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...
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