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.....
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Vancouver is extremely good at feeding, housing and supervising the injections of the Downtown Eastside. But for all the money and attention here, there is little success at either getting the area’s shattered populace back on their feet, or cleaning up the neighbourhood into something resembling a healthy community.
Until that changes, say critics, Canada’s “poorest postal code” is only going to get worse.
“We’ve made it Fortress Downtown Eastside; easy to get in, exceptionally hard to get out of,” says Ernie Crey, president of the AREA’S Aboriginal Life In Vancouver Enhancement Society (ALIVE).
As Vancouver’s cheapest neighbourhood—and the site of most of its social and Aboriginal services—the Downtown Eastside funnels in vulnerable and low-income people from across Western Canada.
Once there, “quite literally, there are going to be people on your doorstep dealing drugs or encouraging drug use … and beyond that, they’re going to try and exploit you in other ways, like turning you out for prostitution,” says Mr. Crey, whose sister Dawn lived in the neighbourhood for 20 years before she was murdered by serial killer Robert Pickton.
ALIVE, which does not take government funding, is one of the most vocal critics of what it calls the Downtown Eastside’s “broken system”: Unaccountable non-profits, a general disinterest in tracing the impact of government funding, and a complete lack of any coherent end-game for the place.
“The way things are happening now, things are going to get much worse, it’s just a terrible system, straight-up,” said ALIVE’s executive director, Scott Clark. “Everybody should agree this is unacceptable.”
Comprising 18,500 residents, the Downtown Eastside has always been rough around the edges. As far back as the 1950s, Skid Road, as it was known, was already notorious for its high concentration of beer parlours, mayhem and murder.
But it has only been in the last few decades that a tough neighbourhood has devolved into one of the worst in Canada. Hard drugs replaced booze, patients from de-institutionalized mental hospitals flooded in and police presence was pulled back and the area became dominated by social services.
Leo Knight walked the Downtown Eastside as a Vancouver beat cop in the 1980s, when he said officers were able to keep on lid on the area’s “bubbling cauldron” of crime. That is, until beat teams were abolished in favour of a softer “community policing” approach.
“In a nutshell, the police gave up the streets in the early 1990s,” he said. “What we have now is the largest open-air drug bazaar in North America, and in my day, we didn’t tolerate it.”
As of 2009, there were more than 250 service agencies and housing operations in the Downtown Eastside, spending a total of $360 million per year. Roll in the spending on social assistance, and the area easily costs that $1 million a day.
“You just keep dumping money in, building social housing and filling it up with people from all around the region and the country … they all get chemically dependent, and it’s just more sales for the drug dealers,” says Philip Owen, Vancouver’s mayor from 1993 to 2002.
As the conservative-minded son of a B.C. Lieutenant Governor, Mr. Owen was the unlikely champion of Insite, the city’s supervised injection site.
But he staunchly opposes what he calls the city’s unilateral policy of “ghettoizing people” in the Downtown Eastside, rather than spreading social housing throughout the city.
It is easier said than done. Terrified at the prospect of becoming another chaotic, needle-strewn corner of the city, neighbourhoods are known to militantly oppose anything with the slightest whiff of being a homeless shelter.
Last December, for instance, the opening of a 40-person short-term housing facility in East Vancouver prompted an angry mob of local residents to flood the building’s lobby in protest. “We didn’t anticipate 100 Chinese people coming and yelling,” said City Councillor Kerry Jang, who was dispatched to calm the crowd.
More recently, a downtown neighbourhood rose in revolt to a city plan to temporarily house 150 homeless in a leased Quality Inn. “Everybody knows this will result in hundreds more police and ambulance calls in that neighbourhood per year,” wrote one letter-writer to the Vancouver Sun.
And merely housing the homeless does almost nothing to address the underlying problem of drug addiction.
“Nobody can go through recovery here, for the most part, it’s just not possible,” says Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, a drop-in centre for survival sex workers (women who use prostitution to pay for their addictions).
‘We’ve made it Fortress Downtown Eastside; easy to get in, exceptionally hard to get out of’
There are only three detox centres in the neighbourhood, with only a handful of beds. “It’s only a seven-day stay, and nobody kicks a lifelong habit in seven days.”
Stanley Q. Woodvine, a homeless Vancouver blogger who supports himself by collecting beverage containers, took up the issue of drug addiction in a lengthy October post, saying that Vancouver’s policy of simply “warehousing” the drug-addicted “can’t end homelessness and neither will it sustainably slow it down.
“It is not a stepping stone to real independence but more of a dumping ground for misfits … a kind of gulag full of people with no expectations beyond their next government assistance cheque or hoot, whichever comes first,” he said.
The neighbourhood’s Drug Users Resource Centre recently debuted Canada’s first crack pipe vending machine, followed closely by a program to teach alcoholics how to brew their own beer.
When too many Downtown Eastsiders were being killed after staggering into the street, the city dropped the speed limit on Hastings to 30 km/h. When activists balked at a police crackdown on illegal street vending, city hall put up $30,000 for a weekly “binner’s” market that has become notorious as a hotspot for stolen goods.
Michelle Fortin is the executive director of Watari, a Downtown Eastside group that counsels youth back into “self-sufficiency.” She says that in trying to give dignity to the addicted, there are groups who have taken to “managing people” in their current state, rather than helping them develop an “exit strategy.”
“The idea is not to make them comfortable in their circumstance, the idea is to get them to take some risks to do things better and differently,” she says.
But after years of stagnancy in the Downtown Eastside, a popular theory among Vancouverites is that the neighbourhood is kept unhealthy on purpose – with too many non-profit and “poverty pimps” relying on Downtown Eastside funding, they’re incentivized to stick to the status quo.
“They want to maintain themselves, these people are poverty administrators, they want to be there,“ says Mr. Crey.
In fact, the Downtown Eastside has increasingly been shaped into a place tailor-made to house a permanent population of addicts.
The theory is a good way to anger a Downtown Eastside social worker, and Sean Condon, the editor of Megaphone Magazine, a street newspaper sold by coastal B.C. homeless people, says it’s a myth.
“No one wants rampant drug addiction to continue, no one wants rampant poverty to continue.”
Still, the myth wasn’t shattered by news in March that one of the Downtown Eastside’s dominant charities, the Portland Hotel Society, was caught spending tens of thousands on limos, luxury hotel rooms and European vacations.
Further disillusionment came when restaurants opening up in the formerly abandoned buildings of the Downtown Eastside found themselves subjected to months of aggressive protests—and even threatening torchlit marches—by self-styled “poverty activists.”
More galling still, many of these demonstrations were organized by the Carnegie Community Action Project, a hard-left group that receives funding from City Hall and operates out of city-owned buildings.
“To me it’s astounding that we accept all this,” says Michael Geller, a Vancouver architect who has had involvement in Downtown Eastside planning. “I think collectively they’ve simply decided that maybe it’s not such a bad place.”
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/11/14/vancouvers-gulag-canadas-poorest-neighbourhood-refuses-to-get-better-despite-1m-a-day-in-social-spending/
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