Gentrification is not a four-letter word!

The high gate used to be a drop-site for drugs and stolen property.

Today's Province newspaper gives front-page treatment to a situation that's been brewing for the past week or so on the Downtown East Side: protests over a new restaurant, Pidgin, right across the street from Gospel Mission/The Lord's Rain.





The windows are about 2/3 blacked-out from view from the street,
so I played "Secret Sam" with my BlackBerry to get a look inside.



The Province article is very well-balanced (I think the editorial is bang-on, too), as it quotes a couple of regulars in the area -- like John, whose family has run Wing's Cafe (in the same building at the Mission) since the 50s, and some of those who hang out at Pigeon Park -- as saying the protesters "aren't from around here" and it makes me wonder why they've singled out Pidgin when there are at least 4 other new restaurants within the same block -- Nelson the Seagull and Rainier Provisions in the Rainier Hotel building, the resurrected Save-On Meats a bit further west on Hastings, and Acme Cafe a couple of doors past that.

Maybe it's because Pidgin has posted a statement on its windows that hits the "gentrification" issue head-on. See, there's a fear that the current incursion into the DTES by developers, buying and renovating delapidated properties will drive out the poor. As it is, the new developments have included a lot of low-cost housing and quite a few of the people who come into The Lord's Rain have found clean, new homes in these developments.

Rather than a bogeyman, gentrification is a unique opportunity -- it's a point I've made before and it's the notice Pidgin posted in its windows makes the same point -- an opportunity for two distinct groups of people to get to know each other. Let's face it: the image most people outside the DTES have of the area is the "Canada's Worst Postal Code" label hung on it by the activists. Were they to spend any time there -- say, having a nice dinner -- they might actually see something different. They'd see human beings, like themselves, only with a key difference: they made mistakes that they were not able to recover from as elegantly as others.

Who knows? Maybe while walking from the parking space on Cordova Street or the bus stop on Hastings, the restaurant patrons might strike up a conversation with the gang in Pigeon Park, and as an old Anglican minister once said to me, "you can never hate a man once you've talked to him."

Certainly, the menu at Pidgin could attract a "different" kind of crowd. If you're into trying out "cured steelhead, asian pear, ginger, sesame" ($13) or " beef tataki, black garlic, gruyère, woodear, wasabi mayo, chips" ($14), you would be attracted to the place. You might not be so inclined if they were just another burger-and-fries place.

So foodies and others get a first-hand look -- not the story getting fed by the activists -- and then start considering solutions that step outside the gimme-gimme answers the activists keep pushing. They might even see Gospel Mission and The Lord's Rain across the street, which has been ministering to people in the area since the Great Depression and changing lives in a positive way (without taking any taxpayer money).

And maybe that's what the protesters don't want. A quote in the Province article may say more than the speaker really wanted to: “The rich don’t need another playground down here in a poor area.” Is it that they want it to stay segregated? Do they want to see the DTES stay the way it's been for most of the past 40-odd years: a cauldron of despair, drugs and living death, ignored by the well-to-do. After all, if people start seeing what it's really like and start coming up with solutions that actually might raise more people out of poverty, there won't be as great a need for activists with demands which I believe are unreasonable and unachievable -- and at the very least, require someone else to spend the money.

You have to wonder why.