Powerful, untouchable poverty and drug-addiction industry in Vancouver

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.....