Creatives Kicked Out By Vancouver Condo Boom

"The reason for this is that Vancouver's great condo transformation continues unabated, and no corner of our downtown peninsula (or anywhere nearby) is safe from the prevailing urban ideology of hausen uber alles."

"What a strange new city we are making: chock full of boomers preparing retirement nests; hub to global investors transforming their dollars/euros/pesos/yuan/rupiah into condo walls. But as a direct result, we are also shrinking core-area offices and studios, the very spaces where culture is created and where new businesses are grown."

"Vancouverites may regret for a long time the way former planning head Larry Beasley's 'Living First' downtown housing policy guidelines were allowed to morph into a "condos only" downtown development reality. To bring the irony of this situation into focus, just ask the art galleries and artists who were cleared off their Homer Street locale so that Amacon Developments could build a condo complex launched into pre-sales last week, bearing the name 'The Beasley.'"

"The choice of this condo's name seems to me yet more evidence of "Vancouver: the postmodern edition." Find me another city, anywhere, where a developer happily names an apartment tower after the city planner who approved its construction."