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We all have a fetish . . .
. . . and mine is for zombies. But I'm also happy to see latex, leather, etc., if it's for a good cause. In this case, the cause was a Save the Main event. These guys are campaigning to keep Montréal's red light district from being turned into yet more office space (we already have more than we can lease!). Anyway, part of Bonnie's baladi troupe was dancing in the evening's cabaret element, although the feature event was a fetish film festival as part of the Montréal Fetish Weekend.
The dance connection wasn't the only reason I went. As it happens, I believe that cities need red light districts. Tonight, I heard that lots of cities are bulldozing red light districts to make room for more offices. Well, I've seen that happen, folks, and the reality is this: It disperses the district's people and activities all over the city. If you're into this stuff, it becomes harder to find. If you're opposed to it, guess what? It ends up in your back alley. Either way, nobody wins . . . least of all the people who work there.
And that's enough politics for one night.
The dance connection wasn't the only reason I went. As it happens, I believe that cities need red light districts. Tonight, I heard that lots of cities are bulldozing red light districts to make room for more offices. Well, I've seen that happen, folks, and the reality is this: It disperses the district's people and activities all over the city. If you're into this stuff, it becomes harder to find. If you're opposed to it, guess what? It ends up in your back alley. Either way, nobody wins . . . least of all the people who work there.
And that's enough politics for one night.
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Of course, San Diego already has a large amount of half-occupied office and commercial space. But I doubt that would stop the city from encouraging people to build more, if we had any red light districts to tear down. The only thing most Californians have learned from the real estate bubble is that they want the government to bring it back.
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Save The Red Light District!
Of course, it did disperse the prostitutes around the city.
Re: Save The Red Light District!
Wait, didn't you say convention center?
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I realize that it's common to have moral objections to lap dancers, strippers, and prostitutes, but let's be honest: There's enough of them in business in one area because the demand exists. The demand won't go away. Why put these people out of a workplace and then lie about the reasons? ("We need more office space!") How is lying a moral thing?
Setting that aside and getting to something I actually know about: There's also the fact that the same district supports alternative entertainment. A percentage of that is risqué, like most fetish shows and some burlesque. However, much of it – like a lot of niche dance and performance art – simply lacks a venue. How do the forces crushing a red light district on two-faced moral grounds justify tossing artists in the street in order to build empty towers?
It's a complex problem. However, it has its roots in the fallacy that the square feet of city you get to have dedicated to your particular interests should be proportional to the tax dollars you pay. Thus, wealthy developers and suburbanites feel entitled to dictate how the inner city is used, despite rarely going there. Meanwhile, people who work or perform there are silenced.
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Unlike most people (but like many city planners), I rarely hear a moral argument for or against "gentrification". Ultimately, it's all about money, and the perceived best interest of the competing interests involved. If you hope to see Montréal's "Performing Arts District" preserved, you will need to find an economic rationale for its continuation. (God, I miss being able to think in colloquial English right now!) This is especially if you're dealing with actual religious prejudice, for which there can be no moral debate that is not absolutist.
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What you say about an economic rationale is completely true. Everybody knows it, too. The problem is that Canadian culture – and I include Québec culture here, although that's approximate – doesn't work that way. You're speaking American. Up here, people expect a socialized solution. Of course, this would come from the same place as the impetus to build big glass towers, whence the problem.
To expand: The very artists who want the region preserved are relying on economic handouts; they are not generating significant revenues. Unsurprisingly, the Powers That Be feel that makes them a net loss where office space would earn. The moral issue is that this comparison is a lie. We already have a ridiculous vacancy rate for office space, so office space would be a net loss, too, and would represent the economic momentum of an earlier era carrying a delayed plan forward when it's no longer the best plan. Even if the region were vacant lots, it would be dumb to build offices; therefore, doing so when people and businesses stand to be displaced seems especially offensive to some.
