Pancakes Not Pipelines Draws a Large Crowd

Beginning in the AM, a crowd of over 500 showed up to an event organized by Skwomesh Action, at Chief Joe Mattias Centre in the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh territories (so called West Vancouver).

Do We Look Dense?

Some notes on space in Lynn Valley

Why Density?

When I was a child living in the centre of Lynn Valley (from the late eighties to the early nineties), it had a slightly different feel.

Like any child I hated going to bed early, and I have distinct memories of being really bored in my bed staring up out the window at the red blinking lights of the antennas on Mount Seymour.

Either by myself or with my brother, I would often hop the wooden fence from our complex to the next, on the way to school or to play with the kids on the other side. I remember the small slide attached to a four foot high stump we had fun taking turns on. I remember when my mom had the money, sprinting barefoot to catch the ice cream truck at Whiteley Court in the summer.

While certainly a suburban area it also had a semi-urban quality in that you could walk to do just about anything you needed to do. Most people in my area lived in townhouses and apartments, and it confused me as a child that most of my school friends often lived in single family houses with yards.

Fast forward to today, and there is no way that a child would be able to see out that window past the next building as the old building which was rental and housed many working poor and immigrant families, has been torn down (including the slide) and replaced with middle class condos, one or two stories taller. The children presently living in the complex do not ever cross the fence to play with the condo kids, as there really doesn’t seem to be many places over there that they could possibly play, even if they wanted to, not to mention that you don’t really see children over there anyway!

Central to the discourse around the towers proposed to be built at the mall, and the “Official Community Plan” put forward by the developers and the politicians, is the word density.

What is density? What does it look like? Who does it benefit? Why the morality about it, as if whoever came up against it were either childish or compromising some kind of long established community value? Hasn’t it already been dense for a while? What is going to need to go, in order for it to be “more dense”?

Towering Resistance

The Prospects of Towers and Resistance in Lynn Valley and North Vancouver

What is Gentrification?

The term gentrification was first coined in the 1960’s by English sociologist Ruth Glass to describe the displacement of working class residents in London by middle class property buyers (“gentry”). Since then it has moved all over the world taking many different forms. When it has occurred in larger cities it usually results in increased racial profiling of a neighbourhood’s residents as real estate speculators and their associated community groups use the police to secure investments. Nowadays it serves a major purpose within local capitalist economies in the west. As we see here in Lynn Valley and more broadly in the Lower Mainland, it is no longer only an urban phenomenon. It has reached the suburbs, and in a place like “British Columbia”, where tourism is the next major industry after resource extraction, it can even take a rural form. In places like the Gulf Islands, where working class people have historically gone because they are more independent there, where land and rent were extremely cheap, residents are now being forced to move by wealthier summer homesteaders.