Restaurants aren’t the cause of gentrification, they’re a symptom

By Rachel Braeuer
Photos by Jonathan Dry

Gentrification talk is hard. On one side, the people getting put down are more often than not small business owners. It’s hard for me to want to tell them to take a hike when a Cara-owned big box could just as easily have gone up where their restaurant now resides. It’s not my intention to argue that DTES residents should let their communities go gentle into that good night; I think they should rage against the dying of the light. But protesting small businesses is hardly the way to go about this.

Gentrification is not limited to the DTES. When looking for an apartment in the Mount Pleasant area two years ago, one of the ads on Craigslist explicitly said “NEWLY GENTRIFIED MAIN STREET AREA. CLOSE TO AMENITIES!” It wasn’t that long ago that a person could find a relatively affordable place to live in the Mount Pleasant area and enjoy the sense of community there, too. Luckily for the area, there seem to have been enough people with enough pull (aka people with BFAs) to maintain some of that, but the Tim Hortons at the corner of Main and Broadway serve as a kind of flagship to the area’s eventual gentrification.

But what about Surrey? Yes, I know, Surrey is gross. Surrey is poor. Surrey is full of people wearing Affliction shirts and pyjama bottoms in public (if Walmart can be considered public). Does that absolve everyone from caring about the gentrification going on there?

The coldness (and I contend this goes beyond apathy) shown towards the homeless and poor in Surrey is appalling. A woman was found beaten beyond recognition in December. Two weeks ago she succumbed to the injuries she sustained in her attack. This happened just three blocks away from SFU’s Surrey campus. Where were the protests and candlelight vigils for Janice Shore?

Admittedly, Shore lived a “high risk lifestyle” which apparently excuses her life ending like a scene from a Tarantino movie. Regardless, she was still a member of the community in which SFU decided to locate one of its satellite campuses, turning notorious “Whalley Ring Road” into “University Drive” which soon became populated with condos that investors scooped up on the cheap and are now renting out at $800 — more than their mortgage payments — for a cut-and-paste bachelor. There have been, however, no swank new restaurants opening up.

SFU can fairly escape blame for Surrey Central’s gentrification, despite knowingly moving into the heart of Whalley’s ghetto. Mayor Dianne Watts’ gentrification-centred political platform is slowly becoming reality. The people of Surrey have elected Watts by a landslide twice now, and she has been transparent about her intentions (albeit phrased as “revitalization,” but tomayto tomahto).

However, in the DTES there is really no justification. Keeping a W on top of a building that houses space for the arts doesn’t make up for altering the fabric of a community, thereby bringing in the kind of people who would pay $20.00+ per plate at the insensitively named Pidgin, located walking distance from their new faux-loft condo built behind the heritage-building facade that covers the first three floors.

Couture restaurants don’t just pop up in the poorest postal code in Canada for shits and giggles; they follow the sound of jangling change in yuppies’ chinos. While endeavours like Save-On-Meats’s meal token program are at best patronizing kindness and at worst an offensive affront to harm reduction, they’re still an attempt by small businesses to give back to the community they reside in, however misguided they may be. This is more than can be said for the big names that seem to have moved into the DTES without a visit from the GTFO wagon that smaller names have experienced.

The who and the why are interconnected when it comes to questions of gentrification, and while many elements are at play, unless activists are addressing the key backers instead of the peons on the front lines, not much is going to change.