my house got demolished for a million dollar condo
my house got demolished for a million dollar condo
I don’t slow when I see it — that is, the absence of it. gutted out like wisdom teeth, where I once live in a fairytale house, robins egg blue, now is an abysmal gaping wound. it tremors and pulsates, stray wire branching like veins, a metal-suspended skeleton, a canyon of raw earth. in my optimism, I imagine my house was strung to a thousand balloons, gingerly coerced off its frame for a new adventure like in the Pixar movie, Up.
glass windows, metal panels, and manicured green lawn: these glossy condo-lined streets are ubiquitous in ‘vancouver’. overturning old single-family homes for multi-storey condos, call it ‘meeting the need for more housing’, but i’ll call it for what it is: gentrification generification gentrification!
let me take you back.
when I was 19 and deep in my rabbit hole of my depression, i moved into a home in riley park at 157 west king edward avenue to attend my second year of university. it was late into august and a few days prior, our previous landlord had suddenly dropped us from our original rental agreement out of nowhere. we were scrambling to find a home in time for the beginning of the semester.
the sky was a tender violet by the time we saw our fifth and final house viewing, exhausted from a day of acting as well-manner young tenants. when we entered, the floorboards creaked beneath our weight. empty and desolate, inside, edwardian-style archways and a worn, wooden stairwell that echoed like the set of a horror film. i was convinced it was haunted. but back then, i still slept with a nightlight on.
i took the ground floor room facing king edward avenue. at night, i could feel the rumble of cars speeding by: as if the foundations of the house were hollowed out: held together by weathered, rotting wooden beams devoured by the silverfish that burst like fireworks when i discovered them hiding in the closet or in the bathroom at midnight.
after long hours from monotonous lectures, i’d catch the 25 home and stare out the window listening to The Internet and recite house numbers that wizzed by, caffeine-high, legs jittering with excited anticipation to finally go home. the best days were in the late winter when the air was cold and sharp, my socks soaked through from the downpour, our blue house glow with a warm orange light from within like a candle, flickering bodies alive inside, laughing, gathering, coexisting. A would emerge from his room, his eyes puffy from sleeping, sparkling with a childish delight to see me. we’d sing Beatles covers on my guitar and take midnight walks to 24/7 connivence stores on Main St because we could. R and A bickered like siblings — we all did, feel a sort of comfort to say whatever wanted to, because we lived like we were family. grocery runs, hanging at the doorframes of each others room, a continuous turnover of our friends coming in and out of the house, in and out, in and out.
in 2021, my house sold for $4,000,000 to the City of Vancouver as part of the Cambie Corridor Plan. the plan seeks to build low-rise townhouses in surrounding areas of the Canada Line skytrain stops spanning from King Edward Station to Marine Dr Station. the development is named King & Columbia and it proposes “30 modern brownstone [buildings] in Vancouver’s Upper West Side”.
I have never in my life ever heard anyone refer to Riley Park as “Vancouver’s Upper West Side”.
like all other building proposals in Vancouver, the Cambie Corridor plan acknowledges the need for affordable and low-income housing. in fact, the development proposal states that it’s one of it’s seven key principles: ‘to provide a range of housing choices and affordability’. homes at King & Columbia are currently for sale on the market, with homes ranging from $849,000 to $2,599,000.
this is the absurdity of colonization: demolishing what pre-exists and rebuilding in service of the agenda of exclusion and elitism. separating the rich from the poor, creating financial inaccessibility to those whom it most greatly harms: houseless, seniors, low-income, and IBPOC people.
income-driven segregation does not end when you demolish one home and build four on top of it. the lowest priced home for King & Columbia starts at $849,000 remains far-out of reach for many working families. new development homes are simply not affordable. just shy of a million dollars for a one bedroom home is not affordable.
with the continuously widening financial disparity–it feels like we’re yelling across canyons.
I think of land and how harmful it must feel to be built on and demolished over and over again. to be stolen, and abused and used for greed, to give and feed and nourish with no reciprocity. the answers are and always have been in the hands of indigenous people, the original caretakers of this land.
land is power. land, in the hands of real estate developers, epitomizes the contentions of governments misuse of stolen traditional land that indigenous people have been fighting since before 1867.
in the doorframe to the dining room slathered thick with white paint were once markers of being. names splattered up and down next to a little dash, the people who had lived here before us had measured their heights on the doorframe. the shortest one just a few inches off the ground (we presumed a dog or cat). we carved our names down too, even threw parties with a sharpie taped to the wall so that our friends could measure themselves. it seemed like everyone we loved and knew had made a mark in that house.
but such is the cycle of life for our land, isn’t it? to be loved, then stolen, then exploited, then sold, demolished to a heap of rubble, a hole in the ground, and then, turned into a million dollar condo.
references/