Feb. 22, 2018
Dear Ryan Beedie,
Chinatown Action Group and Chinatown Concern Group demand you withdraw your upcoming 105 Keefer appeal at the Board of Variance’s meeting on March 2, 2018.
We are outraged but sadly not surprised at your appeal of your last rejected application. The refusal delivered by the Development Permit Board was not exceptional, but just the latest round in what will now be your fifth consecutive year of failures and public humiliations since acquiring the property in 2013. The Chinatown community and its supporters are not alone in refusing your luxury condos at 105 Keefer; the Development Permit Board and Vancouver City Council, including Mayor Gregor Robertson, have rejected your development proposal time and time again.
The message is clear. You and your condos are not wanted in Chinatown, not by the people nor the city that serves them.
Your appeal, which will be reviewed by the Board of Variance on March 2, 2018, claims that you have suffered “significant hardship by reason of the inability of the Appellant to make effective use of the property,” citing “loss of revenue” and continued “damage to [your] reputation.”
For the president of a billion-dollar firm to cry over supposed financial hardship is as disgraceful as it is disingenuous. Your crocodile tears are an insult to the poor and working people that your condos, if built, would displace from their home in Chinatown. We are appalled that you would dare to blame the Chinatown community for damages to your reputation. You have dragged your own name through the mud these past five years in your dogged pursuit of profit at the price of people’s lives. Your shameless ploy does not fool us; you have demonstrated for the people of Vancouver your ego, greed, and outright failure as a professional real estate developer. Ryan Beedie: perhaps you should consider another line of work.
Your developments have devastated and displaced low-income communities across the Lower Mainland. Chinatown will not tolerate your ruse. In a sweet bit of irony, your attack on Chinatown’s most marginalized has brought together an improbable city-wide coalition led by the Chinese working class. Your repeated defeats at the hands of the people has brought hope to the city’s renters and workers at a moment when our homes and livelihoods seem all but lost to the designs of the developer class. We will not stop fighting until the site at 105 Keefer is home to 100% welfare- and pension-rate housing and a communal space for Chinatown’s elders. Your name may be on the deed, but 105 Keefer belongs to us.
On Monday, February 26th, at 11:00 AM, we will hold a community hearing at 1111 W. Georgia St to determine the people’s final decision on the fate of 105 Keefer. If you say you are working with the Chinatown community, we challenge you to keep to your word. We invite you to our community hearing, to come down from your office on the seventeenth floor to defend your latest application and appeal.
Signed,
Chinatown Action Group 華埠行動小組
Chinatown Concern Group 唐人街關注組
Chinatown Action Group 華埠行動小組 is a collective of people of Chinese descent fighting for social justice in Chinatown and building a progressive left voice within the Chinese community.
Chinatown Concern Group 唐人街關注組 is an organization of Chinese residents in Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside working to address neighbourhood issues.