As part of OPIRG’s Alternative Welcome Week, a presentation called “Gentrification and the Art Crawl” was held in the Student Centre on Sept. 14 about an hour before Supercrawl began. The talk addressed the changes happening on James Street North, and how the coffee shops and art galleries that have opened on the street are influencing this change.

“When I hear about that kind of thing, I always get tense,” said Tim Potocic, one of the main organizers of Supercrawl and an owner of the downtown Hamilton record label Sonic Unyon. “And it’s purely selfish, because I spend so much time trying so hard to avoid conflict, to try to appease as many people as possible.”

The basic idea of gentrification starts with a neighborhood where everything is cheap. People might not make much money, and there’s low-income housing and social services designed for the people living there. At some point, a person who is drawn to the neighborhood by the cheap rent is inclined to take a bit of a risk, and they start something that appeals to people outside the community. Quite often, these are artists who open galleries. The area then becomes trendy, and everyone wants to go there. Slowly, everything becomes more expensive.

“Instead of offering them food co-ops and affordable housing initiatives, we’re giving them very expensive café’s and galleries and apartments that aren’t going to be able to house low-income people,” said Riaz Sayani-Mulji, an organizer and facilitator of the gentrification talk.

In theory, the problem with gentrification is that the concerns of low-income people are forgotten. But the question is whether the way gentrification is theorized is actually the way it’s playing out on James Street North.

“Nobody has the thought, ‘I’m going to buy that building and I don’t care about those people that I’m going to put on the street,’” said Potocic. “These are not people that are buying buildings and turning them into giant Wal-Marts and only care about the mighty dollar and don’t care about the people they are putting on the street. They do, and they feel guilty about it. And they – actually, which nobody sees – make efforts to help those people.”

Potocic said that his ideal street has a diverse group of people with all different levels of income, and that new development doesn’t necessarily mean that low-income people are displaced. But, just as gentrification might be different in theory than in practice, Potocic’s vision of a street could have some problems.

“The one thing that I see most clearly when I’m at work is the increase in police presence on James,” said Sayani-Mulji. “With gentrification, when you’re trying to clean up the street and get rid of all the ‘undesirables,’ with that comes a social policing as well. And I’ve seen a lot of, I wouldn’t say brutality, but definitely rough-handling of youth, very aggressive behaviour. I’ve had to report the police on more than one occasion while I’ve been at work.”

Sayani-Mulji recently graduated from McMaster and has worked at youth shelters downtown for several years. He said that the Jamesville Community Centre, which he used to work at and was located a block away from James North, went into decline before being closed and relocated last May. The Hamilton Spectator reported that the relocation of Jamesville was always planned, and that it was simply because of more opportunities in the new location. But Sayani-Mulji said that the gentrification on James North also had a role.

“I think it’s just a difference in priorities,” he said. “The city has made its commitment to this creative class and revitalizing the community through art, but that comes with a sacrifice.”
The extent to which art is influencing City funding priorities is questionable, but Sayani-Mulji also had a more explicit example of how the changes on James North are affecting the community.

“The Notre Dame House, a shelter I used to work at, has received enormous pressure over the last few years to relocate because it’s almost seen as an eyesore along James Street North,” said Sayani-Mulji. “But what they’re doing, and what is great to see, is that they’re taking part in the Art Crawl. So the youth that are staying at the shelter and the youth they serve are getting involved in things like the Urban Arts Initiative and saying, ‘We’re part of this community, and like it or not, we’re going to take part in the events that you’re running, like the Art Crawl.’”

What remains to be determined is whether a coffee is shop just a coffee shop, or if it really does have some larger role in gentrification.

“I think that we all have to be cognizant that, and this is very true for McMaster students, that we’re entering into a living community,” said Sayani-Mulji. “It’s not something static that we can mould into what we like.”

Nolan Matthews, Senior ANDY Editor

Tim Potocic has the job of being one of the main organizers of Supercrawl, and it’s a huge task for a huge event. Last year, 50,000 people attended the festival, and this year’s expected attendance was around 75 000.

Planning Supercrawl for so many people was a year-long job for Potocic. And as that year of organizing was whittled down until just one week was left before the event, the panic set in.

“I had late nights that weekend before, as well as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” said Potocic. “It’s pretty panicked. I wish we were more organized.”

After Thursday, Potocic’s experience planning Supercrawl starts to sound more familiar to any student who has left a massive assignment until the day before it’s due.

“When I got up on Friday it was full-on,” said Potocic. “I didn’t get home until seven in the morning on Sunday, and I only slept for two hours on Friday night. And that’s the way it is. You just run on adrenaline because you know there’s an end. We know the street has to open up at 8 o’clock on Sunday morning.”

Even by forgoing sleep, Potocic didn’t really get to see much of the festival he was responsible for.

“This is the first year I’ve actually been able to catch one set of one band,” said Potocic. “I saw Change of Heart. They are reuniting to do very few shows, so I needed to see it.”

Before Change of Heart and the huge crowds, Supercrawl began four years ago as something much smaller. Potocic has been there since the very beginning of the idea.

As one of the founders of the Sonic Unyon record label, located just off James Street North, Potocic has always been part of the monthly Art Crawl, but he wanted the event to grow, to really push it and see what it could do.

“We got a big group of people together, there was at least 20 people in a room,” said Potocic. “We said that we wanted to close the street, because we thought it should be closed anyway during the regular monthly art crawls, even at that point in time, and we thought, let’s try to do a street festival. That was literally in June. Then everyone sat around and was like, ‘Yeah, it’s a cool idea.’ And we had twelve weeks to plan it, which is not enough time.”

With the initial plans approved by the city, the next problem was deciding what to call the event.

“We were batting names around, and I was like, ‘Well, its going to be super! Let’s call it Supercrawl,’” said Potocic. “It’s a dumb name, really. We’re specialists in dumb names, so it kind of fits. I mean, Sonic Unyon is a weird, dumb name.”

So with the name decided, the organizers rushed to get everything else finished under the impossibly tight timeline of a couple of months. Instead of happening in September, like the other Supercrawls, the first was pushed to October to give the organizers more time. And when that time was up, Potocic and the other organizers prayed they would be lucky with the one thing they couldn’t plan.

“It poured rain,” said Potocic. “But we still had thousands of people out with umbrellas, and we were like, ‘Huh, thousands of people came out and it was pouring rain, so clearly there’s a need for a street closure festival style-thing, so let’s start working on 2010 right now.’”

Since then, planning future Supercrawls has taken all year, and that means Potocic hasn’t really been able to catch his breath even though this year’s event has just ended.

“I’ve already had two conversations with two agencies that are good friends of mine about what we’re going to do next year,” said Potocic. “We’ll really need to have our wish-list of top five acts that we’re looking at to headline potential stages locked in before the end of the year.”

Though Potocic is responsible for organizing the big stuff, that’s only part of what allows Supercrawl to happen because, ultimately, the whole James Street North community is involved.

“That’s the key to making Supercrawl and art crawl and James Street North as amazing and vibrant as it is, because it is a community initiative,” said Potocic.  “We do a lot of community outreach to make sure that we’re not taking liberties that we shouldn’t. I mean, there will always be critics, but we try our best to reach out with the limited staffing and resources we have to run something like this.”

Next week, part two of this article will look at what the critics are saying and Potocic’s response. Hint: it has to do with gentrification.