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In 2023, the Vancouver City Council recently adopted a motion titled \u201c<\/i>Uplifting the Downtown Eastside and Building Inclusive Communities that Work for All Residents<\/i><\/a>.\u201d <\/i>An <\/i>update<\/a> was released earlier this year, and the associated DTES Housing Implementation report created in response to public engagement<\/a> is scheduled to be heard at Council on December 9th. <\/span><\/p>\n On the surface, the title offers a generous phrase\u2014a soft, aspirational promise that gestures toward care, improvement, and collective betterment. Who, after all, could reasonably oppose a plan to uplift<\/i> a neighbourhood long marked by poverty, trauma, and systemic neglect?<\/span><\/p>\n But the word deserves inspection. <\/span><\/p>\n Because in cities, words rarely remain poetic for long. They metastasize into bylaws, zoning schedules, development incentives, and redevelopment schemes. Over time, they turn into walls, leases, eviction notices, and displacement.<\/span><\/p>\n So, before we debate density numbers or unit mixes, it is worth pausing\u2014not at the policy, but at the prose\u2014and asking a more basic question: What does it mean to \u201cuplift\u201d a neighbourhood that has already endured decades of being managed, reimagined, and repeatedly \u201cfixed\u201d from above?<\/span><\/p>\n This piece offers a language audit\u2014not to nitpick phrasing, but to examine how certain words quietly frame<\/i> which futures are imaginable, whose presence is temporary, and whose is meant to last. I have explored political rhetoric and inequality<\/a> in the past, and think it\u2019s worthwhile to return to it here, with a different register and context.<\/span><\/p>\n Planning language has always carried double duties. Officially, it communicates policy. Unofficially, it trains people on how to feel<\/i> about that policy.<\/span><\/p>\n Terms like revitalization<\/i>, renewal<\/i>, transformation<\/i>, and activation<\/i> do not merely describe change\u2014they moralize it. They recast disruption as progress, replacement as improvement, and resistance as backwardness. Over time, these words become so normalized that they no longer feel political, even though they do political work every day.<\/span><\/p>\n The Downtown Eastside plan is no exception. Its language is careful, measured, therapeutic even. But it is precisely this tone of care that demands critical attention. Because planning history shows us this uncomfortable pattern: the more benevolent the language, the more important it is to scrutinize the outcomes it makes possible. As I argued previously, planning\u2019s language of \u2018care\u2019<\/a> and \u2018protection\u2019 often masks structural violence\u2014and this DTES proposal appears to rehearse the same script.<\/span><\/p>\n Let\u2019s look closely at a few of the core terms used in the City\u2019s framing.<\/span><\/p>\n To uplift<\/i> suggests elevation\u2014a movement upward from something lower. In urban discourse, this often carries an implicit judgment: that the current state of the neighbourhood is something to be escaped, transcended, or corrected.<\/span><\/p>\n But uplift from where, and into what?<\/span><\/p>\n In the case of the Downtown Eastside, the term subtly frames the neighbourhood as a space defined primarily by deficiency: lacking opportunity, safety, or proper form. <\/span><\/p>\n This framing sets the stage for intervention. And crucially, it implies that improvement can only come through significant structural change\u2014often physical redevelopment\u2014rather than through stabilization, support, or reinvestment in existing social infrastructure.<\/span><\/p>\n Historically, uplift<\/i> in urban planning has often arrived hand\u2011in\u2011hand with displacement<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n From mid-20th-century urban renewal programs to more recent \u201cregeneration\u201d strategies, \u201cuplift\u201d tends to occur spatially\u2014towers replacing walk-ups, mixed-use developments replacing low-income housing\u2014and socially, through demographic turnover. The neighbourhood may become \u201cbetter\u201d by some metrics, but often not for the people who endured its hardest years.<\/span><\/p>\n Here, uplift<\/i> risks functioning less as care and more as a justification<\/i> for reconfiguration.<\/span><\/p>\n Few planning phrases are as ubiquitous\u2014or as revealing\u2014as revitalization<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n To revitalize<\/i> is, quite literally, to bring life back. But the Downtown Eastside is not<\/i> lifeless. It is dense with people, memory, improvisation, care networks, and political struggle. Calling it in need of revitalization implies a lack of legitimate life in its current form\u2014as though only certain kinds of vitality count, usually those that photograph well for consultants or align neatly with market value, commercial attractiveness, and visual order.<\/span><\/p>\n The sister phrase, \u201cunlocking potential<\/i>,\u201d comes straight from the grammar of real estate economics. Land has \u201cpotential\u201d when its exchange value<\/i> can be increased. <\/span><\/p>\n In this framing, potential is not about human flourishing; it is about recalibrating land to meet what the market deems its highest and best use<\/i>. The Downtown Eastside, then, is recast as an underperforming asset\u2014a site waiting to be optimized rather than a community requiring protection, repair, and political restraint.