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At this point, though, it's clear that all I can do is turn up my palms and say, "Sucks, don't it?" I clearly don't understand the situation, for example how development got backers when the vacancy rate is already so high. There must be some sort of government development subsidy? My instinct is always to follow the money, and that applies pretty much regardless of culture. So now I'm curious: Who's getting some on this deal?
Construction unions?
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There may have been some effect from the housing bubble. I've read that it's starting to turn into a commercial real estate collapse as well, though more slowly.
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I see a lot of empty office space out in Oregon's Silicon Forest (i.e. Hillsboro and vicinity), where all the dot-coms died. Downtown Portland, though, place be hoppin'. I'm thinking we have our "urban growth boundary" to thank for it. Even so, when I see a massive class 'A' complex in Hillsboro with an actual for sale sign on it, something is very very wrong.
A couple of Asian churches got very nice digs as a result, though. Which led to the further jarring-but-rather-nice image of a lovely children's playground next to a shining glass tower.
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. . . and mine is for zombies
I find the notion of ZDSM equally amusing and disturbing.
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No Red-light: Portland doesn't have a red-light district I can point to (it used to, I think, if my memories of the old Pearl are any guide). The sex trade is dispersed all over the city. Advertising is simultaneously blunt and non-graphic, i.e. the signs are textual but not subtle. I never really hear locals complain; Portlanders are nothing if not blasé about vice. Crime is very solidly in the lower middle of the chart for large US cities.
Mixed Red-light: Los Angeles also seems to match low-end sex to high rates of violent crime, creating numerous red zones. Meanwhile the mid-level "massage parlours" have a racket set up with the local chiropractors that offers them considerable legal shelter. Before he retired, my father became something of a specialist in taxing the mid-to-high sex trades (tax evasion by other groups required less innovation to counter). Like all retail, it needs to be close to the customers, and so is dispersed away from any definable red-light district. His stories of visits to high end defence attorneys are far more harrowing than his more comedic tales about his treatment at various tax-dodging brothels.
Definite Red-light: In San Jose, Costa Rica, there was a clear red light district, which happened to lie along my way home between two expatriate colonies. I got into a knife fight in San Jose's red-light district (in the alley behind "The Red Windmill", which was far less classy than the French establishment that inspired its name), one of the few times I've been assaulted. Nobody intervened or, perhaps more shockingly, even ran away. The police also didn't go into that area. There was "blight".
An additional observation: Amsterdam was, from what I am told, cutting back on its red light district primarily because it was a magnet for human trafficking. This seems like a legitimate concern to me.
(By the way, I've been working almost exclusively in non-English or in very badly translated English for the last several days. If my prose is choppy, and it feels like it is very choppy, this is why.)
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Los Angeles also seems to match low-end sex to high rates of violent crime
The police also didn't go into that area.
Amsterdam was, from what I am told, cutting back on its red light district primarily because it was a magnet for human trafficking.
This argument seems to be focusing on crime and/or lawlessness. Mostly, that's a nonissue here. We're not talking about crime . . . we're talking about Joe Blow having to see signs for burlesque joints. Or his mother, Mrs. Effie Blow (91 years of age), being offended at a 200-lb. man in a leather suit being led on a chain by a girl in latex.
Locally – and it's always anecdotal, isn't it? – I could point to half a dozen spots on the Montréal map with higher crime rates and scarier crimes than this one. For instance, there are areas run by street gangs and others terrorized by cycle gangs, and several where ethnic tensions result in regular deaths. For the most part, the dominant "crime" in the region I'm talking about is manufactured, in the sense that hookers work there and Canada hasn't seen fit to legalize their trade.
I do hear the human-trafficking angle – see my latest campaign recaps for how I feel about that, really. Here, it's internal: Girls are spirited into Montréal, Toronto, and Vancouver from towns and smaller cities. It's hard to say whether Amsterdam's experience applies. It's a reasonable claim that demand stimulates supply, but it's just as reasonable to assume that defining a region and a tax rate makes things easier to police. I'm not sure that anecdotes are enough to decide the issue.
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