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The Current Transcript for July 11, 2016

Host: Mike Finnerty

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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What was discovered by a beach-goer were two body parts on the beach right in front of where the beach volleyball area is being built up.

MIKE FINNERTY: A different kind of stage is being set for the Rio summer games now less than a month away. More than twice as many killings by police than last year, an Australian Paralympian robbed at gunpoint, the state and the city of Rio broke a state of calamity declared in order to get emergency funding from the federal government. And that's not even to mention the organizational problems, the environmental concerns, the government corruption crisis, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the Zika virus, and the anger at these expensive Olympic Games that will not come close to getting paid for as the Brazilian economy falls off a cliff. That's coming right up. Also today --

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[Sound: House being demolished]

MF: Character homes in Canada making way for new housing, changing the face of neighborhoods in Vancouver, in Ottawa and in Halifax. More in half an hour. I'm Mike Finnerty. Welcome to the summer edition of The Current.

'Olympics not for us': Brazilians face political, economic turmoil ahead of Games

Guests: Renata Neder, Luis Peaze, Mauricio Santoro

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CROWD: [Shouting] Welcome to hell! Welcome to hell! Welcome to hell! Welcome to hell!

VOICE: [Through translator] I’m here with my friends the military officers, civilians and firefighters because we aren’t receiving our salaries. Every single day, we see a policeman dying. Yesterday, it was a firefighter who died. He left two daughters and his wife, pregnant. This is an embarrassment for the city of Rio. What kind of Olympics are these?

CROWD: [Shouting] Welcome to hell! Welcome to hell! Welcome to hell!

MF: Welcome to hell. And I think it’s safe to say that no Olympic host city has ever greeted visitors quite like this before. That's what the police have been chanting to visitors arriving at Rio de Janeiro's airport and they're warning that visitors may not be safe. On the flip side, there are the dire warnings about the police themselves, about human rights violations they're alleged to have perpetrated. The number of gun deaths in Rio has grown so high that Amnesty International has just released an app for Android phones called Crossfire. It tracks the use of firearms in Rio de Janeiro in the lead up to the Games. As a human rights advisor to Amnesty International, Renata Neder monitors the incidents of violence perpetrated by security authorities on the local population. And to tell us what her research is showing, she joins us now from Rio, Renata Neder, hello.

RENATA NEDER: Hello, good morning.

MF: What's your view, first of all, on the greeting “Welcome to hell” that the police are giving people arriving at the airport?

RENATA NEDER: Well, it's of concern that the security forces feel themselves disrespected like that because this has a direct impact on the public security operations. We do know that the economic crisis of the government is leading to the non-payment of the police officers but also other civil servants. And we know that this can have a very negative impact in terms of the police operations and public security operations as a whole in the upcoming months.

MF: They're actually not getting paid?

RENATA NEDER: The payments have been delayed and some amount of it is not being paid, but there are huge delays and payments of public servants in general here in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

MF: Okay, let's come to your research about the levels of violence perpetrated by the police and security forces in Rio. What does it show?

RENATA NEDER: We have been documented the relation of the increase in killings by the police and major sporting events here in Rio de Janeiro. Rio had both the opportunity and the burden of hosting three major sporting events in the past 10 years. We hosted the Pan American Games in 2007, the World Cup in 2014, and now we're hosting the Olympics. And we can already identify a pattern of violations related to public security operations and law enforcement officers and we are calling on the authorities to, you know, adopt preventive measures to avoid this from happening again in the Olympics. 2000 and--

MF: But these are shooting deaths and how much is the increase from, say, last year?

RENATA NEDER: Okay, so for example, the year of 2007, which was the year of the Pan American Games, we had over 1300 people killed by the police in the state of Rio. And that's the highest number in 10 years. It represented an increase of over 30 per cent in comparison with the previous year of 2006. In the year of the World Cup 2014, we saw an increase of up to 40 per cent in comparison of the number of people killed by the police in 2013. And since 2014, we have been seeing an increase every year in the number of people killed by the police. Now, in 2006, we're seeing a huge increase now in the month of April and May. So when you compare--

[Crosstalk]

MF: This year. You mean this year.

