Editor: Re: Umbrellas light up Metrotown, Burnaby NOW, May 23.
Indeed, the LED umbrellas designed by Metrotown neighbourhood children to beautify a demoviction site of Belford Properties across the Skytrain station look lovely. I am confident (Burnaby Neighbourhood House’s) comment of Belford wanting to “give back to the community” will be received very well. In fact, Belford’s online marketing exploits those umbrellas, which are likely seen by more than 30,000 people a day, to the fullest extent.
I also hope the Burnaby Neighbourhood House enjoys the kitchen that IntraCorp funded for its Metroplace branch. Looked at in this light, your emphatic letter in support of IntraCorp’s latest demoviction application, which almost celebrates IntraCrop for their “good heart,” did not come as a surprise. As you recall, this deal, if passed, would allow IntraCorp to turn affordable housing structures south of Maywood Park into park land, and, in return, receive the freed density for a condo development north of the park. That deal, I may add, is certainly worth a kitchen.
Personally, I find this wheeling and dealing between the Burnaby Neighbourhood House, the City of Burnaby, and Metrotown’s land developers rather troubling, not least because these land developers execute the City of Burnaby’s gentrification program in the very neighbourhood of the Burnaby Neighbourhood House. As it appears, everyone with monetary interests in this process wins, which, unfortunately, excludes the very demographics of people that has populated these lands since the mid-20th century. They are thrown under the bus.
I fear if Burnaby’s symbiosis of benevolent land developers, city planners, mayor, councillors, MLAs, and now even community organizations continues to “give back to the community” at the current pace, there will soon be no affordable purpose-built market rental structure left in Metrotown for the existing community to live.
Reinhard Schauer, Burnaby
