As I understand it, a $17-plate of beef tongue and cheek,
with a side of broccoli pistou and mustard now qualifies as a social
crime, if not a culinary one.
I have no idea what pistou is, but I
know pissed off when I hear it, and that, according to media reports,
is the mood of protesters who have, of late, been demonstrating in front
of a Downtown Eastside eatery with the excruciatingly hip name of
Pidgin, where the above victuals are offered. The restaurant’s name is a
play on birds. It’s across the street from Pigeon Park.
The
protest is about turf. The demonstrators, identified as, ahem,
anti-poverty activists, object to Pidgin’s presence in their
neighbourhood.
Their beef, served up without tongue in cheek, is
not just with Pidgin but with the flotsam that chi-chi establishments
like it bring in their wake, namely gentrifiers, slumming hipsters and
insufferably knowledgeable foodies whose cuisine is so haute they don’t
have to Google “pistou” to discover what it is.
The protesters, it should be said, have every right to protest, within the limits of the law.
Nor
are they setting any kind of precedent in doing so. NIMBYists in plenty
of the city’s neighbourhoods have howled about changes they feel have
threatened their way of life, and the protesters in front of Pidgin are
no different from any other group of NIMBYists. They’re just poorer.
As for the fatuousness of their protest — which I will get to in a moment — they have no monopoly on that, either.
Several
years ago, I covered a meeting in a church where residents of Dunbar
had come to discuss the establishment of a supportive housing project
for the homeless and addicted. Dunbar, at the time, was unique among the
city’s neighbourhoods in that it had no social housing of any kind.
That the meeting was held in a house of the Lord did not stop many that
night from uttering some of the most uncharitable and uninformed
comments I have ever had the misfortune to hear. They, too, were
NIMBYists, just richer ones. To the neighbourhood’s credit, better souls
prevailed. Dunbar now has its first social housing complex.
In
stark contrast, the Downtown Eastside has 84 social and supportive
complexes offering subsidized housing to a wide range of disadvantaged
tenants. The adjacent neighbourhoods of Strathcona and the Downtown have
31 and 35 such developments, respectively.
That adds up to 150
social and supportive housing complexes within the core of the
second-most expensive city in the world. The large number of that type
of housing in so small and costly an area is miraculous, and speaks to
the enlightened and extremely costly approach the city and provincial
governments have taken to house the disadvantaged. Anyone who believes
otherwise, or that this sizable stock of subsidized housing is in danger
of disappearing any time soon because of gentrification, is a fool.
The
fact is, the opposite has been happening. According to a City of
Vancouver study, the stock of low-income singles housing in the downtown
core has increased in the last 20 years, to 12,126 units in 2013 from
11,371 units in 1993.
During that 20-year period, the greatest
growth in those units has been in non-market government subsidized stock
— now at 7,642 units — while the privately-owned low-income stock has
fallen dramatically — to 4,484 units.
So while there may be
gentrification going on in the Downtown Eastside, governments have
interceded to keep the stock of low-income units growing. These
governments have done this by requiring new private developments to
supply a percentage of low-rental housing, such as in the Woodward’s
Building, or by buying privately-owned SRO hotels and renovating them.
By
all accounts, the management of Pidgin has acted with admirable
restraint through all this. They’ve hired local people and tried to keep
the lines of communication open with the protesters. The restaurant
deserves to thrive.
(And business, one of the restaurant’s co-owners told me Wednesday, was “fantastic.”)
But
this issue isn’t about business, it’s about ambience. The protesters —
if indeed they’re truly representative of local sentiment — want a
neighbourhood they can be comfortable walking around in. And
notwithstanding the childishness of their protest (like shining
flashlights into patrons’ eyes), that sentiment deserves some respect,
however one might disagree with it.
But neighbourhoods, like
menus, change. And as tough a meal as this may be for the protesters to
swallow, they better develop a taste for it. It’s more than just pistou
that Pidgin and its ilk are bringing to the Downtown Eastside.
pmcmartin@vancouversun.com