RENATA NEDER: --With May last year, there was an increase of over 130 per cent in the number of people killed by the police in the city of Rio.

MF: So more than twice as many. And what exactly are we talking about when you say police are killing locals? What are the circumstances?

RENATA NEDER: Well last year, Amnesty International launched a report called You Killed My Son, where we have documented cases of killings by the police. And what we found out is that although the police claim that these killings happened in self-defence, we actually saw a pattern that they have very strong evidence of being extrajudicial executions. In some cases for example, these are targeted killings. The police are wielding specifically, targeting one individual, they want to kill one specific individual. There's a mechanism that they call the Trojan horse. The police hide in an ambush waiting for a specific person in the favela to execute them. In other cases, there are victims that had already surrendered or were injured. They were all unarmed and the police, instead of just detaining the person and bringing them to the police station, they intentionally shoot them again to execute them. And there are also cases where the police simply enter the favela shooting, because that's the way they operate. They operate in this logic of war, of confrontation, and they just enter the favela shooting, and this of course, leaves many people killed.

MF: They're also being killed as well. You heard the clip earlier where they said there was a police officer dying. I think they said every day. Is that true? Does your data support that as well?

RENATA NEDER: Well, a lot of police officers are being killed, but most of them are being killed in off-duty situations. Although there are a number of police officers being killed on duty, the vast majority of them are being killed off duty. So not during police operations, not while they are exercising their duty as law enforcement officials. However--

MF: Renata--what's the connection to the Games? To the Summer Games?

RENATA NEDER: Well, of course, major sporting events tend to increase a violation that is already happening on the ground. So obviously, the police brutality and the number, the high number of people killed by the police in Rio is a structural and historical problem. But hosting a major sporting event tends to increase a violation that already happens. And this is what we saw in the Pan American Games and the World Cup. And it's probably an issue of simple math at first, because if you have a police that kills a lot during its operation, if you increase the number of operations because you're hosting a major sporting event, you will increase the number of people being killed. But there are also violations that happen specifically in operations related directly to the Games. During the Games, the military, the armed forces and federal forces of security are being deployed to the city for specific operations related to the Games. And in the past, in the Pan American Games and the World Cup, the use of the military and the federal security forces had led to a number of violations including extrajudicial executions. So we are also worried particularly about the use of those public security forces for policing work.

MF: And are visitors to Rio and are the athletes safe?

RENATA NEDER: Well, it's important to see that little violence in Brazil does not affect all in the same way. The primary victims of homicide in Brazil are the black youth from the favelas. The same way police violence specifically does not affect everybody the same way, the primary victims of the police are also the black youth from the favelas. So although Rio has this outrageous number of homicides and of homicides by the police, we have to be very clear that they do not affect everybody in the same way and we are trying now to give visibility to this violence that the black youth from the favelas suffer in general and also at the hands of the police.

MF: Okay, understood. And Renata Neder, thank you very much for speaking to us.

RENATA NEDER: Thank you.

MF: Renata Neder is a documenter of human rights violations. She was in Rio de Janeiro. And if you want to check out the Amnesty International app that is tracking violence in Rio, visit our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. We contacted the local governor's office for an interview, we've not heard back. We also requested to speak to the mayor of Rio. He was not available today, but we are hoping to connect with him in the coming days. Our next two guests are live in Rio and counting down to the Games. Luis Peaze is a Brazilian journalist who has been reporting on the impact of the Olympic Games on Rio citizens for the past few years. And Mauricio Santoro is a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. And like so many other people in his city, he's feeling the impact of the political and economic instability that's gripping Brazil. He's currently on strike. Hello to you both.

MAURICIO SANTORO: Hello Mike.

