Vancouver’s ‘gulag’: Canada’s poorest neighbourhood refuses to get better despite $1M a day in social spending
Tristin Hopper | November 14, 2014
VANCOUVER – In a campaign that has otherwise been pretty scant on details, mayoral challenger Kirk LaPointe rolled out at least one policy point that got some attention: If elected, the former journalist would initiate a crackdown on the drug dealers of the Downtown Eastside.
“The people that bother me the most are the predators down here, the people that are taking the few dollars that the residents have from them,” he said in an interview with Gastown Gazette, a vocal advocate against what it has called the neighbourhood’s “revolving door poverty policies.” “Those are the people that I think have to be rerouted out of the system.”
It’s fertile election terrain. Mayor Gregor Robertson was elected in 2008 with a vow to “end homelessness by 2015.” But it remains fertile electoral terrain – because after years of pumping the area with social housing units, not only has the homeless count actually gone up, but the new roofs seemed to have little effect on the area’s epidemic of drug use and on-street chaos.
It is among Canada’s greatest puzzles: Why has one of the country’s richest, most beautiful cities abandoned its historic centre to scenes of abject misery—even as it absorbs $1 million a day in social spending?.....click "Read More" below to continue.....
11/22/14
7/2/14
The right to be drug addicts permanently and paid for
Money wasted on Vancouver's DTES
By Leo Knight, Law and Order, 24 hours Vancouver, July 1, 2014
The hand-wringing continues unabated in the Downtown Eastside. The weekend’s Vancouver Sun detailed a laundry list of 260 agencies that provide some form of “service” to the roughly 6,500 residents in need in what we used to call the “Skids.”
Those 260 agencies collectively spend an estimated million dollars a day in a neighbourhood that plays host to the world’s largest open-air drug bazaar. The DTES also contains North America’s first supervised injection site, where heroin addicts can use to their heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that if they overdo it, a health-care professional paid for by the taxpayer will ensure they are brought back to life and live to stick a needle in a vein another day.
Broken down, that’s a little over $48,000 per year per resident impacted. And that’s before you factor in the money given to them in welfare, housing, the cost of medical care, plus the policing or corrections costs that are all inevitably involved.
Instead, we have a small circle of hand-wringers and poverty pimps trying to convince the rest of us (who actually pay the bills) that salvation is at hand. It isn’t. The vast majority of these folks cannot be fixed, whether it is their addiction issues that caused their mental health issues or vice versa. It’s all related. Let’s at least admit it.
Thirty years ago, junkies didn’t use in the open on the streets or in an alley. They would get arrested. The open-air drug bazaar in the East Hastings area that has been prevalent for the past 15 or 20 years didn’t exist when the Vancouver Police Department had control of the streets.
And there’s the rub. VPD gave up control of the streets when they started hosting community barbecues at Main and Hastings, and calling junkies and dealers “clients.”
Then came the likes of the group Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, who trotted out the nonsense that drug users were somehow a part of mainstream society. In fact, I was stunned to learn in the Vancouver Sun that Vancouver Coastal Health was, in part, funding VANDU. While it’s true that VCH has to deal with the ramifications of drug use, it should not be funding the enablers who are foisting their ridiculous views on those of us who actually pay the freight for this bafflegab.
The story is not about how much all of this is costing, it should be about how do we stop the nonsense.
And all of this for 6,500 folks. For the record, Riverview used to be home to about 5,000 patients. But that was before we became enlightened.
Leo Knight is a former police officer, security expert and host of primetimecrime.com
http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/2014/07/01/money-wasted-on-vancouvers-dtes
By Leo Knight, Law and Order, 24 hours Vancouver, July 1, 2014
The hand-wringing continues unabated in the Downtown Eastside. The weekend’s Vancouver Sun detailed a laundry list of 260 agencies that provide some form of “service” to the roughly 6,500 residents in need in what we used to call the “Skids.”
