Osborne Village was once a thriving community, but now the edges are being nibbled by big box stores and franchises. Of the coffee shops at the corner of Osborne and River none are locally owned and operated. That is a symptom of the decay, the neighbourhood’s demise written in logos and brands crowding the sidewalks.
These types of neighbourhoods were common at one time. People like living in a community and they want it to be liveable so they plan for parks and local shops that serve their needs. The resulting walkable community is reasonably population dense, such as Commercial Drive in Vancouver, St Denis in Montreal, and Kensington Market in Toronto. But when you have higher population in a place then that attracts the corporates like a corpse attracts flies. They want to move in so they can drive smaller businesses out and steal some of the money for themselves. They care nothing for the community, they bow only before the dollar, or Ruble, or Yen, or Dinar.
They circle slowly overhead, then move in, shove aside city bylaws with their greedy appetite and then plant their giant warehouse stores right in the middle of the neighbourhood. Nobody wants them there and as those types of stores accumulate they destroy the community. Small stores go out of business and the people start to move away from a neighbourhood which is just a shopping run for another suburbanite. Finally, you have another gutted community. Once the people move away, the big box stores look for somewhere else to ruin. What’s left turns to crime and slum housing and no services.
There are usually people who fight against it. Hippies and concerned citizens who protest and go to city hall where they stand before people making a hundred thousand dollars a year to take bribes and do what their corporate masters want. The conclusion to these attempts to educate the city flunkies ends as you might expect.
In Osborne Village we saw that with the Safeway expansion, the attempt to turn the Gas Station Theatre into a Target store, which would be closing now anyway and somewhat recently, in the closing of the family restaurant Vi-Ann so the owner of the building could make a secret deal with shoppers drug mart.
Shoppers drug mart wanted to expand, told us we needed their crap that was already available in two or three other locations within a block, and so they started their circling. The word went out, people rallied to protect their neighbourhood but the backroom deals had been struck. They started the construction even while people were pleading with the councillors in city hall, they were that sure of themselves. While people talked, machines swarmed and tore out walls and prepared legal writs.
Some of us said we would never go into a shopper’s drug mart again, and I haven’t been in one since. Interestingly, I don’t miss it at all. I never needed them anyway. I don’t think anyone does.
