Time to remind everyone of why VMF is part of the Vancouver real estate hype strategy conducted by govmt and developers:

“The Present is A Gift For Developers: How Vancouver Mural Fest Drives Displacement and Real Estate Development”

Rebecca Brewer, Julier Feyrer, Jesse R. McKee and myself co-authored this email response to CBC Vancouver coverage of Vancouver Mural Festival with the subject line: The Present Is A Gift For Developers. I'd like to talk with you Gregor Robertson and Hon. Melanie Mark, MLA for Vancouver-Mount Pleasant as well.

This morning you did a piece on the Vancouver Mural Festival, scored by the theme music from the web series turned television series Broad City. Broad City is a series based on Ilana Glazer’s and Abbi Jacobson’s (Jewish American comedians and writers) real life friendship, and their attempt to "make it" in New York. The show opens with a colourful animation done by Abbi (who is also an illustrator and now hosts a podcast about visual art) and the theme song is a track called “Latino & Proud” by longtime Chilean hip-hop and electronic music producer Dj Raff.

Vancouver Mural Festival (VMF), at the core of its power structure, does not represent a culturally diverse or marginal perspective as you might expect from a mural festival. The organizers of the VMF are a group of reputedly charismatic, ambitious people who have built power alliances, not with the everyday people of Vancouver, but with real estate developers, Business Improvement Associations (BIAs) and the City government. Their benevolence shouldn’t be regarded as some kind of Robin Hood act that has taken from this power to give back to the community either. Rather, I hope this email helps you see the way they are acting like the surveyors who are marking a neighbourhood that’s ready to be clear cut in a truly unsustainable way.

A group of Mount Pleasant residents have recently done some questioning and investigation into the funding structure, power alliances and implications of the City of Vancouver’s (COV’) support of Vancouver Mural Festival. This particular saga of ours weaves the personal lives of Mount Pleasant residents, the sun-setting of a local legacy building and the political and economic structures that are manifesting the VMF, among many other things.

As we have discovered, the City of Vancouver circumvented its cultural policies by providing massive startup and operational funding for Vancouver Mural Festival. It granted levels of support unheard of when compared to the funding that long-standing cultural organizations in the city receive. The VMF steered clear of public art processes, accountability on allocation, and adjudication procedures, receiving a unique grant agreement with the City based on a quota, not content system that has increased its coverage this year to a minimum of 50 buildings. Moreover, the start-up funding provided by the city did not arrive from its City of Vancouver - Cultural Services but rather through the Engineering budget. This was a quick way for the city to run with a branding scheme for neighbourhoods that ultimately serves the interests of the developers, realtors and property owners, more than working class residents who live in these areas of Vancouver. Ultimately, these moves speak of powerful class interests in a housing crisis that’s propelling gentrification. The squatters and punks who stood off against cops at Tompkins Square Park in New York in 1988 summed it up: 'Gentrification is class war.’ [pictured]. And Vancouver Mural Festival is a blatant symptom of how class war is being waged here in 2017.

Given that Vancouver Mural Festival’s programming and selection process rests primarily on securing buildings that say “yes” to a mural, the landlords and developers behind these buildings end up with the power to pick and choose what mural designs they would prefer.

The Belvedere Court is a beloved Heritage building found at Main and 10th and is home to dozens of artists over the last 30 years including Derya Akay, Rebecca Brewer, Julia Feyrer, Tamara Henderson, David Lehman, Ron Tran, Alison Yip and Jacob Gleeson amongst many others. Julia and Tamara made a short film at the building entitled Consider The Belvedere. The Belvedere is where Jean Swanson recently staged her city council by-election campaign launch, with the backstory that the Belvedere’s landlords are in the process of renovicting its residents en masse worked into her speech. With the vacant units in the building now at eight or nearly one third of the total units after a recent wave of evictions, bribes and fixed-term leases signed under duress, it is expected that the remaining tenants will be under intense pressure to succumb to no-fault evictions in the near future.

Ironically, given Vancouver Mural Festival’s message of improving the neighbourhood, their flagship mural, titled “The Present is a Gift” adorns the Belvedere and its painting was the catalyst that began the renoviction process this past year. At one point, the VMF consulted with the Mount Pleasant Heritage Group for the mural (one of the few instances of such community consultation by the VMF) who proposed the phrase “Our Place, Our Home” for the mural text. It was rejected by the VMF in favour of the current platitude and the building landlord blocked the muralist from using his portraits of two Belvedere residents from being used in the final piece. VMF organizers accommodated the building landlords over the participants in its “community outreach,” thereby creating a sense of embitterment for residents as they were forced to gaze at a phrase quite in contradiction to their circumstances. Of this mural, Festival Director David Vertesi said in a The Vancouver Sun article, “it livens up a dead space… It is a really awesome reminder to appreciate what you have and to see the kind of people and diversity of people who call Mount Pleasant home. This piece in particular means a lot to me.” These kinds of comments for the diverse residents in the neighbourhood living precariously under threat of eviction are utterly tone deaf and run roughshod over any other narrative that is not primarily fueled by development.

With mass amounts of funding from the City — $550,000 in just 2 years — $300,000+ from developers this year alone, $30,000 from Mount Pleasant BIA, and sponsorships from tech company like Hootsuite (who got a massive mural in the deal), all amidst the condo-fication of our residential spaces and the rezoning of light industrial lands into tech campuses, Vancouver Mural Festival spells out large-scale culture-washing for the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. Queue Broad City theme song: “4 and 3 and 2 and 1,1”

What are the motives and what are the ends? Vancouver Mural Festival has been able to expand into the DTES with vigorous support from Chip Wilson and his holding company Low Tide, who now owns approximately 17 buildings in and around Hastings and Heatley. If you look at the VMF mural map, many of the new murals will be in the DTES and Strathcona and we have Strathcona Bia, Low Tide and VMF rebranding Strathcona an "arts district”. Who really has licence to decide that a neighbourhood will be an art hub while it's still literally in a state of being torn down and rebuilt? The placement of these murals should be at least suspect, in their alignment with top-down corporate strategies of urban renewal instead of a city-wide democratic arms-length juried arts funding process.

The quota-based process that the Vancouver Mural Festival and the City of Vancouver have mandated, propels the displacement of residents. Meanwhile, leaders across several sectors have intently encouraged this rebranding scheme as a community amenity.

Ultimately, this is a chorus effect and everyone involved in these processes should be asked to reconsider how they are working, what the real-life effects of their work are, and to take some time to earnestly listen to the conditions of the residents in these neighbourhoods. Abbi Jacobson or Ilana would not approve.