Dust (un)Settling: How the Woodward’s Building Became the Center of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Housing Crisis. 

Clouds of dust billow up as Woodward’s comes crashing down. It’s an overcast September day in 2006 and the building that had been sitting vacant and boarded up for thirteen years was about to change the trajectory of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver. As the dust poured onto Abbott and Hastings streets, there was a sense of grief and loss settling into the cracks of the sidewalks. Woodward’s came down, the squat had been dismantled, efforts lost, and the skyline of the Downtown Eastside would never be the same. 

On September 30th, 2006, all but the oldest portion of the Woodward’s department store was demolished. (Photograph by Tannoy, Woodwards building Vancouver demolition 2, September 30, 2006, Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Woodwards_building_Vancouver_demolition_2.jpg).

The Woodward’s building first opened in 1903 and was a marker of the prosperity in the West Hastings shopping district.i In the 1980s Woodward’s was still open and serving its community with affordable food floor options and the famous dollar forty-nine day, but there was shift in the neighborhood was marked by the 1993 closure of the department store. It was this closure that marked the beginning of the housing downfall in Vancouver and the downtown eastside (DTES) specifically. Through an interview with Ivan Drury— an original member of the Woodward’s squat protest––as well as reading archival material and studies done by Carnegie Community Action Project (CCAP) I have come to understand the importance of the destruction of Woodward’s not only as the loss of a historic building, but as a loss of what could have been hundreds of low-income housing units in the name of revitalization. Throughout this piece I will examine what led to the crumbling of the Woodward’s building and how the new structure continues to serve as a reminder that the City of Vancouver is far from treating housing as a basic human right. 

Here we have the East Van cross (officially called the Monument for East Vancouver). The symbol, which had been used by graffiti artists for decades in the neighborhood, was imagined by artist Ken Lum and was erected in 2010.

The Woodward’s building is located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood. The neighborhood is defined by eight sub-neighborhoods: Strathcona, Victory Square, Gastown, Downtown-Eastside Oppenheimer, the Hastings corridor, the industrial strip, Chinatown and Thorton Park.ii It is within this relatively small sub-section of the city of Vancouver that issues like poverty, homelessness, chronic drug use, and housing live under a microscope. I live in East Vancouver, not in the neighborhoods that make up the eight sub sections of the DTES but right along its border. This summer I spent a lot of time on the corner of Abbott and West Cordova, one block away from the Woodward’s redevelopment and the infamous corner of Abbot and Hastings, as my partner has moved into the refurbished Alma building. We spent our nights quietly crammed into the one-hundred and seventy-six square foot apartment exceedingly aware that we were breaking the no guest rule put in place by the building management. Outside his window there was the ever-present hum of sirens and the larger than life “Land Back” mural. We would go to the Nesters inside the Woodward’s development to buy an expensive bag of chips, walk the block back to the apartment passing no fewer than five people passed out on the sidewalks.  

My view from the Alma apartment this summer. This mural is less than a block away from the Woodward’s complex.

It was here and in this context that I was drawn to housing in the DTES. If my partner –who has supportive parents and works full time– can barely afford his cramped space, how are the people who are in worse off situations than him supposed to access this fundamental right? I was faced with the Woodward’s building daily and had a fondness for its romantic and idealized past.  

Upon its opening in 1903, the Abbot and Hastings Woodward’s department store was an important community marker in Vancouver’s east end neighborhood. It drew business and wealth to Hastings Street and the surrounding neighborhood. People came from across Vancouver and the Lower Mainland to shop the store’s iconic sales, the food floor, to park their cars in the adjacent two hundred car parking –the largest in Canada at the time of its opening.iii It brought economic prosperity to the area and led to the opening of other stores along the 100 and 200 block of West Hastings Street, each attempting a gain from Woodward’s success. By 1957, Woodward’s had undergone nine expansion phases and consisted of twelve stories, the adjoining parking garage, and took up three quarters of the city block. This success felt like it would never come to an end, but with the dawn of the 60s came the beautification of what was becoming a somewhat of a skid row.iv 

Looking east from the corner of West Hastings Street and Cambie Street in 2025 with the 1950s view layered on top (sourced from the City of Vancouver Archives: reference code AM54-S4-:Str P413.2). The businesses that lined the 100 block of Hastings in the 50s have been replaced with an SFU campus and 3 coffee shops.