LUIS PEAZE: Hello Mike. Luis Pea-ah-zay by the way.

MF: Hello and thank you for joining us. Mauricio Santoro, can I start with you? How would you describe the mood of the people in Rio as we get closer and closer to the Games?

MAURICIO SANTORO: Well, the mood here changes a lot during the last two years. When it was chosen to be the host of the Olympics seven years ago, I think that most people were very happy with that but nowadays, the general feeling is of indifference or even hostility to the Games because people are very angry with the economic crisis, with the political stagnation, and in many situations, people in Rio feel that the Olympics are not for us. We usually feel that it's like this big party being given to other people, but not us.

MF: Luis, what’s your view?

LUIS PEAZE: Well, I cannot disagree with Santoro, of course. So the only part I would comment is the very first bit of his words. When we won the Olympics, the most of the people, I wouldn't say they were, we were happy with the Olympics. We heard a lot of things on the news, of course. It was a big issue but the population doesn't understand what the Olympics is about. We don't have a tradition for Olympic Games, Olympic sports. We used to keep soccer, but no longer, even the soccer, we’re, you know, that good as we used to be. But again, the broad picture is, we are not happy at all. We don’t comment about Olympic Games. If you walk around, if you use public transportation, if you go to ferry, metro, buses, you don't see people wearing brands of the Olympics, of T-shirts, or happy, or talking about gymnastics, boxing, archery. We don’t talk a lot about anything like sailing. People don’t understand what sailing is.

MF: But are the preparations for the Games affecting people's day to day life?

LUIS PEAZE: Definitely.

MF: How?

LUIS PEAZE: The city became chaotic, even more chaotic, that it was rarely, has been for the last decades. The gentrification of the downtown, it might be a good thing for the future. It’s always good when we improve things. But the traffic, it has been changed several times in Rio. The buses have changed itinerary. Sometimes you go on a bus, and even the driver doesn’t know where to turn because they just change it on almost a weekly basis.

MF: Mauricio, what’s happening at the university where you work? I understand it’s right across the street from one of the new Olympic stadiums.

MAURICIO SANTORO: Exactly. We’re just across the street from Maracanã, the big stadium, saucer stadium in Rio. And we haven’t been feeling all this impact of the Olympics in our daily lives because Maracanã went through a very big reform, that it cost more or less, 1 billion and a half Reals. Let me put you that with a comparison. With that amount of money, I could pay the budget of my university for two full years. And we haven’t been on strike for four months right now because the state doesn’t have enough money to pay our salaries or to pay the salaries for the people who are responsible for the security of the university, for doing the cleaning, and so on. So myself and my students, when we look across the street, we can see very clearly what is the priority of the government right now. And it’s not a vacation, it’s not the university, it’s the Olympics. And we feel very resentful of that.

MF: And Luis, the broader picture of the Brazilian economy in the state of the government finances, I see the economy shrank by five per cent year on year, and has been steadily shrinking for many quarters. You've got the city government, the state government running out of money declaring a state of calamity looking for help from the federal government, and I see reports of hospitals closing as well? How bad is it?

LUIS PEAZE: Yeah. Again, the broad picture, it’s a very hard picture to do. You’re asking me to point out the very core of our problem here, the health system. If you take an angle from very far away from this, you start to look into the education system, the security system, then transport again, see the mobility and environment. The health system has to deal with all of this.

MF: And are hospitals really closing?

LUIS PEAZE: Again, in December, right one day before Christmas, they confirmed of the Rio de Janeiro declared calamity of the health system. And by that time, we had 12 hospitals shut down or with their activity reduced to a minimum. And we saw employees complaining about not having gloves, tissues for their toilets, supplies in general, syringes, things like that. We also had dozens of UPAs, which are emergency care units, so it was only about six and a half months ago. And now one month ago, the new government, the interim government, declared financial calamity of the state. So, there is the broad picture. We cannot comment anything on top of that. Right now, if you need a hospital, you are not sure if you go there and you will be attended.

