Street art saves us from a Pretty empty city

The alienating effect of walking by blocks of empty homes is seen in the writing on the wall. It is there in the masked Spock and other super-hero mashups that adorn the boarded-up exteriors of several houses near the King Edward Canada Line station. Like graffiti art, the houses are here today, gone tomorrow. In two years this corner — and every two-block stretches radiating from all of the city’s rapid transit stations — will be transformed into homes that are not rented out and that most people who use that transit couldn’t afford anyway. 

I don’t mourn the loss of those sprawling old ranchers; they’re an inefficient use of city land. I worry about losing the street art, when every last residential development has been exploited and the bland luxurious uniformity will deter diverse forms of artistic expression.

As if we need any evidence of the relevance, interest and proliferation of unauthorized street art, almost 9,000 images tagged ‘vancouvergraffiti’ have been uploaded to Instagram (at this writing). There’s even an app for that, Curb, created by three former UBC students who envisioned an evolving street-art wiki-gallery. (Spot some local work in Curb’s promotional video, below.)

Only when the art is sanctioned do we get a glimpse of some of the particularly artistic street murals, like in this time-lapse video of Ilya Viryachev, a rising star in Vancouver’s animation industry. I’m holding out hope that the hundreds of digital artists moving into the new Microsoft and Imageworks headquarters (beside the Vancouver Art Gallery) this month will share some of their talent outside their new downtown digs.

This week the local news was full of the City of Vancouver’s attempt to at least count empty homes, presumably as a baby step toward dealing with the housing crisis (ie. no one except the rich and heavily subsidized can afford to live here). But recently when we were dropping off a friend in his MacKenzie Heights neighbourhood on the Westside it was eerily clear that it may be too little, too late. It was twilight on a Sunday evening but most of the impressive homes with manicured lawns on his block were empty, he said, with the rare interior lights likely on timers.

It was at this moment that it hit me: that this disparity between the over-housed and the homeless is out of control. The popular Beautiful Empty Homes website can’t keep up with the latest high-end residential property deals and the crisis is also plaguing the Eastside.  The City may be mulling a wiki-registry of empty houses and condos but this tell-on-your-neighbours scheme may just add fuel to the fire.