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Developing Story: Grants help preserve city’s heritage buildings

The Vancouver Heritage Foundation is once again accepting applications for its 15-year-old small grant program, which is designed to help owners preserve Vancouver’s heritagehomes and buildings. There are four categories in the grant program.

The Vancouver Heritage Foundation is once again accepting applications for its 15-year-old small grant program, which is designed to help owners preserve Vancouver’s heritagehomes and buildings.

There are four categories in the grant program. To qualify for three of the categories, the building has to be on the heritage register, while the forth category helps the owner nominate their building for the register, explained Vancouver Heritage Foundation spokesperson Kathryn Morrow.

“It’s good to get the word out that we have these as an option for people because a lot of times one of the things [people] worry about with a heritage home or a heritage building or site is, how do we pay for it? How do we make sure we can maintain it for the future and keep it in the community?” Morrow said.

“So this is a way we can fill the gap between really big restoration projects and smaller maintenance-type projects. Things like restoring the porch on your house may not seem like a big deal but it keeps that house in keeping with its original intention. It makes it a great part of the neighbourhood. The community benefits by having restored heritage buildings and there’s been a lot of reports and studies done on the impact that restored buildings do have on the neighbourhood. People like living in them. People like working in them. They enjoy them more.”

The organization handed out about $10,000 worth of small grants in 2014, a figure augmented by Benjamin Moore with the donation of paints. Grant amounts are typically between $500 and $1,000 but are based on the number of applications received.

True Colours is one grant category. It helps owners restore the original colours to a building.

“That includes the consultation and also the paint from Benjamin Moore,” Morrow said. Three buildings earned these grants in 2014.

A second type of grant is called the Restore It grant.

“The idea of that one is if there is original fabric that either needs to be fixed up or if it needs to be re-created to keep with the original intention of the building, it can help with that cost,” Morrow explained.

This grant helped the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre restore the Japanese Canadian War Memorial in Stanley Park, which marks the lives of Japanese Canadians who died in combat for Canada in World War One and subsequent conflicts.

It hadn’t received a significant restoration since the 1980s, according to VHF.

The plaque was updated to recognize more recent conflicts, glass panes in the lamp were repaired, and repairs were made to the mortar and to worn elements in the pillar’s base.

Morrow said the memorial “looks cleaner, fresher, newer. It looks well loved.”

A third grant category is called House Call, in which a heritage consultant gives an owner a plan to help maintain and restore their building into the future.

The fourth grant category — Get on the Register —helps with the process of nominating a building to be included on the city’s heritage register.

It was awarded to the Ming Sun Benevolent Society in 2014, which is trying to get the Ming Sun building on Powell Street recognized on the register. It’s also getting a House Call grant to help draft a long-term conservation and maintenance plan.

The City of Vancouver ordered the demolition of the Ming Sun building just over a year ago in mid-November of 2013 due to safety concerns.

It sparked an effort to save the building based on its historical importance — it was once owned by a prominent Japanese-Canadian family and is one of the 20 oldest buildings in Vancouver.

Morrow said the Get on the Register grant was worth about $500 — about half the cost of preparing the documents to nominate the building for the heritage register.
Interest in preserving Vancouver’s heritage homes and buildings has grown over the years, as more and more have been demolished to make way for new buildings.

In 2013, Caroline Adderson, a West Side resident, launched the Vancouver Vanishes Facebook page to chronicle the loss of heritage homes.

Last May, heritage conservationists held a rally in front of the Legg Residence in the West End to call attention to the issue. The Legg Residence was knocked down to make way for a 17-story tower.

In June of this year, city council approved new regulations designed to reduce the number of older homes being knocked down and to require building materials be reused and recycled for pre-1940 homes if they are knocked down.

“In the two years I’ve been with the VHF, I’ve noticed there has been more public talking about heritage,” Morrow said. “It used to be a select group who were very much into it and cared about it and loved it, but I think generally, the city — the citizens of Vancouver, are much more interested in keeping the history of Vancouver and not accepting that it’s a young city and that we don’t need to care about this. Vancouver does care about it. Part of it is because there seems to be a lot of it lost. I think [people were] concerned that there were so many houses coming down, there were so many buildings coming down that it suddenly became important because it was visual. It wasn’t just a pie in the sky number. It was suddenly the neighbour next to them — the house was gone. Once you can physically see it in your neighbourhood, it means a little more. You can see the neighbourhood changing.”

For more information about the small grant program go to vancouverheritagefoudnation.org. The deadline for applications for 2015 is Feb. 2, 2015 at 5 p.m.

noconnor@vancourier.com
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