MF: Mauricio, the ticket sales, I understand, are not going that well. And is it true the government started to give away tickets?

MAURICIO SANTORO: Yes, it’s giving away tickets for the Paralympic Games because they are fearing that there are not going to be enough people. There are lots of empty spaces and that's not going to appear good on television. But it's like Luis was telling us. There is this lack of interest of the population about the Olympics. I can give you an example. Yesterday, there was the final match of the European Championship. And people were discussing that in Brazil much more than the Olympics. You know? Supporting Portugal or France much more than they are discussing what’s going on in Rio right now because of the Olympic Games. And perhaps it’s because Brazil doesn’t have a strong tradition. We have never been among the top 10 Olympic conference, for example. But I think that it has more to do with this general financial crisis in the state of Rio, with the complete lack of resources in the city, and people actually think that we should have other priorities.

MF: Luis, I was going to say that the media do, just before Olympic Games, tend to paint a picture of the host city as not being quite ready and the population may be not as enthusiastic as they could be. But in the end, the home community gets behind the Games and it tends to turn out well. What are the chances this is going to all just pass off well, and Rio and its citizens can be proud of the Summer Games?

LUIS PEAZE: I don't think so. I don't agree with that. I think the media and the media here, we need to point out, we have four major newspapers and only one TV station, very strong, and a couple of them, just around this very TV media outlet. And I think my opinion, from reporting daily basis since six months ago, is that the local population will visit nearby Olympic venues to see what’s going on, to take advantage of the turmoil in a good sense. Cariocas, people from Rio, local Rio people, like to be outdoors. Houses here are not designed for people to stay at home. So they go out, they go near the beach, and they will look like they are happy because Cariocas look like they are always happy. I don’t agree with that anymore, but anyways, still they are.

MF: Mauricio, do you think that the Cariocas and the city of Rio will get behind the games in the end, when all the international attention focuses on your city?

MAURICIO SANTORO: I have the feeling that's going to be very different from the World Cup, for example, when people were very engaged with the Games and so on. Most people here are indifferent to the Olympics. Perhaps that can change a little bit during the Games, but I really don't think that it's going to be an exciting moment for Rio. And we should also remember that Brazil now is facing a very serious political crisis, and probably there are going to be huge demonstrations during the Olympics because that's an opportunity for the protesters to show the world what's going on here. And I am really expecting some tense weeks, some difficult weeks, during the Games in Rio.

MF: Both of you, want to thank you very much for your time. And well, I guess we need to wish you good luck for the Olympic Games and thanks for speaking to us.

LUIS PEAZE: Thank you.

MAURICIO SANTORO: Thank you Mike, have a nice day.

MF: Mauricio Santoro there, who’s a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and Luis Peaze, who's a writer and journalist, and they were both in Rio this morning. The news is next, then in a real estate market as hot as Vancouver’s, people will pay millions for character homes only to tear them down. Stay tuned to the summer edition of The Current across Canada on CBC Radio One.

Vancouver's hot real estate market puts character homes at risk

Guests: Michael Kluckner, Peter Saito, Natalie Bull

MF: Hello, I'm Mike Finnerty and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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MF: Coming right up, the fight to preserve our city's heritage — one brick at a time.

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Welcome to Vancouver in the summer, where the sound of the bulldozer drowns out the sound of the birds.

MIKE FINNERTY: That is writer Caroline Adderson, standing in front of a West Side Vancouver home, and you guessed it, that home is being torn down.

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So I’ve been watching this house for about 4 months. I’m a writer and I see these houses as repositories of narrative. They're built from old growth wood, which is a nonrenewable resource. In this very house that we're standing in front of, if you looked from the upstairs window out at the North Shore mountains, you would be looking at the place where the trees grew that created the wood of the structure you were standing inside. So there's this like embodiment of this connection between nature and the world we build, that we lose when we destroy all these homes in addition to these materials and the craftsmanship from the stories of all the people who have ever lived in the house. And when I do the research for the Facebook page, I always put the first owner in the occupation if I can find it, because that gives people the sense of story. Replacing these homes that could go on for hundreds of years — kind of a form of censorship.

