One of the big mistakes of downtown redevelopment was when the city bought and levelled the historic PG Hotel and Roadhouse.
If the goal was to drive out the folks who frequented those establishments in the name of “cleaning up” downtown, it hasn’t worked out too well.
Instead of some affordable housing and a safe, cheap place to raise a pint, we have the Wood Design and Innovation Centre, a flashy building that is as sterile as it is useless to the innovation and promotion of local wood products.
There is nothing there for the public to enjoy and unlike the Wood Enterprise Centre we had in Quesnel, it doesn’t help small sawyers and wood manufacturers whatsoever. It’s geared to the academics and the megacorps. A colourful bit of our history and culture is now a lifeless institutional building guarded by security behind a locked door. Sure, it’s a neat building, but what does it add to downtown?
The answer is nothing.
We basically kicked a bunch of people out onto the street for no reason whatsoever.
Well, I guess there’s always a reason.
It’s almost a requirement that bureaucrats and planners look at society through the lens of the upper crust investor class. They view any kind of worn-out ‘scuzzy’ establishment as a problem that needs to be “cleaned up” and “revitalized.” After all, it’s bad for “investment.”
But the PG Hotel was a community. It was a place of gathering.
We didn’t “revitalize” anything by tearing it down. We uprooted people’s lives and moved the community to homeless camps and the street, a displacement that once again disproportionately impacted Indigenous folks.
Is that good for “investment?”
I bring this up because the same powers of “revitalization” are at it again with the “Civic Core District Plan.” Already we have a long list of lost opportunities.
It started with levelling the recently-renovated Simon Fraser Hotel for our over-budget Canfor Pool, and has continued with the destruction of the structurally sound Four Seasons Pool and now the old firehall.
The taxpayers, of course, will be on the hook for tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to replace all this.
But with what?
More bland, lifeless stuff for politicians to stand in front of?
We had community and a culture downtown, and it functioned.
The problem was city hall figured our home-grown First Nations/logger/pioneer culture wasn’t good enough for PG anymore. It was a little too rough around the edges. City Hall thought we could snuff it out with the antisocial emptiness of glitzy and exclusionary institutional architecture, at great taxpayer expense.
This mindset has done much harm to our identity, our downtown and the people who call it home. More harm will come of it.
James Steidle is a Prince George writer.
