Quote:
Originally Posted by svlt
I just find that so hard to imagine as much as I would wish it. It's been terrible at the street level since I immigrated more than three decades ago and it's only gotten worse. We'd need a wholesale change of government at the very least at the municipal level to even begin putting this area back on track. Aside from fancy restaurants looking for a very gritty neighborhood and cheap rent who'd open up here in a free market?
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Parts of East Hastings are way worse than they used to be. The concentration of poorly housed and homeless using the street as their living room, and the sidewalk is very intimidating to a lot of people. The impact of artificial opioids and other drugs on many of those people has become more obvious, and more tragic in the past few years.
But it may not be a totally lost cause. In 2002 Stan Douglas published 'Every Building on 100 West Hastings'. The buildings, many of them heritage structures, were in rough shape. Many were for sale. More were boarded up than in use. Some were squatted, and many were far short of meeting the fire code. Across the street, Woodwards was boarded up.
Private sector developers bought up and transformed almost every building in the block. Businesses have come and gone; some have been victim to bad location choices (the short-lived baby store seemed very out of place), and more recently to covid and changed eating out habits (Noodlebox, for example), but many have survived, and other are moving in.
Woodwards totally transformed the north side, adding the western office of the National Film Board, City employees, a drug store, a supermarket and SFU, as well as hundreds of apartments including 200 non-market units. Further up the street the derelict Ormidale Block was totally rebuilt behind the facade, and has office space and a Kafka's coffee shop.
The Flack Block beyond it had been in a bad state, with stonework hacked off and stucco patches when Salient Group completely renovated it.
To the east on the unit block there's a huge new market, non-market and health centre building being developed on land that Concord owned, and held vacant for many years. It's opposite the Army and Navy where the Cohen family are teaming up with Bosa to develop a rental project on both Hastings and Cordova. Next door the Beacon Hotel has been transformed by BC Housing, and to the east the North Star Rooms, closed for repeated code violations in 1999, and where the back of the buiilding collapsed a few years ago, has been totally rebuilt and reopened by Solterra.
At Pigeon Park to the east Millennium have completed an comprehensive restoration of the Merchant's Bank as office space, and just completed a market rental building next door with some excellent architecture. (It even has curved glazing).
Anthem own the former BC Hydro building across the street, and the retail space where the streetcars used to run into the building is a lighting showroom.
The congregation of 'street users' generally starts at Pigeon Park, and runs for two blocks to Main, and sometimes spills eastwards to Gore. There are two new projects redeveloping old, tired non-market hotels into new non-market housing, and there are two more being developed for the east corners of Gore and Hastings. Those two or three blocks are really what make the difference to the statistics - a lot of closed or boarded store fronts, a handful of dodgy convenience stores, and a few social service centres and offices (Work BC, the Muslim Foodbank, the Salvation Army drop-in, and Insite. That's the block where the Balmoral will be redeveloped, possibly with a private sector partner like Wall Financial.
The activity and the dereliction used to stretch further, and has been concentrated as blocks like the 100 block of West Hastings have 'gentrified' (or normalized). It's not inevitable that the situation will get worse, and there are new developments and initiatives that might make it better. (There's another thread where that's 'debated'). It seems a better idea to have retail / office spaces that could come back to life, like the 100 block of West Hastings, than take a depressive view and condemn it to purgatory (like unwanted parking space).
[images are mine except Stan Douglas on
Gabrielle Moser's blog]
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