MF: Vancouver writer Caroline Adderson. In the past year alone, the city of Vancouver has issued 974 demolition permits for family homes and duplexes. Of course Vancouver’s housing crisis is national, even international news right now. So the sight of single family homes being demolished — only to be replaced by much larger single family homes — has people such as Caroline Adderson screaming “stop”. Especially when the homes being lost are distinctive character homes. Michael Kluckner is a Vancouver-based author and illustrator. His books Vanishing Vancouver and Vancouver Remembered, have received numerous book and heritage awards. We reached him at his home in Vancouver. Hello.

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: Hello.

MF: Why are hundreds of character homes in Vancouver being bulldozed?

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: Because there's a business opportunity in replacing them. That if you you tear them down, you can replace them with a much bigger house that will sell for a much higher price. The zoning in these Vancouver areas were always allowed for a much bigger property than anything that was historically built. The current feeling of people who are buying in that area, is that they prefer the great indoors to the the former landscape, which was a relatively modest house with a big garden and established trees and so on and so forth. With that business opportunity being there, and also that they are attractive places to live, people who might want to keep those houses are being outbid by people who want to tear them down. So there's a kind of a clash of values of new versus old. Of a different type of a house versus a more historic one. And the kind of community building narrative that Caroline Adderson is talking about in her piece, seems to be in that part of Vancouver just being thrown into the dumpster along with the house.

MF: Can you tell us a bit more about the houses that are being torn down, I mean, sometimes you hear them called heritage homes, other times character homes. How old are they?

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: The typical houses in the areas that she's talking about on the west side of the city, they're interwar houses. So 1920s, 1930s. And they're fairly small. They definitely in a lot of cases have a kind of a cute factor. The style of them is sometimes called storybook. They tend to have steeply pitched roofs, sharply pointed gables kind of, and they fit because they've been there for a long time, and because the whole culture of the place was about gardening and landscaping that they tend to sit kind of framed in a very leafy environment. So the new houses that are coming in, built to the maximum allowable by the zoning, there are a lot of trees that are cut down when the houses come down. Houses tend to be squarer and taller, they don't tend to have the kind of picturesque roof line. An earlier generation of this type of house was branded the Monster House, this is back in the 1980s and the 1990s. And so there's esthetically a real change in the landscape that's happening there. And people are arguing too about the character houses, these kind of interwar houses. They're difficult to modify for contemporary lifestyle, whatever contemporary lifestyle is. And it's that business opportunity. I keep coming back to that, that's what's happening there, and it's not happening in other areas of Vancouver, where you have old houses or heritage houses that fit more closely to the existing zoning.

MF: And then what does it mean to lose this many of those sorts of houses to the culture of the city?

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: I think you can sentimentalize the culture of the city. I think environmentally, if you have a city that touts itself as the greenest city in North America, and these houses are being torn down, and they're actually being ground up for fuel pellets to heat greenhouses, that starts the spin that is put on the sustainability aspect of this thing. You're not getting any advancement in terms of the city adapting itself to more people, because you're actually if anything, losing population in these areas when a small house, some of which might have suites that are then torn down and replaced by a much bigger house that is still a single family house. Those of us of a kind of an aesthetic banter, a historical bent, will say that we are losing an element of culture as these areas are being clearcut. Other people would say, well no this is just people doing what they want to do and this is the new reality in the single family areas. I think it's just lose lose. We are losing a landscape, but we are not gaining a more urban city out of it, a more compact sustainable city where more people can live. If anything, as I say, fewer people are living in these areas than were before.

MF: What would you like to see done to protect the character homes?

