Real estate boom hits notorious Vancouver area

Until two months ago, Nick Bahrami's Downtown Eastside building was home to some of Vancouver's poorest people.

It now has a for sale sign on it. Mr. Bahrami is asking $2.5-million -- five times what he paid three years ago -- and he claims he has five bidders waiting to make him an offer close to that price.

On the same block, a former department store and two other lots are also for sale, with offers starting to come in at double what land in the area went for two years ago, says CB Richard Ellis agent David Ho.

That's just some of the change coming to the city's infamous Downtown Eastside, which has been plagued for years by homelessness, crime and serious drug abuse.

And it's underway thanks to pre-Olympics fever, pressure to expand the downtown, and the success of the city-plus-private-developer planned Woodward's project -- which incorporates 200 units of social housing, space for a daycare and community groups, along with market housing units.

Those units sold out in a day last month for prices higher than some condos in tony Yaletown.

The city has dozens of development applications in for the Downtown Eastside, Chinatown and Gastown areas and many inquiries. At the same time, the fate of a half-dozen rooming houses and hotels is unknown, as landlords have decided it might be easier to sell than deal with police, fire and city inspections.

That has landowners and realtors gleeful, neighbourhood advocates anxious, and municipal staff and councillors trying to figure out what the city should and can do.

Jim Green, the former city councillor who fought the gentrification that hit the Downtown Eastside before Expo 86, says the city faces two different futures for this longtime embattled neighbourhood, depending on what its leaders decide to do.

"The negative one would be similar to what happened with Expo. The other option that could be very different is co-development, where the city and the developers work together," says Mr. Green, who has been working as a consultant to developers and community groups since he lost his bid to be mayor.

Some new Non-Partisan Association councillors agree the city is facing a tectonic plate shift in the Downtown Eastside.

"This is a real challenge and a worry," says Councillor Suzanne Anton, who added NPA councillors are committed to the homelessness action plan brought in by the previous council, which called for the city to create 800 units of social housing a year that would include the purchase of one or two hotels from the old residential-hotel stock.

At the moment, however, there is no money in the pipeline from the federal or provincial government. And there are no immediate plans for any city purchases.

As well, several forces in recent months have converged to produce potentially the highest number of housing-unit losses the city has seen in several years.

Police have put pressure on the worst of the Downtown Eastside hotels. The fire department has also become more aggressive, with the result that the tenants of Mr. Bahrami's Burns Block building were given an hour to move out March 30 after fire officials said the building was unsafe and the owner appeared unwilling to do repairs.

In previous decades, the city used those kinds of inspections and closures to bargain with owners for improvements.

That has changed now, say observers.

Mr. Bahrami, a West Vancouver resident who bought the Burns Block in 2003 for $550,000, says he thinks the police and city want to clear out the old hotels.

Police and fire spokesmen say they're just doing what they've always done, although perhaps a little more frequently in an effort to pull up standards in the worst buildings.

But a lawyer acting as an advocate for displaced tenants says he is seeing a fundamental shift.

"Previously, the landlords would want to do anything to keep the tenants in for the cash flow," says David Eby, a lawyer with the PIVOT Legal Society. "Now, the buildings are more valuable to them with no tenants."

prepared by Frances Bula/National Post)