VANCOUVER - The Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council brought out brushes and breakfast today to the once majestic Pantages Theatre. The shell of the historic building on East Hastings is rumoured to be joining its neighbours - which are being demolished.

The DNC says it fears the developer owner will use the massive site for condos in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. The owner tried to sell the property to the City but was turned down by the Vision Council. The DNC named the site as one of 10 the City should buy for social housing.

According to the DNC:

"We put the Pantages Theatre on our list for 100-per-cent social housing because:

1) Condos at Pantages would be a gentrification bomb in the heart of the DTES

 We DTES residents often feel like we live on a chessboard in a game of real estate development. The Woodward's development sparked a front of gentrification in the western part of the DTES and gave a burst of confidence to developers that they could make a lot of money by building along Hastings from Cambie. The ripple effects of their gentrification drive there has crept along Hastings and Cordova in the form of hip restaurants and fancy boutiques that have displaced low-income serving stores. City Hall's recent passage of heights increases in Chinatown has opened a front in our struggle against gentrification to the south. The 100 Block of East Hastings is a symbolically important area in the fight for our community and we have to do everything we can to keep it as a low-income friendly area that is free of condos and yuppies. We suspect that's why the city refused to buy the Pantages site when it was offered to them; they think market condos at Pantages could encourage market condo development in the DTES.

 The symbolic importance of Pantages (in the eyes of the city as well as of the low-income community here) is also why DNC feels that we have to fight for Pantages to be 100% resident controlled social housing and not a "social mix" project like Woodward's, or an "affordable condo" project like at 60 W. Cordova. Developers have agreed to work with the city on "social mix" projects and experiments like 60 W. Cordova (which city councillors called the "future" of affordable housing in the DTES) especially when they think they could not sell a normal condo project in the area. Although it might be tempting, and city council and others will definitely tell us that we have to be "realistic" and accept whatever we can get, we cannot afford to settle for anything less than 100% social housing at the Pantages site. *Any* market condos on the 100 block could open the rest of the 100 block and the rest of the neighbourhood to market condo speculation.

 2) Pantages is part of the low-income community's historic claim to the DTES

 Like Woodward's before its development as a "social mix" condo project, the Pantages Theatre is a symbol of the low-income community's place in the Downtown Eastside. Cultural groups have rallied for years to demand the Pantages reopen its doors as an arts centre in and for the neighbourhood while the owner, a non-resident investor, has sat on it and let it decay to the point where it has become beyond repair. In a familiar story for DTES residents, after making the building condemnable, the owner is seeking to profit from its condemnation. The low-income community has been excluded from the Pantages Theatre for years by a real estate speculator that has made it empty and "abandoned". Can we allow the same site to be used to exclude the low-income community from the 100 block through gentrifying condo development? We think that it is wrong that anyone other than the low-income community should be allowed to live in the space that has been left empty and decrepit in our neighbourhood for so many years. If the city buys the site and designates it for 100% social housing it can again be a cultural asset for the DTES community - a happy ending.

 3) Condos in Pantages could set off condo development throughout the eastern DTES

 The Pantages Theatre is in the city's "Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer" (DEOD) sub-district of the Downtown Eastside. DEOD zoning is important because it is "inclusionary," which is some of the most progressive zoning in the country. City planners we have met with say that the DEOD inclusionary zoning is the best protection we have against the vicious hunger of real estate developers in Vancouver. (Not their wording exactly…) "Inclusionary zoning" in the DEOD means that any new development has to include 20% social housing -- there can't be any pure market condo projects in the DEOD. The result? There has not been a single condo development in the DEOD, not even through the heights of the real estate investment boom. If Pantages was successfully developed as a mixed condo-social housing project it would be a model for further condo developments in the DEOD and could unleash market development on the most sensitive and (until now) protected area in the city."