Years ago, one Vancouver post and beam house was scouted for a major music network as their “1970’s Clubhouse”. Unfortunately the house’s upgrades determined its ineligibility, but there were several other houses in the neighbourhood that were good candidates. Kerry Gold in the Globe and Mail notes another example of how tight the housing market is-evident in that film location scouts are finding it hard to find old buildings that can reflect “middle class” America in films. This is seen as a “byproduct of Vancouver’s empty-home crisis and the freak show that is the region’s real estate market… as historic buildings get demolished in favour of the generic and new, the city’s “look” is becoming a lot more homogeneous.”
“Trying to find older locations is becoming more and more difficult,” said (location scout) Mr. Hogarth. “What I’ve been noticing is that the buildings that we would go to are now being redeveloped and turned into condominiums, and we are losing locations that we have frequently gone to in the past. We are having to look further and further outside Vancouver for good locations, both residential and commercial.”
The generic housing along Cambie Street, retail on Main Street, redeveloping Chinatown and the demise of the Ridge Theatre were mentioned as great location losses. In an industry that provides over 25,000 jobs, the loss of locations means that productions move out-of-town or in some cases out of country. As old craftsman style houses disappear the “look and feel” of an American city is also lost, and the new housing stock is not suitable for location shots.
“It’s definitely changing, the demographic is changing and a lot of the houses like those upper-middle-class houses in the Kerrisdale and Dunbar area are being sold and redeveloped. And quite frankly, the houses that have been redeveloped or torn down and rebuilt, they all look the same. They are identical. You can get 10 or 12 of them and they all look the same. They are spacious on the inside, but don’t have any quality architecturally that make them stand out from one or the other.”
Perhaps most unsettling is that while this location scout was born and raised in this city, he sees and experiences the paradox- he door knocks homes on Vancouver’s west side to ask about filming. Even though there is a huge affordability housing crisis,”on the west side of the city, these houses are often empty-and no one is home. On Drummond Drive, in Point Grey, I can think of six places off the top of my head that are just sitting empty.”
Yes. Vancouver has become soulless and it will likely harm the city’s film industry. But when you’re hooked on real estate that’s what happens, real estate becomes everything. I am happy to have moved to Montreal. Like Toronto, as a “city” with neighbourhoods, it trounces Vancouver, which is beginning to take on the aesthetic characteristics of a Houston suburb. Vancouver just increasingly doesn’t feel interesting or urban.
So…. we should not only pay the film industry $500M/year in subsidies in the form of tax credits, but we should also cordon off 80% of the city for potential sets and force everyone who can’t afford to live there to squeeze into the edges where journalists will make fun of the only housing they can afford for not being nice enough for the refined eyes of the 1% to gaze upon?
LOL, right, because those new limestone clad “palaces” replacing our character homes are soooo affordable.
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Reblogged this on Sandy James Planner.
So, Kerry Gold is moving on from crusader journalism on affordability (with few realistic solutions and a dismissive attitude toward land use, I might add) to being an architecture critic?
Hmmm.
English Arts and Crafts and American Craftsman design lasted less than a generation here. On the other hand, Vancouver has an outstanding pre-WWI legacy of Edwardian residential architecture. Their 12:12 pitch sawtooth roof profiles are as much a part of Vancouver as the PNE and mountains. They can be found side-by-side, block-by-block in many older neighbourhoods. Is that too working class for the producers? Perhaps it’s time to develop a stronger Canadian film industry with all those tax credits.
American residential (read: suburban) architecture is non-architecture and can be found anywhere in the suburbs in the Western world.
I don’t believe they were singling out Arts & Crafts as being the only style worth saving Alex. Rather those are the homes most in danger of disappearing, since they were generally smaller than the Edwardians before them. Add in the fact the Edwardians tended to survive in greater numbers on the East Side which was until recently more immune to the demolition plague.
An example would be the “Hobbit House on W.King Ed which was until recently flanked by sympathetic homes and would make a cohesive location. Now its abutted by ultramodern townhomes and is pretty much ruined as a location (BTW, if the CRA is listening, several of which we promptly flipped after construction). Or the mansion on the Shannon Estate which was until recently one building, but has now been stratified and lost as a location thanks to that and unsympathetic overbuilding on the property.
What is more “unsympathetic” than to call someone else’s home “unsympathetic” or “overbuilt”? Especially when that someone couldn’t have afforded the single family home that was there before?
I agree that the Eastside hasn’t been beset with the same level of angst as the Westside. That only emphasizes the media’s unhealthy, focused attention on the moneyed parts of Vancouver while practically ignoring the rest of the metropolis.