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: If I were king, if I were in charge, I would downzone the area. Meaning that I would take the business opportunity out of any demolition, so that if you tore down a 1920s house, you would only be able to build something of the size of the house that you tore down. Now if you were willing to keep the 1920s house, you would have a whole range of options that would be there including lot subdivision, including building significant infill homes on them. Something that would make the the community more diverse and more interesting, but that would also get rid of this pressure to build these huge new houses that I don't believe in the long run are sustainable for people who will live in Vancouver and who will earn a living in Vancouver. These houses that are being built now, I can see them if there's any kind of externality internationally that will pull the money back out, that these will very rapidly deteriorate into being rooming houses in a very short form. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I don't see this as being a long term way of making these communities move forward.

MF: And just lastly, why shouldn't the the person who spends the money who buys these properties not have the right to do what she or he pleases with them?

MICHAEL KLUCKNER: Everybody debates this issue of property rights. And that's like saying the guy next door to you ought to be able to raise sheep or have an auto body shop or something. Cities across Canada, across North America, and really across much of the world, accept the idea of character and heritage as being a public benefit. And they in general accept the restrictions that go on properties like that. The interesting issue about this character house thing, is that a lot of people just say “oh these little houses are just crap, they weren't great houses when they were built, and we shouldn't be wasting heritage dollars” and so on and so forth on trying to retain neighborhoods like this. An alternative point of view would be what particularly Caroline Adderson has championed, that these houses in this landscape are really important to the development of the city.

MF: Michael thanks for talking to us.

MICHAEL KLUCKNER:Thank you.

MF: Michael Kluckner, Vancouver-based author and illustrator, and founding president of Heritage Vancouver. Our next guest has clients who sometimes want to tear down their homes. Peter Saito is a Vancouver real estate agent. He's worked in the industry for 27 years. He's in Vancouver. Hello.

PETER SAITO: Morning.

MF: In your experience why do people who purchase these properties then move to take them down?

PETER SAITO: If the zoning allows for a multi-family, then they will do that because there's more everybody seems to think, more profit for them. Take Shaughnessy (Vancouver neighbourhood) for instance, the part where I work quite a bit. It's one of the top echelon neighborhoods in Vancouver, where houses cost ten, fifteen million dollars each. Now the city has done a broad stroke thou shalt not tear down any property that was built before 1940, in the recent zoning amendment that they did last year in October. Now there's been a big problem trying to sell pre-1940 houses since then. In fact not many have sold, and there is a price difference between something that you can tear down, and something that you cannot tear down, which has increased to about $200 a square foot.

MF: And so how does that change things?

PETER SAITO: That causes a lot of owners who have saved up their entire lives, who have lived in that house for their entire lives, to lose about four million dollars of property value. Well, we're talking about 300 of them. Three hundred times four million dollars is 1.2 billion dollars worth of property value that they just broad stroked out. I don't think that's fair. I think if you're trying to save the neighborhood and have some character houses, you should as a city prepare some money even let’s say a hundred million to buy some of these houses. Then the city owns them and they can do with them whatever they like. Like for instance renovate, repair and keep them as museums of a past era.

MF: But would that really safeguard a neighborhood which has a distinctive character, because wouldn’t that create a patchwork?

PETER SAITO: And on top of that you can also zone a certain way. New houses that are going to be built have to be built in a certain way that matches the character of the neighborhoods; instead of thinking recompensating by adding density and stuff like that. Shaughnessy is a special neighborhood. Shaughnessy is Shaughnessy because of it being single family homes on large lots. Now if you densify it, then it loses its character, it becomes like another town house district.

MF: And it's different how? Again, the house that usually replaces one of these character homes, what sets it apart when they build a new one?

PETER SAITO: Most of the time the sizes become bigger. But more importantly they are more efficient to run, because technology is different these days.

