By Frances Bula, on December 10, 2017
The Gain Wah is the kind of business that Vancouver planners are looking at these days in an effort to figure out how to support and preserve what are being called “legacy” businesses, starting with Chinatown but eventually in other parts of the city.
Those are businesses that, as Bill Yuen from the Heritage Vancouver Society explained to a full house of interested locals at a city workshop on Friday night, “embody values regarded as important to how people view and experience their memory of an area.”
The fate of those businesses, especially in Chinatown, has increasingly become a concern, as Vancouver real-estate prices soar and the demographics change around areas such as Chinatown, the Punjabi market and the once Italian-dominated Commercial Drive.
In Chinatown, in particular, where there is a lot of upheaval and change, community groups and businesses are concerned about preserving the character of the once-flourishing neighbourhood. For them, that means preserving not just buildings, but the bookstores, produce sellers, restaurants, herbal shops, housewares-supply stores and service offices that have been pillars of the area for years.
It’s an issue that many cities in Canada and the United States are struggling with, as cherished businesses that symbolize the history of the city or neighbourhood fall to gentrification, development or the disappearance of ethnic enclaves.
But it’s not simple to figure out exactly what a legacy business is and what the city can do to help preserve them.
A consultant hired by the city to work on the problem went down to San Francisco to study the legacy-business support program there.
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