Downtown Eastside at ‘tipping point’ as London Drugs considers leaving Woodward’s building

A broken window is plastered with a sticker bearing big, red letters declaring: “DANGER.”

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One day earlier this month, a man used a metal baton to smash the glass in the front door of the London Drugs in Vancouver’s Woodward’s building, before threatening to kill the workers inside.

Police promptly arrested a man in connection with the incident, and he was charged with assault with a weapon, mischief and uttering threats, court records show. He has 26 known aliases, and dozens of charges and convictions in B.C. courts over the years, mostly for theft, robbery and probation breaches. He wasn’t held in custody after this month’s charges.

Such incidents have become frustratingly commonplace at London Drugs stores in many of B.C.’s downtown cores, says Clint Mahlman, president and chief operating officer at London Drugs, but the Woodward’s location — opened in 2009 as an anchor tenant for the landmark redevelopment — has been a particular challenge.

“We bought into the vision of the governments of the day, wanting to use investment in the community to revitalize the area,” Mahlman said. “We’ve lost millions of dollars. We’ve never made money in that store, and that’s not our point, but our point is, is that it hasn’t worked. Because they didn’t bring all the other things to bear at the same time, to help convert the neighbourhood.”

London Drugs’ lease at Woodward’s ends in October, Mahlman said, and the company hasn’t decided whether it will continue operating there.

Mahlman said that in his company’s conversations with government officials and police, he believes they share a serious concern about the prospect of London Drugs and the neighbouring Nesters supermarket leaving Woodward’s.

“It’s seen as a bit of a domino effect,” Mahlman said. “But how much money do we are we expected to lose for the community benefit? How many staff members do we have injured? And how many people have to transfer out of there?”

Last summer, TD Bank closed its Woodward’s branch, and has cited safety as one reason. The summer before, JJ Bean closed its café in Woodward’s, with company owner John Neate telling Global News that he was “fed up” with rising crime and the harassment of staff. Both storefronts remain vacant.

The two largest remaining commercial tenants at Woodward’s are London Drugs and the Nesters Market.

A retailer or two closing up shop isn’t always big news. But the outsized symbolic and strategic importance of Woodward’s means that the potential loss of these businesses — and possible knock-on effects of that in the broader neighbourhood — is alarming people in the community, at city hall and even the provincial government.

What happens at Woodward’s affects the whole of the nearby Downtown Eastside, which starts just over one block away.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim said Thursday in a speech to a community safety forum that what happens in the DTES “affects our entire city and our entire province.”

Sim declared his intention to halt any additional supportive housing in the city, calling for an end to the “hyper-concentration” of social services in the DTES. The mix of support and fierce criticism that met Sim’s announcement underscored how conflicting visions for the neighbourhood’s future still generate intense debate.

The history of Woodward’s is similarly contentious.

Woodward’s Department Store opened at the corner of Hastings and Abbott streets in 1903, and did brisk business for decades in what was once Vancouver’s premier shopping district. The store’s closure in 1993 coincided with a downturn for the broader neighbourhood, and the building remained vacant until activists squatted there in 2002 demanding affordable housing.

In 2003, after the city bought the property for $5 million and committed to redeveloping it, then-Mayor Larry Campbell re-lit the massive ‘W’ sign in a ceremony. At the time, Coun. Jim Green — the late DTES community leader-turned-city councillor who was pivotal in the Woodward’s project — told The Vancouver Sun that the re-illuminated red ‘W’ was “a symbol of the rebirth of Woodward’s and of the Downtown Eastside” and “a beacon of hope.”

The redevelopment, completed in 2010, took up most of a city block incorporating four buildings, 536 market condos, 200 below-market rental units, floors of office space, Simon Fraser University facilities, child care, ground-floor commercial space and more.

The mix of social and market housing, cultural and commercial uses, and public space was hailed as a bold social experiment to revitalize the neighbourhood. To help bring in businesses, city hall gave the commercial space a 10-year property tax exemption, but that ended in 2021.

As the massive redevelopment approached completion, Ian Gillespie, CEO of Westbank, the project’s developer, told The New York Times: “There is so much riding on this project … Everyone sees it as a panacea for huge social problems.”

Not everyone was a fan. Some in the DTES complained about gentrification and displacement, the bringing in of new businesses selling expensive organic smoothies and luxury cosmetics, the kinds of goods the neighbourhood’s low-income residents didn’t need and couldn’t afford.

You can’t solve fundamental social problems with a building … no matter how well-designed and executed.

Geoff Meggs

But, to many observers, the social experiment of Woodward’s seemed largely successful — at least for awhile.

“It was a very far-sighted project,” said Geoff Meggs, who worked in the Vancouver mayor’s office under Campbell from 2002 to 2005, then served on Vancouver city council from 2008 until 2017, when he became then-Premier John Horgan’s chief of staff.

