Seven Oaks Magazine.

The Cultured and the Cool: Art, Culture and the Vancouver real estate market
April 13, 2007
Reed Eurchuk

Vancouver's condo industry has embraced "culture" and "art" as a fundamental part of many sales pitches. The cultural allusions run thick in local ad copy. Where once the real estate industry emphasized a residence as a good place to raise a family, today they use “life style” to lure prospective buyers. Culture as a commodity, a purchased aesthetic experience, an exotic vacation or an elegant product, we are told, signifies personal depth and spiritual development. By correlating cultural commodities of distinction with the people of distinction who purchase them, the marketers construct its imagined clientele at the same time it makes its pitch. Who is this new clientele?

'Avedon' and ‘Sakura’, Polygon's two new developments situated just north of Shaunessy on the hill where Granville Street slopes into the downtown, each tout themselves as locations “where art and culture converge”. The massive, luxury-only "Shangri-La" development at Thurlow and West Georgia plans to include a public art gallery, to be managed by the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The copy for Henderson Development's 'Espana' drips with snooty attitude. "In the first modern novel, Don Quixote, " it states, "named the best book by the Guardian, Cervantes tells us of the delightful guests of two friends and their superb conversation, conversation full of witticisms we use today". In quick succession the ad refers to a classic work of literature, mythical literary figures, a high brow English journal and joins them to the supposed “conversation full of witticisms we use today”. Who are "we"? The ad constructs its own implied audience.

"We" all read the Guardian, don't we? Mais, oui. "We" all read Don Quixote and mine it for 'witticisms'. The errant knight descending into madness, the book – a signpost along the road of an imploding social order, the feudal system – gets reduced to clever repartee among “delightful” pals. It brings to mind the pictures that usually accompany the copy, of good-looking people with perfect bodies and teeth laughing at one another's cleverness.

Industry related promotional material also recognizes “the culture angle” as an important sales point. Writing on Millenium Development’s new "L'Hermitage en Ville" on Robson in a recent New Home Buyers Guide article, Susan Boyce enthuses, "...when you're ready to explore, you're at the very heart of what makes Vancouver a vibrant, truly world-class city. Perhaps a night at the opera or symphony? Or an afternoon pondering the latest showing at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Maybe you'd prefer wine tasting...".

In The Culture of Cities, Sharon Zukin explains that many North American downtowns have employed cultural strategies to attract investment, employers, upscale residents and tourists. She writes that this strategy "inspires a new language dealing with difference" and "a coded means of discrimination". The mobilization of “taste” as a mark of “distinction” appeals to specific type of resident to the downtown, one who has had the time and money to invest in developing these tastes, tastes developed outside the exigencies of the labour market. Put bluntly, the ads employ coded class appeals to differentiate their target audience. Condo Salesperson seeks cool, authentic, risk oblivious people, either sex, for fun and debt bondage.

But the industry is nothing if not flexible, and it continually seeks new markets. The housing market is cut up into a number of micro-markets: the elderly, the business market, the investment market, the family oriented housing market. Each market gets further segmented by details of income, demographics, ethnicity, sexuality, among others. Even the poor are game: witness the ongoing instability of the “subprime” loan market in the US where companies, some associated with mainstream banks, have preyed, like loan sharks, upon lower income and Black and Latino home owners. This is a huge market, worth $1.3 trillion according to The Independent. However, the condo market in the new downtown Vancouver is not for the poor.

One large market is the “alternative” condo market. Youngish, single, their identity defined not so much by work as by taste (alt bands, yoga, required fashion statements, fear of children): they wear their “cool culture” on their sleeve.

The Downtown Eastside condo market has become an area that targets this new market. According to the lead article in the first issue of a good new culture-oriented zine, Fearless, “With 35 visual art galleries and a dozen new facilities being developed or opening soon, it will be the Downtown Eastside that will be known as Vancouver's 'cultural hub'." The article, by Nicholas Jacob, goes on to list a number of significant investments by cultural entrepreneurs in the area, among them, the Centre For Creative Technology and Community Arts, a proposed arts centre at the new Woodward's development; a proposed renovation of the Pantages theatre at 150 East Hastings; and an ambitious renovation project in the old Golden Harvest Cinema at 319 Main by its new owner, William Vince of Infinity Media. The magazine has a quietly political edge and a hopeful attitude. Still its hopefulness, that the area will have vibrant art scene that can coexist with rather than displace current residents, is threatened by anxiety that the ongoing gentrification will destroy the area. As Jacob ends his piece, "Will these developments change the neighbourhood without displacing residents, or are we to follow 'de rigueur' every other city championing a mix of arts and revitalization to transform a neglected neighbourhood?"

And Vancouver developers have given some remarkably clear theoretical statements on this alternative market. With chilling prescience, in 1999, way before the current victory of the gentrification of the area, Jon Stovell, of Reliance Holdings, a large property developer in the Gastown area, told Daniel Girard of the Toronto Star, "We can't sanitize the area or convince people it's pristine. We're looking for a more youthful, risk-oblivious person....As soon as it's seen as the cool place to be they'll climb over dead bodies to get there."

Successful real estate agents seem to have an almost psychic insight into the psychology of their target clientele. Bob Rennie, the undisputed king of the Vancouver condo market, told the Sun's Pete McMartin that the Downtown Eastside, "is an authentic area, not a sanitized environment. Neighbourhoods like this are rare and offer a creative mix of cutting-edge culture, heritage and character... This is the future...This is your neighbourhood. Be bold or move to suburbia...I like to call it an intellectual property". Rennie, the master salesman, even ad libs in one line pitches. He sounds uncannily like a barker whose song lures passersby from the passing crowd and into the club. Bosa Development's slogan for its Creekside Development -- "Life Without Compromise" -- echoes Rennie's call to "Be Bold or Move to the Suburbs".

For the arts and culture to be more than a marketing strategy and a tool of the gentrifiers, we have to see and understand its potential roles, as both a servant to and subversive of power.