The Salient Group

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Prince of the City
In the run-up to the Olympics, Robert Fung is renovating the real estate business in one of Vancouver’s most troubled areas.

Light streams into a secluded mews in Vancouver’s Gastown, transforming bullet-blue shadows into golden sunshine. Local restaurateur Scott Hawthorn stands clutching a can of cleaning spray outside Salt Tasting Room — a starkly minimalist charcuterie in Blood Alley. “It’s for the graffiti someone put on my wall,” he says. “There’s always new graffiti around here.”

All over Vancouver, property owners and city officials are cleaning up. They’re getting ready for 2010, when Vancouver hosts the Winter Olympics. The sprucing-up effort has even reached the fringes of the Downtown Eastside — among the poorest postal codes in Canada.

There’s just one problem. Every night, an estimated 1,700 people sleep rough on the streets of Greater Vancouver. With a vacancy rate of 0.7%, the city is struggling to accommodate its own economic success. Public expenditure on Olympics-affiliated capital infrastructure projects alone is pegged at $620 million; the provincial government, by contrast, recently announced $41 million to public housing. Homelessness advocates accuse officials and developers of trying to airbrush the city clean of its “undesirable elements” to make way for shiny, new Olympic-ready facades — and the tenants to match.

Enter Robert Fung and the Salient Group.

Fung is a developer. He makes money by creating stunning new designer condos out of some of Vancouver’s oldest building stock, in some of its most depressed neighbourhoods. And he’s using a basket of incentives he helped devise in which a chunk of public money from the city offsets some of his costs.

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