Those 260 agencies collectively spend an estimated million dollars a day in a neighbourhood that plays host to the world’s largest open-air drug bazaar. The DTES also contains North America’s first supervised injection site, where heroin addicts can use to their heart’s content, safe in the knowledge that if they overdo it, a health-care professional paid for by the taxpayer will ensure they are brought back to life and live to stick a needle in a vein another day.
Broken down, that’s a little over $48,000 per year per resident impacted. And that’s before you factor in the money given to them in welfare, housing, the cost of medical care, plus the policing or corrections costs that are all inevitably involved.
Instead, we have a small circle of hand-wringers and poverty pimps trying to convince the rest of us (who actually pay the bills) that salvation is at hand. It isn’t. The vast majority of these folks cannot be fixed, whether it is their addiction issues that caused their mental health issues or vice versa. It’s all related. Let’s at least admit it.
Thirty years ago, junkies didn’t use in the open on the streets or in an alley. They would get arrested. The open-air drug bazaar in the East Hastings area that has been prevalent for the past 15 or 20 years didn’t exist when the Vancouver Police Department had control of the streets.
And there’s the rub. VPD gave up control of the streets when they started hosting community barbecues at Main and Hastings, and calling junkies and dealers “clients.”
Then came the likes of the group Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, who trotted out the nonsense that drug users were somehow a part of mainstream society. In fact, I was stunned to learn in the Vancouver Sun that Vancouver Coastal Health was, in part, funding VANDU. While it’s true that VCH has to deal with the ramifications of drug use, it should not be funding the enablers who are foisting their ridiculous views on those of us who actually pay the freight for this bafflegab.
The story is not about how much all of this is costing, it should be about how do we stop the nonsense.
And all of this for 6,500 folks. For the record, Riverview used to be home to about 5,000 patients. But that was before we became enlightened.
Leo Knight is a former police officer, security expert and host of primetimecrime.com
http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/2014/07/01/money-wasted-on-vancouvers-dtes
5/3/14
An entrenched poverty industry
Shelley Fralic: Redevelopment won’t solve Downtown Eastside’s problems
The same moral and legal standards should apply there as anywhere else
By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun columnist March 3, 2014
You can bandy about all the earnest statistics and well-meaning initiatives and heavily funded social engineering experiments you want.
You can wring your hands and tug your forelock and lie awake at night desperately seeking solutions for the crushing poverty and rampant criminality, for the open-air drug market and the mentally ill street wanderers.
You can build more low-income housing and actively campaign for grassroots help, from the experts and the non-profits, from the government and the rich, and even from the middle class that pays the bills to make the city livable for everyone.
But it still boils down to this: If you want to turn the Downtown Eastside — relentlessly branded as Canada’s poorest postal code, a notorious cesspool of enabled addicts, revolving-door criminals, sanctioned poverty and supervised narcotic consumption — into a place where families want to live, where it is safe to walk the streets and where felons and drug addicts are treated, well, like felons and drug addicts, then you need to face facts. ....click "Read More" below to continue...
The same moral and legal standards should apply there as anywhere else
By Shelley Fralic, Vancouver Sun columnist March 3, 2014
You can bandy about all the earnest statistics and well-meaning initiatives and heavily funded social engineering experiments you want.
You can wring your hands and tug your forelock and lie awake at night desperately seeking solutions for the crushing poverty and rampant criminality, for the open-air drug market and the mentally ill street wanderers.
You can build more low-income housing and actively campaign for grassroots help, from the experts and the non-profits, from the government and the rich, and even from the middle class that pays the bills to make the city livable for everyone.
But it still boils down to this: If you want to turn the Downtown Eastside — relentlessly branded as Canada’s poorest postal code, a notorious cesspool of enabled addicts, revolving-door criminals, sanctioned poverty and supervised narcotic consumption — into a place where families want to live, where it is safe to walk the streets and where felons and drug addicts are treated, well, like felons and drug addicts, then you need to face facts. ....click "Read More" below to continue...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