MF: To what extent Peter did you share I don't want to say the sentimentality, to an extent of what Caroline Adderson was saying earlier, and I suppose as well Michael Kluckner, of the importance of these sorts of neighborhoods rather to the overall character of the city? Do you have any time for that? Do those arguments have any kind of resonance in you?

PETER SAITO: Yes. For instance in Shaughnessy there’s one house that belonged to Eric Hamber, the Lieutenant Governor of Canada for one time. And when the Queen, Queen Elizabeth II came to visit, she stayed in that house. That house has a lot of architectural merit to be preserved. So things like that the city could consider buying. If the heritage people have their say, Vancouver’s going to remain a village. And that causes other problems, like efficiency of a city, population growth and a lot of other factors to be considered.

MF: Peter, thanks very much for speaking to us.

PETER SAITO: OK.

MF: That’s Peter Saito, real estate agent. He has dealt with many character home demolition cases, he was in Vancouver. Well the controversy over older houses coming down is also playing out in other cities across the country, and we go to Halifax next.

SOUNDCLIP

So we're standing on beautiful leafy Young Avenue, which is a historic avenue that has been full of big mansions leading into Point Pleasant parks since the 1800s. We don't have adequate protections in Halifax for streets that we value but that aren't actually registered as heritage. So in the past, we just counted on the fact that there wasn't enough money in the city for things like this to happen. You just wouldn't tear that down in the past. Now that the economy has sped up, there's a lot of pressure to “maximize value” as the economists would say, and we're seeing things that previously no one thought would be torn down. Torn down because it makes economic sense to do it, even if it's not good from a community point of view. So we hadn't started changing Land use bylaws, because no one thought they were going to be tearing down mansions. So when the backhoes move in, and the building starts being torn down, there was nothing that the city council could do. All we can do now is work to try and register more heritage on the street, and to change the land use bylaws to protect the kind of houses that are here. It breaks my heart. I grew up in Dartmouth across the harbor, and one of the things you do for fun as a kid is your parents would drive you down Young Avenue, you would see where all the rich people live, and you’d go for a barbecue in Point Pleasant Park. So this has been a part of my childhood, and to see a piece of that historic fabric get wiped out strictly so that the developer can make a little bit more money, it's heartbreaking.

MF: That's Halifax councillor Waye Mason in front of a home demolition on Young Avenue, a street that tour buses drive along to show off Halifax’s historic mansions to tourists. We have some photos on our website, again that’s cbc.ca/thecurrent. And when homes such as that one are demolished, a piece of Halifax's history is being lost. Even if the row houses which replace it will add more housing to the neighborhood. There's a palpable tension in communities across the country between progress and preservation, and our next guest says these conversations are only intensifying. Natalie Bull is the Executive Director of the National Trust for Canada. It's a national charity working to save and care for historic places. And she’s in Ottawa. Hello.

NATALIE BULL: Hello Mike.

MF: What's your reaction to what's been happening in Halifax and Vancouver?

NATALIE BULL: It's interesting to see that bi coastal challenge that we're experiencing. And certainly Vancouver with its perfect storm of zoning loopholes, the great influx of wealth and a rapidly changing demographic, is really the most intense example we've seen. But it's certainly happening across the country. We're still seeing multi-million dollar teardowns and great building stock not necessarily always historic, but just what we might call character homes 1950s buildings even coming down in places like Toronto's North York.

MF: Help us to make the distinction between the two of them, heritage homes and character homes. Because I think heritage home is probably a little bit clearer for people as to why they are important and why they're important for a community, but character homes have a crucial place as well.

NATALIE BULL: Right. The term heritage is used in different ways. Sometimes it can mean places that are formally recognized and designated for their heritage value, their historic associations, or their architecture. Character homes I think is a broader term, and it just helps us recognize places that are special. So neighborhoods that have developed over time, that have a certain palette of materials, and a certain feeling and character that residents value.

MF: In Vancouver the house that we heard being demolished, was being replaced by a mansion. In Halifax it was being replaced to build housing for more people. Is there a lesser of two evils there?

