Condofest
Tim Carlson queues up for a Woodward’s unit
It was a nice day for condo-buying panic. The April sun was hot and bright that Saturday, nudging the thermometer into the high 20s. Hundreds of prospective buyers of the 536 units in W—the two-tower address set to open in 2009 on the Downtown Eastside’s fabled Woodward’s site—stood corralled on an outdoor concourse outside the Shaw Tower sales centre on the Coal Harbour waterfront. Each was ID’d and prioritized by colour-coded wristband, the W promoters having taken a page from the arena-rock industry in dealing with frenzied fans.
According to the buzz, people had bivouacked overnight to get first crack at putting down money on a view suite. “We bought them dinner,” said the staffer who studied my plastic purple wristlet, checked my name off a list, and showed me to my place. “It was the least we could do. I mean, they stayed out here all night.” Employees were already pre-hyping the rumour when I had visited the 17th-floor show suite several days earlier. So, wanting to collect the reflections of committed condo campers in the tense midnight hours before sales began, I went down to find them. But the place was deserted; not a sleeping bag or lawn chair in sight. Perhaps camaraderie had developed and they’d all gone for a nightcap.
Parked in line by mid-morning with other purple-banded folks, waiting for our 1 p.m. sales appointment 17 floors up, I enjoyed complimentary coffee, donuts and W-shaped cookies glazed with neon-red icing, served by gracious staff in red T-shirts emblazoned “Be Bold or Move to the Suburbs.” A DJ spun remixes of old-school funk and reggae while people studied floor plans in the impressively oversized, 1 x 1.5-foot marketing package bursting with glossy layouts. (I later determined that the materials inside added up to 166.5 square feet.)
The atmosphere was festival-like, and I found myself imagining the potential for a larger cultural enterprise that could fuse our civic condo-consciousness with the development industry’s lip service to supporting local arts. CondoFest could kick off the festival season every spring with an array of activities like construction site-specific theatre, bank burlesque, maybe an organic snake-oil stand. You could sell tickets to swing the heritage wrecking ball. Who wouldn’t enjoy bashing out the old to make way for the new? People would camp out overnight, I’m sure.
Anyway, around noon, the DJ faded James Brown and passed the mic to MC Bob Rennie, the real-estate Svengali behind Rennie Marketing Systems and the W selling strategy. With his boyish looks and casually conservative style, expressed in tennis shoes matched with a charcoal suit, he reminded me of a trusted dentist or children’s entertainer rather than a homes huckster—the slick marketeer was interior rather than façade.
“We’re running a little behind and there’s no excuse for that,” Rennie said with a tone of humble assurance. “There’s quite a bottleneck up there. What’s happening is that people are taking five minutes to make up their minds on which suite to purchase instead of one minute—and that’s their right. I want to assure you there’s still inventory in all price ranges, so be patient, it’s worth the wait.”
As part of his multi-slogan campaign, Rennie was billing W as an “Intellectual Property.” Clearly, there must have been a bunch of detail-obsessed professors clogging things up. “The Smart Money Gets in Early,” crowed another marketing pitch, but that’s why the system had stalled. Obviously, if they’d just let the impulse buyers up first, everything would have been running like clockwork.
It turned out that “Be Bold or Move to Suburbia” hit a false note. I was surrounded by suburbanite investors more interested in flip potential than in moving downtown. One young car salesman from Surrey had brought his retired father from Delhi to provide financial leverage. He was looking at the median price range—$500,000—and talked excitedly about the possibility of doubling his money by 2009. The 50ish couple from Walnut Grove were theoretically interested in W as a weekend home, but seemed more enamoured by a half-minute of face time with Rennie. A nervous young man with shifty eyes jerked his thumb westward and asked me uneasily if I thought “those people” would be “moved out” of the neighbourhood by the time construction was complete. “Yes, that’s how gentrification usually works,” I said, “except for ‘those people’ who would be living in W’s 200 social housing units below you.” I also pointed out that the Downtown Eastside was actually located about a dozen blocks east.
W differs from dozens of other Vancouver developments insofar as it exists as a symbol as well as architecture. The Woodward’s buildings themselves, built from 1903 to 1908, lay at the heart of the city’s retail district until the area began its devolution into the shadow side of the gleaming metropolis. Even so, the W beacon above the store remains hardwired into the local psyche, a guiding light. Years of intense provincial, civic and neighbourhood politics over the site ended up as front-page news with the 2002 tent-city occupation by groups calling for more social housing. It eventually worked out through a low-end $5 million sale to the city, with plans including low-income units and SFU’s School of Contemporary Art as the anchor tenant.
Certainly, W has its attractions—I could imagine enjoying the downstairs art school or skinny-dipping in the W-shaped communal penthouse hot tub—but I wasn’t there that Saturday to buy. Honestly, I couldn’t have afforded a down payment on the crisper in each unit’s standard titanium LG fridge, never mind financing even one of the lower-floor, non-view, 558-square-foot condominimums. Besides, the week before I’d just lucked into a 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom house in Kitsilano with two decks, one with a decent North Shore view and the other overlooking the garden on the million-dollar lot—with my half of the rent in the $700 range. I figure I’ll be comfortable there until the mortgage bubble pops.
By 2:15 p.m., the DJ was losing steam; the playlist had degenerated to “Stuck in the Middle with You.” The Surrey car salesman had jumped the queue, gone upstairs, and returned shaken, reporting that any view suite in his price range was gone. He quickly upped the ante to $800,000. His father didn’t blink. When Rennie returned to the microphone to once again encourage people to stay because there was “still inventory in all price ranges,” the car salesman crossed his arms and shook his head with frustration. “It’s not true. I just looked at the board.”
About an hour later, the Walnut Grove couple, who had gone for lunch and walked the Seawall, returned just in time to slip back in line and be whisked up with all of us purple people... for another 45-minute wait in the hallway. Lots of time to consider this condescending blather stencilled on a wall inside the sales room:
“If you’ve lived in Vancouver all your life you may think of Woodward’s as edgy. But if you’ve moved here in the last 10 to 15 years, or have resided in any other major city in the world like New York or London, you will recognize the incredible potential—this 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.”
The same could have been said of Robson Street, South Granville or West Fourth in pre-gentrified incarnations. If the homogenization standard holds, the W neighbourhood will likely get less interesting, becoming an extension of Gastown rather than a re-branded Downtown Eastside. The galleries—such a heavy selling point with W—will morph into tourist-trinket vendors and spas, the unique cafes and restaurants will get Starbucked or Milestoned, and the retail quickly Gapped. I could be wrong; maybe something groundbreaking like an enviro-Wal-Mart will come in and spice things up.
We formed two lines on either side of the W model, pushing towards two young women with clipboards who were answering questions and posting SOLD tags on the last 26 units still on offer. The Surrey car salesman and his dad soon spent under five minutes on a decision, then were quickly ushered to another level to complete paperwork and choose tile colours. The Walnut Grove couple stepped out of line to chat with Rennie again.
If I’d had smart money to get in early, the best I could have done by the time I got to the front was a 26th-floor, 708-square-foot corner suite with balcony looking east down Hastings for $405,000. The layout was similar to the display suite, where I’d wandered to lie down on the couch and take a phone call. I could probably have crawled into the bed, the staff being otherwise occupied. Covering a living room wall was a photo of the North Shore—a view that won’t actually exist from any suite of this type, a salesperson had told me days before.
All of the suites sold that day—some $200 million in property, as Rennie proclaimed to the press. However, as a W VIP, I received an email one month later, letting me know that I had first crack at 28 units that had come back on the market.