oxymoronic: tolerant people don’t develop resentment. It’s intolerant.
Moronic: workers “outbidding” long-time residents. It is precisely the long-term residents who are gladly selling at the inflated prices.
Journalism in the modern age; they’re allowed 20 minutes to do research in a topic new to them.
“It is precisely the long-term residents who are gladly selling at the inflated prices.”
Long term residents are not always owners… and what constitutes long-term? 1 year? 5 years? 25 years?
The Tech crowd is has little interest in the city never mind Granville, they’re leaving in droves..
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/national/millennials+fleeing+vancouver+cities+with+more+affordable/11783875/story.html
ironically the one place that has most of the better paying tech jobs for people who would consider moving out of vancouver is the one place where living expenses are even higher.
Author
“Long-time residents” can be long-time renters, eh?
On Mon, Mar 14, 2016 at 1:34 PM, Price Tags wrote:
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