Woodward’s seemed to bring new life to the neighbourhood, Meggs said. “But you can’t solve fundamental social problems with a building … no matter how well-designed and executed.”

A few years after Woodward’s was reborn, Meggs said, a “double blow” hit this neighbourhood particularly hard: an increasingly toxic and deadly drug supply, which led to a public health emergency in 2016, and the start of COVID-19 in 2020.

DTES resident Gordon Bird said that during COVID and, soon after, the atmosphere in the public space in the Woodward’s atrium was “super-belligerent.”

On a quiet morning recently, Bird relaxed on a bench in the atrium and shared stories of violence and chaos in this space during those years. But recently, Bird has noticed an increased police presence, he said, and things seem calmer.

“This is my backyard,” said Bird, who was previously homeless in the DTES and now works for a non-profit in the neighbourhood. “This is where I shop. This is where I go.”

Last September, a month before a provincial election in which crime and public safety became major issues, B.C. Premier David Eby announced provincial funding to boost policing in downtown cores, including Vancouver’s.

The Vancouver police used this money to boost the police presence in the area, said department spokeswoman Const. Tania Visintin, but violent retail theft remains a chronic, and often under-reported, problem.

Since the VPD increased patrols inside the Woodward’s atrium last October, there have been “some slight improvements,” said a spokesperson for Pattison Food Group, which owns Nesters Market, in an emailed statement. “We are very appreciative of the VPD’s efforts; however, the violent encounters remain high.

“Crime in this area has steadily increased over the last decade, but in the past two years, we have seen the number of violent incidents increase by more than 400 per cent,” the statement said.

Pattison Food Group declined to answer whether the company had decided whether to stay when its current lease ends.

The commercial landlord of Woodward’s, Westbank, has been in “constant contact” over the past several months with both the mayor’s and premier’s offices, said Emilie Lok, Westbank’s head of commercial real estate. “Everyone is in this together to come up with a solution. It’s obviously not something that’s going to solve itself overnight, but I can say there is a commitment across the board.”

The Pattison spokesperson and Mahlman, the London Drugs’ president, both said they have met with municipal and provincial government officials to discuss concerns about crime and disorder. Both companies were founding members of Save Our Streets, a coalition of business and community groups formed before the last provincial election to pressure governments to improve public safety.

Mahlman believes municipal and provincial officials are taking the issue seriously.

“They’re particularly worried about that area as a tipping point. If they start to see more businesses close, I believe that there’s a genuine worry that it creates a domino effect,” he said. “If any of the large retailers leave that area, what’s next?”

Mahlman said he appreciated Sim and his team coming to Woodward’s in October to visit with him and his staff. Two weeks after Sim’s visit to Woodward’s, the mayor introduced a motion at city council to fund a new community policing centre to serve the Gastown and Hastings Crossing neighbourhoods.

Reached this week, Sim said the new community policing centre is expected to open in March and will be “transformative” for the area.

Hastings Crossing Business Improvement Association executive director Landon Hoyt, part of the advisory group for the new policing centre, said the empty space at Woodward’s vacated by TD Bank has been identified by all parties involved as a good location for the new policing centre but hasn’t been confirmed, and talks are underway between the city, the VPD and Westbank.

“We have had several working meetings now and I’m confident we are heading in the right direction,” Hoyt said.

The community policing centre is part of the city’s recent efforts in the area — along with increasing its sidewalk cleaning and bylaw compliance — aiming to “enable retail businesses to remain and thrive,” said Vancouver’s deputy city manager Sandra Singh.

The city isn’t only concerned about commercial tenants leaving Woodward’s, but also more broadly across the DTES, where the storefront vacancy rate is roughly triple the citywide average, Singh said.

“Vacant storefronts result in reduced services for residents, workers and visitors to the neighbourhood and a less active public realm. We do not want to see other businesses leave the area,” Singh said in an email.

The City of Vancouver previously leased two floors of office space — about 17,000 square feet — in Woodward’s from Westbank, which it vacated in summer 2023 as part of “a decision to consolidate city operations from Woodward’s to other city-owned buildings” to save money, said Singh.

The loss of the Army & Navy retailer, which closed during COVID in 2020 after 101 years in business one block east of Woodward’s, left a major hole in the community, said Steven Johnston, executive director of the Community Impact Real Estate Society, a DTES non-profit commercial leasing and property management social enterprise. (The owners of Army & Navy are now planning a mixed-use redevelopment of that site with residential towers)

Now, the possible loss of Nesters and London Drugs — the only full-service grocery store and one-stop shop for daily needs in the immediate area — represents “a big risk to the community,” Johnston said.

Vacant storefronts “create a void” that invites other kinds of activity that can be detrimental to the neighbourhood, Johnston said. “It becomes a cascading problem.

“People need places to shop, work and socialize,” Johnston said. “Right now, we don’t have those to the degree that we would benefit from them. And that type of investment is what will help propel the Downtown Eastside into the next best version of itself.”

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