“Blight is death to a city” booms the narrator in the 1964 film To Build a Better City, and blight was starting to take over the DTES by the 60s.v Houses were falling into disrepair which further isolated the neighborhood from the rest of the city. It was in the 60s that the city first started to ask “how can these worn out areas be renewed?”vi While Woodward’s stayed in business throughout the 60s and into the early 90s, the neighborhood around it was drastically changing. The DTES –considered to be the blight of the city— was turning into a point of interest for Vancouver’s city planning department. New social housing projects like the Mclean and Raymur housing developments began replacing overcrowded historic colonial houses that had fallen to disrepair.vii 

Many were displaced due to these housing developments which systematically removed blight-ridden houses replacing them with high density housing one block at a time. It is because of these projects along with the downsizing of the Riverview Hospital that homelessness was officially pronounced an issue in Vancouver in the 1980s.viii Mentally ill patients from the hospital were released with no residence set up. Japanese Canadians came back from a generation of internment camps and displacement, arriving home to their properties in the vibrant Powell Street neighborhood were sold off by Custodian of Enemy Property (a federal government agent).ix Indigenous residents face heightened levels of displacement inherently due to Canada’s colonial history and present. Lack of cultural resources and alienation by government bodies are considered formed of neocolonial displacement that have disproportionally effected Canada’s Indigenous population.x These groups come together in the DTES, woven together because of concentrated social resources, safe injection sites and other supports which began to emerge in the 80s along with the acknowledgement of issue. It is because of the response to the displacement crisis that the DTES has become an epicenter for even more lifesaving resources for its residents. 

This is the 2025 view of the Woodward’s building on East Hastings Street (looking West) with a 1986/87 photo from the Vancouver Legacies Program layered on top (photo sourced from the City of Vancouver Archives, reference code COV-S477-3-F111-: CVA 775-2.3). In the photograph from the 1980s, you can see the section of the department store that was demolished in 2006.

Blight continued to take over and the increase of housing projects led to a decline in shoppers at Woodward’s by the 1980s. The food floor had been sold off to Safeway in 1986 as a desperate way for the department store to dispose of its assets during a time of financial hardship.xi This ultimately led to Woodward’s closing it’s doors in 1993. As the building sat vacant, the streets of the DTES filled with more and more unhoused folks with each passing year. The building sat there, insulting them with its thousands of unused square feet of housing space boarded up and inaccessible. The first homeless count of the City of Vancouver was done in 2002 and at that point in time the count was six-hundred twenty-eight sheltered and unsheltered people in the City of Vancouver.xii This number has done nothing but grow with the most recent published count being in 2023 and having found two-thousand four hundred twenty people self-identifying as homeless with six hundred five of those people being marked as un-sheltered. A number tripled from the 2002 count which already noted itself as being a drastic shift from numbers in the 90s. It was in this context that something powerful was brewing.  

The Woodward’s redevelopment was a highly contentious social issue in the early 2000s and polarizing views by members of the community and the Anti-Poverty Committee (organized by Ivan Drury and his colleagues) led to the three-month long Woodward’s squat. The Woodward’s squat (or Woodsquat) was not a part of the Woodward’s history that I was familiar with before speaking with Capilano University professor Stacey Bishop. We were in conversation regarding my interest in social housing and Vancouver’s housing failures and the Woodward’s squat was brought up. After roughly ten years of the building sitting vacant, a group of activists, secretly backed by the Portland Hotel Society, were joined by the Anti-Poverty Committee (APC) on a march to the Woodward’s building. Upon their arrival this is what Ivan Drury describes seeing:  

There they were, leaning out the window, waving to us. And I was amazed and so I said to Sean Hey, throw down a ladder. We should all come up. He put down a ladder [and] I went up and then a whole bunch of us went up the ladder into the building and then we opened it as a squat. Their intention was to do a symbolic occupation of the building with just the four or six of them and hang a banner from the big tower up top, which they did, and call for the for the city to buy the building and dedicate it to 100% social housing.xiii 

Their efforts ultimately led to a series of arrests of the squatters and the protest was aggressively dismantled by VPD. 

This is the corner of Abbot St. and W Hastings St. from the perspective of the Woodward’s building. This building is Abbott Mansion and is currently SRO housing. It was on this street corner that arrests were made dismantling Woodsquat.

