STORY about Direct ActionHousingIdeasPovertySolidarity posted on March 14, 2013 by B.Cat

A Sign of the Times

by B.Cat

Fucking with gentrifuckers

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On a recent eve, a small group of merry mischief making anarchists made off into the night with a prominent piece of gentrification propaganda:
the Save-on Meats a-board. The act was meant to let the gentrifiers know
that they have entered an area with a long history of class warfare. The
ghetto revolt will not stop until every capitalist enterprise has ceased to destroy daily life. This small action is one facet amongst many. It isa symbol of the slow and deliberate dis-assembly of the capitalist machine.

Gentrification: the civilization of wild terrain, colonization, the shift; scary/undesirable/unknown to "the new frontier in fine dining", the process that makes the displacement of a social class inevitable and acceptable, even to the displaced.

Two capitalist endeavors, Save-On Meats and Pidgin, have pasted “ethical consumerism” veneers onto their schemes (so have many others, but for now here’s a rant about these two). Brandon Grossutti’s Pidgin is a restaurant for the wealthy and well-dressed bourgeois/up-and-coming class, and was designed to allow the patrons to sneer out the huge windows at the vibrant life of the lower class beyond those windows. The restaurant lent a hand and hired someone “from the community”: a dishwasher who gets paid minimum wage, and with that, Pidgin must have become the only restaurant to ever be publicly applauded for hiring a wage slave.

And entrepreneur voyeur, Mark Brand of Save-On Meats, continues his crusade against the poor; masquerading as a savior with his paternalistic, segregating token program, and his multiple gentrifying businesses in the DTES-area. Save-On also sells cheap meals to many DTES housing corporations like Atira, which Brand brands as “supporting the community”, but he fails to mention that the meals he sells are usually containers of potato salad, hot dogs, sloppy joes, macaroni, and other anti-nutritional choices which promote neither physical nor mental health.

These businesses gloss over the most vilifying fact: by catering to the wealthier elements of this fucked up city, they are raising property values in the poorest neighborhood of all, and their very existence has rendered much housing already unaffordable to those getting by on piddly welfare cheques. Buniness owners like Brand and Grossuti claim to want to “start a conversation”. This conversation has been going on for years.

EVEN IF the gentrifiers think they are doing right by the present residents of the DTES, their very presence is a key ingredient in an ongoing movement to displace the existing residents and create a newly fashioned enclave for outsiders.

We will not stop. We will take their property apart bit by bit if we haveto, and we’ll have fun doing it.