Vancouver Chinatown's Gentrifying Pace

A marble lion defaced with spray paint

These are photographs of Vancouver's Chinese Cultural Centre.

One of a pair of marble lions was spray painted, and fires were set in the area -- for a second time -- in the same place.

2nd fire at the back of the Chinese Cultural Centre

The anti-Asian sentiment is still alive three years after the Covid-19 pandemic with no solution in sight, except to clean up the mess and hope it doesn't happen again.

Last Wednesday the City of Vancouver began clearing the sidewalks near Chinatown, forcing some 80 homeless people to seek shelter elsewhere. About a dozen of them returned but each day city workers kept coming back to remove them.

Cleaning up the area is a start, though it's troubling the city doesn't have enough places for these homeless people to live in and yet pushes them off the streets.

This evening I was in the Chinatown neighbourhood for dinner and afterwards saw two ambulances and a firetruck attending to someone possibly overdosing?

Kent's Kitchen has served the area for decades

Meanwhile it's interesting to see the area gentrifying -- there's clean modern spaces with gym equipment, a fight club around the corner that sells accessories across the street. Another ground floor space has a pottery class, and there's a restaurant that sells pizzas that are made in a mobile truck nearby complete with pizza oven.

But what's troubling is that legacy businesses are not surviving. One is called Kent's Kitchen, which has several cooked dishes on display and for about C$10, you can get a takeaway box with your choice of two of these dishes and some rice.

For many seniors, it's what they eat most days because the portions from Kent's Kitchen are large and cheap.

However at the end of this month, Kent's Kitchen is closing and then where will seniors go for cheap meals that last two or three days?

A heart-felt sign from a regular customer

The story is that the takeaway shop got notice from the landlord for a 30 percent increase in rent. There's speculation that the landlord wants to kick Kent's Kitchen out to sell the land to a developer because the lot next door is empty.

While Vancouver's Chinatown is resilient, it is slowly falling apart at the seams. While gentrification is good in keeping the neighbourhood going, what about the seniors in the area? The shops serving the goods and services they need are disappearing, while cafes and gyms are appearing.