The 100 block of West Hastings, marked by the abandoned Woodward’s building, was being called the “worst block in Vancouver” and beyond the “boundary into hell”.xiv It was words like these published in the Vancouver Sun that pushed the moral panic rapidly spreading in Vancouver at the time which largely situated around the HIV epidemic that saw the DTES as its epicenter.xv Situated within this context of panic, fear and polarization that groups of social activists began to use the neighborhood as their stomping ground. Young, fresh-faced activists beaming with passion and possibility were stationing themselves on the DTES. It was a place where activists like Ivan Drury were advocating for safe drug injection, housing for all, and  

The goal of the redevelopment of Woodward’s and the shift towards social mix in the DTES has always been to ‘brighten’ the neighborhood or reconnect it with the rest of the city socio-economically.xvi Even more recently, city councilor Mike Klassen said that he has a photo of Hasting Street in the 50s that he looks to as inspiration for how that neighborhood can be once morexvii. We need to understand that yes, the Woodward’s was important for the socio-economic status of the DTES at the time, there were reasons for its closure. Varying factors exacerbated by city halls’ lack of support for Vancouver’s population on the brink of being on the streets led to the ‘decline’ of the neighborhood in the 90s which ultimately (along with Woodward’s filing for bankruptcy) led to the closure of the store. Should we be striving for a dated idea of Vancouver? So much has changed in Canada since the 50s, why is a current city counselor wanting to go back to a time that was arguably worse for the most vulnerable populations in our city?  

Residents of the DTES have access to a few different housing options. There are supportive housing units which are subsidized housing units with on-site support for at risk populations. While the initial move to a supportive housing residence may be marked with hope, these buildings institutionalize the housing crisis and are themselves oxymoronic as they are, according to Drury, “…neither supportive nor housing…”xviii Comparatively, social housing –which as a category has been eliminated from the BC housing budget –is a housing development that the government subsidizes.xix Often lumped in with supportive housing we have single room occupancy’s/accommodations (SROs/SRAs), these are often the worst kind of housing as they are mostly privately owned and there have been examples of SRO landlords letting buildings rot, become rat infested, and lose power with little to no regard for the tenants.xx 

It was a similarly dreary day when the news came across my feed: “leaked memo from the office of Mayor Ken Sim.” I was shocked at the supportive housing freeze that was proposed but agreed that what is happening on the DTES is not working and needs to be changed. I spoke with the people around me who were also shocked by the freeze. It reminded us of Woodward’s and the years of protest and lack of progress that took place within its walls after the closing of the department store doors. The plan to its core is a gentrification plan, similar to the plans that Westbank put forth in their bid for the redevelopment of the Woodward’s building. Gentrification has always been at the heart of the DTES. What do we do with it? Is a question that has been brought up by local, provincial and federal politicians since the 80s. But that question needs to be reframed.  

The Woodward’s squat was more in line with the interests of the community than the city’s redevelopment plan. The city of Vancouver has historically not listened to the needs to the community members. In the “DTES Plan Three-year Summary of Implementation (2017-2019)” overview showed a distinct split on housing needs with “some community advocated suggesting that social housing requirements should be increased” from the current 60-40 current policy –60% of new housing needs to be social housing while 40% can remain market value.xxi While businesses and other counters of this idea are “concerned that the expansion would negatively impact business investments.”xxii Some amazing supportive housing has come out of the temporary modular housing (TMH) that were a part of the 2014 DTES plan which have provided shelter specifically for residence facing homelessness following a housing first approach. As well as the focus on SRO revitalization and replacement with over one thousand one hundred fifty-two SRO replacement units planned since the plan’s inception.xxiii The issue with these new supportive housing initiatives is that they are often temporary and thus not actually social housing but rather feed into the ever growing institutionalization of housing. Many experts call for the DTES to be a “social justice zone” as a way to prevent or resist gentrification.xxiv 

Nothing written about gentrification on the DTES can be written without the acknowledgement of the hundreds of Indigenous people who have been displaced because of the greed and colonial mindsets of city politicians and developers. Let the Land Back mural be a reminder that the majority of the residence of the DTES are Indigenous and cutting housing is just another form of colonization. 

By October 1st 2006 the dust had disappeared and all that was left was the bones of the protected historic Woodward’s. A shell of what once was, filled with developers in construction hats scheming to build an idyllic building where the rich and the poor would come together and live in harmony.xxv It is yet another story of the unhoused being given no right to speak for their needs, being bulldozed by city administration and pushed further out of their community spaces. Looking at the Woodward’s building now it is anything but idyllic, but the “W” still looms as a glowing reminder of the fight lost, of the rooms taken and of the ever increasing need to address housing for residents of the DTES.