NATALIE BULL: In this day and age, it's really hard to justify tearing down an older building and sending the materials to a landfill and not even increasing the density, creating new housing with what you build. Gentle density is a term that we're hearing more and more in relation to managing change to these older areas. I don't think any of us would say that heritage areas shouldn't change and shouldn't accommodate increasing density, but there are there are ways to do that with secondary suites and developments in the laneways; smaller smarter ways to live in these areas that help protect what's special about it.

MF: Peter Saito, the real estate agent we were hearing from Vancouver makes a strong case for property rights. He talks about homeowners in some neighborhoods where the city will pass new restrictions or new regulations, and then suddenly they'll see hundreds of thousands even millions of dollars just instantly wiped off the values of their home. He makes that argument that is unfair to those people. How do you respond to that?

NATALIE BULL: I think the speculation is what has been unfair. It's really created a lot of uncertainty for residents who love the area and plan to stay. What do we do now, should we continue to invest in our property, should we sell and get out? The use of controls like heritage conservation, district protections, can actually bring that stability to a neighborhood that can help it increase property value. And we've certainly seen that over and over.

MF: In terms of Canadian cities and communities here that in your view you see leading the way, what sort of sort examples would you cite?

NATALIE BULL: It's interesting. I'm in Ottawa right now, they've been experimenting over the last few years with something called a mature neighborhood overlay: new bylaws that started out by trying to manage infill development so that there’s greater density in inner city, older traditional neighborhoods. And it's now been extended to all of the neighborhoods within the green belt. In places like Edmonton even in the 1950s and newer neighborhoods, residents are really wanting controls to help manage change to their neighborhoods in the face of the desire for greater density, and so tools like direct control zoning have been used there. Something very interesting in the Vancouver case, the first Shaughnessy area with its recent naming as a heritage conservation district — the first in Vancouver — is also an interesting and more traditional response.

MF: And your recommended response? What would you like to see happening across the country?

NATALIE BULL: I think this idea of gentle density is a great idea to spread. The idea that traditional neighborhoods can accommodate greater density, but we have to be more careful and sensitive and in bringing it into place.

MF: Natalie, thank you very much for your time, appreciate it.

NATALIE BULL: Thank you.

MF: Natalie Bull, Executive Director of the National Trust for Canada. She was in Ottawa. That's our program for today. We started today's program with a look at the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio, and we're going to leave you with comic Stephen Colbert riffing on just a few of the problems plaguing the Rio Games. This is from earlier in the summer. I'm Mike Finnerty, thanks for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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STEPHEN COLBERT: I am pumped for the Rio Games, they are less than two months away — or never. Because just yesterday Rio’s acting governor warned the Olympics could be a big failure. Which is actually an improvement because until yesterday, it looked like a massive catastrophe. The Olympics are in real trouble. Many of the venues are still unfinished, possibly because more than ten billion dollars in construction contracts went to just five firms, all of which are currently under investigation for price fixing and kickbacks. This has already led to top executives being jailed or charged. Though on the plus side for those executives, the prisons won't be completed until 2036. Plus, Brazil has one of the highest violent crime rates in the world. Which led Rivaldo, a former member of Brazil's Olympic soccer team to warn tourists to quote, “stay in your country of origin, because here you'll be running the risk of your life.” Leading to Brazil's newest tourist slogan, “Brazil, come for the sport, stay cause you’re dead.” But, experts don't expect an increase in arrests during the Olympics, in part because police patrols may grind to a halt, because they can't afford to buy fuel. Though with any luck, the problem will solve itself — when the cars are stolen. These budget shortfalls led first responders to stage protests all over Rio yesterday, including one at the airport where police held a sign that read, “welcome to hell.” Yes. Hell. Explains why they're changing the Olympic logo from three people holding hands, to two guys mugging the other guy.

[Sound: Applause]

[Music: Ending theme]

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July 11, 2016 full episode transcript

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