Massive ‘slum clearance’ proposed for Strathcona
On Oct. 19, 1948, “one of Canada’s top social researchers” unveiled a plan to turn “the dingy Strathcona School area” into a “modern paradise.”
How? By tearing down a working-class neighbourhood filled with old houses and replacing it with “apartment units, family row houses and two 10-storey dormitories.”
Leonard Marsh considered the area between Main Street and Glen Drive, Hastings Street and False Creek to be a slum.
“The area today provides crowded housing for 7,500 (people),” said a story in The Vancouver Sun. “It has railway tracks running through a housing area and there are 48 corners for accidents, and 40 condemned ‘cabins’ are still in use.
“To this residential grief there is added no proper play areas, a hodgepodge of commerce and small industry, and only 20 trees to shelter those thousands of people.
“There are cases of 20 people sharing a toilet, and many instances of children having to play in the streets around pool halls and beer parlours because they have no yards.”
The “slum clearance” was to provide housing for 10,000 people. An illustration of the proposal shows row upon row of small apartment blocks with some green space carved out in the middle. The two towers were to be on Hastings Street.
Marsh was a professor at UBC’S School of Social Work. In 1947, he undertook a survey of Strathcona (then known as the East End) with a group of university students, asking residents about their age, occupation, race, education and income.
The Sun described the neighbourhood as “an old district containing few industries and few substantial buildings.” It also noted the population included “Chinese, East Indians, negroes, Croatians, Ukrainians and other minority groups.”
“We chose this area because it is very suitable for conversion to a low-rental housing community,” Marsh said. “The worst parts could be razed to the ground and the area rebuilt along lines of modern community planning, with a centrally located school, library, park and shopping district.”
In 1950, UBC published Marsh’s 76-page report, Rebuilding A Neighbourhood: Report on a Demonstration Slum-clearance and Urban Rehabilitation Project in a Key Central Area in Vancouver.
The cost of the plan was estimated to be $15 million, which made budget-conscious politicians leery. Still, alderman George Miller told The Sun “it might be a very fine thing to create work in time of recession.”
The city’s planning department put out their own 200-page report on the issue in 1957, and recommended demolishing an even larger swath of the old city: Fairview Slopes/lower Mount Pleasant, from Broadway to False Creek between Burrard and Scotia streets.
On Sept. 25, 1957, The Province reported city planners had also decreed Japantown was “beyond redemption as a residential area” and should be turned industrial.
It also noted that the price tag for the slum clearance had gone up to $75 million.
In 1962, the city embarked on the first phase of its urban renewal by building a social housing project on top of Maclean Park at Union Street and Jackson Avenue.
It seems a bit strange that the city built social housing on top of Strathcona’s park at the same time planners were decrying the lack of green space in the neighbourhood. But in 1963, the city created a new Maclean Park by knocking down a block of houses and apartments between Keefer and Georgia streets, Heatley and Hawks avenues.
All told, eight blocks of the neighbourhood would be torn down in the 1960s for various social housing projects, the new park and a new field for Strathcona School. But residents fought back to try to save their neighbourhood.
“Slum Residents Reject New Homes,” The Sun reported on Aug. 30, 1962.
“Hundreds of persons whose homes are being torn down in the city’s slum-clearance program are refusing public housing accommodation.”
The city also wanted to build a freeway through the neighbourhood, which would have basically taken out Union Street all the way to the Trans-canada Highway in Burnaby.
Connections to a proposed waterfront freeway would have demolished a lot of Chinatown and Gastown as well, but in the face of massive public resistance, the city eventually backed off on its freeway plans.
Today, many of the old houses in Strathcona the city thought were slums are cherished as heritage homes, and are quite valuable: a house at 842 Keefer St. was recently listed for $1.99 million and sold for $2.1 million.
There are cases of 20 people sharing a toilet, and many instances of children having to play in the streets around pool halls and beer parlours because they have no yards.