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cInclusion\u201d sounds unimpeachable. But inclusion without specificity can conceal its opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n Inclusive of whom? On what terms? And for how long?<\/span><\/p>\n In many redevelopment narratives, inclusion refers to creating mixed-income or socially diverse neighbourhoods. On paper, this appears progressive. In practice, however, inclusion often operates through substitution<\/i>: new populations are included not alongside existing residents, but in place of them.<\/span><\/p>\n Ironically, a neighbourhood can become more demographically \u201cdiverse\u201d in census terms while becoming less accessible to those who historically shaped it.<\/span><\/p>\n When inclusion is not explicitly tied to tenure security, affordability definitions anchored to local incomes, and the right of existing residents to remain, it becomes a language of replacement<\/i> rather than continuity.<\/span><\/p>\n These words are not floating metaphors. They harden into planning instruments.<\/span><\/p>\n In the case of the Downtown Eastside, the language of uplift<\/i> and inclusion<\/i> is tied to concrete proposals: revised land use policies, changes to social housing requirements, shifts in how single-room occupancy (SRO) replacement is handled, and new permissions for market-oriented development.<\/span><\/p>\n The danger is not in any one of these individually, but in how they interact. When social housing targets are reduced while market development is expanded\u2014all under the banner of uplift<\/i>\u2014the language does quiet work. <\/span><\/p>\n It reframes structural withdrawal as a form of intervention<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n And when SRO protections are loosened while redevelopment potential increases, the language of care masks an emerging logic: that stability for low-income residents is secondary<\/i> to transformation of the neighbourhood\u2019s urban form.<\/span><\/p>\n In this way, the vocabulary of improvement quietly cultivates the conditions for displacement.<\/span><\/p>\n What makes the current moment particularly fraught is not just the scale of the proposed change, but the intimacy of the language used to justify it.<\/span><\/p>\n Planning documents now speak the language of care, wellness, and community. But care in policy is not about intention\u2014it is about outcome<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n If a plan claims to uplift<\/i>, yet produces reduced access to shelter\u2011rate housing, destabilized SRO tenants, and greater precarity for current residents, its language of care curdles into a kind of moral camouflage.<\/span><\/p>\n The danger, then, is not only what the plan says, but how easily its sympathetic vocabulary anesthetizes public concern\u2014dulling the political nerves just enough for displacement to proceed under a banner of benevolence.<\/span><\/p>\n If the words shaping our city matter\u2014and they do\u2014then we must ask what a different language would demand of us.<\/span><\/p>\n Here is one possible reframing. <\/span><\/p>\n When the City speaks of uplift<\/i>, what is often occurring in practice is a process of replacement; a more honest vocabulary should name this instead as stabilization<\/i> and support<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n When plans promise revitalization<\/i>, they often signal the pursuit of increased exchange value; a truer framing should be repair<\/i> and reinvestment<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n When policy documents refer to unlocking potential<\/i>, they usually mean optimizing land for market performance; the alternative is to speak openly about protecting<\/i> and sustaining<\/i> existing communities. <\/span><\/p>\n And when redevelopment language calls for inclusive communities<\/i>, it often masks demographic turnover; a more accurate commitment would be enabling resident continuity<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n These alternatives do not promise glittering futures. They demand slower, harder, less photogenic work: maintenance, retention, long-term care, and political commitment to those who are already here. The Downtown Eastside does not lack life. It lacks secure housing, adequate health resources, and consistent public investment. But these are not problems solved by rhetorical<\/i> uplift<\/i> or aesthetic redevelopment<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n If a neighbourhood is to be lifted, we must ask: lifted by whom? For whose benefit? And who decides when uplift has been achieved? <\/span><\/p>\n As I have argued elsewhere, when care becomes a form of control<\/a>, these questions are not rhetorical\u2014they are the only safeguards a community has against being managed out of its own future.<\/span><\/p>\n Until those questions are answered not just in language, but in guarantees of housing, tenure, and continuity, it is fair to ask whether what is being proposed is uplift<\/i> at all\u2014or simply yet another chapter in a long history of urban replacement disguised as care.<\/span><\/p>\n ***<\/span><\/p>\n Other related articles:<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n **<\/p>\n Erick Villagomez<\/i><\/b> is the Editor-in-Chief at Spacing Vancouver and teaches at UBC\u2019s School of Community and Regional Planning. He is also the author of <\/i>The Laws of Settlements: 54 Laws Underlying Settlements Across Scale and Culture<\/span><\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n