NOT ON OUR STREET

On a frosty Friday night, the chant of a dozen homeowners on Prince
Albert Street is civil but clear: "No more drugs! No more drugs!" The
round Styrofoam signs they carry marching back and forth between 26th
and 27th avenues are equally direct: No Drugs, No Crime and No
Litter. Their chanting, and the waving of the signs, intensifies as
they pause by one of two homes on the block they suspect of housing
drug dealing, prostitution or both.

The residents mean what they say. They don't want the illegal drug
trade and commercial street sex in their neighbourhood. Yet for all
their defiance, they're in a good mood, chatting freely, smiling and
laughing in the intervals between chants. The event is less a protest
march than a friendly gathering of friends and neighbours.

It's a stark contrast to six months ago, when the quiet neighbourhood
of tidy middle and working class homes, centred roughly on Fraser
Street between 25th and 29th avenues, looked to be on a downward
slide. Street prostitution was on the rise, with noisy and sometimes
belligerent clients prowling the streets. Drug dealers had set up
shop in rental suites and garbage piled up in back lanes. Businesses
were fleeing the area and commercial property was defaced by graffiti
and vandalism.

Today, the worst problems have begun to disappear, thanks to hard
work by residents who organized protests and civilian patrols, met
with merchants and lobbied police for increased enforcement in the
area. Street prostitution has been pushed out, drug dealing has been
reduced and much of the graffiti wiped clean. The residents have
organized informally under the name Block Out, and the more
optimistic among them believe their battered section of Fraser is due
for an economic and social revival.

The undeniable success of Block Out underscores the dilemmas facing
many East Side neighbourhoods. Through no fault of their own, Fraser
Street residents have blundered into messy and pressing social, legal
and moral issues that remain unresolved. By responding to the
undesirable activity, they've succeeded merely in moving it to
another part of the city. But in the process, they've rediscovered
the rarest of commodities among urbanites: community spirit and
neighbourliness.

The problem facing the Fraser Street neighbourhood last year was
simple. Although the street lacked the political cachet of Commercial
Drive or the new-found hipness of Main Street, long-time residents
say the area had traditionally been quiet and friendly, with only the
occasional break-in disturbing the peace of hardworking homeowners.
But farther north, a persistent campaign by homeowners and Vancouver
police in the past several years had put pressure on prostitutes and
drug dealers in Strathcona. Tired of the hassle of arrests and
protests, many of the prostitutes moved on. According to Const. Gerry
Burke, a community police officer with the Cedar Cottage
Neighbourhood Safety Office, roughly a dozen prostitutes followed the
path of least resistance and moved along Fraser as far as 29th
Avenue, finding rental accommodation where they could and working
openly on the street. Most are drug addicts, says Burke, and drug
dealers followed their major customers.

Six-year resident Sharole Tylor first noticed the growing presence of
prostitution and drug-dealing when some of the homes near the house
she shares with her husband and young son became rental properties.
The landlord of at least one let the place deteriorate, and soon a
drug dealer moved in. From her front door, Tylor watched customers
and suppliers become regular visitors as his business grew. "The guy
in the TransAm with the gold chain was a dead giveaway."

The problem, she says, is that the newcomers didn't care about the
effect of their activities on the neighbourhood. Break-ins increased
up and down the street. Garbage piled up in the alleys and the
climate became intimidating.

"One day, the guy with the gold chain and the guy in the home were
having fisticuffs right in the middle of the street," she says.

Tylor, who grew up in the quiet, West Side area of Dunbar, began
investigating around the neighbourhood and discovered a bawdy house
had been set up above a second-hand store on Fraser Street nearby.

Police and city hall offered little in the way of concrete response.
Tylor discovered her stretch of Fraser is in a no-man's land between
various civic and police jurisdictions. The one office that gave her
advice and told her who to contact at city hall was the Cedar Cottage
Neighbourhood Safety Office. But she was still acting on her own.

Then in August of last year, a flyer arrived at Tylor's house
announcing a community meeting at a nearby Baptist church to discuss
the growing crime problem in the neighbourhood. Tylor attended and
was amazed. So many people showed up that she could barely squeeze
into the meeting room. "That was the first time I realized that
anyone noticed that there was a problem besides me," she says.

Key among those who had noticed were the meeting's organizers, Cathy
Loukas and Emma Hunter. The two had moved into the neighbourhood two
and half years ago, completely unaware that their new home was in the
path of oncoming social problems. One night, returning to the
neighbourhood, Loukas saw a stranger, a woman, on the corner. "I
remember coming home and thinking, hmmm, that doesn't look like
someone I know, and what are they standing on the street corner for
at 1 a.m.?" Loukas and Hunter walked around the area and discovered
prostitution and drug dealing were more common than they realized.
Calls to police were met with apologetic explanations of limited
manpower and the fact that prostitution wasn't illegal. The activity
escalated, and soon it was common to see several women working on
Fraser at night. The noise created by customers also increased.

Loukas and Hunter weren't satisfied working alone. Last July, they
sat down at their computer and churned out handouts inviting their
neighbours to a barbecue to discuss the problem. Nearly 40 people
showed up, anxious and wanting a solution.

"We thought, wow, we've started something here, and we better do
something about it," says Loukas.

A second meeting at the church attracted 70 people. By the fourth
meeting, 200 people were attending. Encouraged by long-time resident
Tom Little, who became the group's media liaison, Tylor joined and an
informal group dubbed Block Out was born. The structure was kept
simple and informal with subcommittees to handle specific problems, a
core group of organizers and monthly general meetings. A separate
watchdog group formed to tackle problems around Kingsway.

"I thought maybe this was a group I could do my little bit through,"
says Tylor. "As one person, you can't really accomplish a whole lot."

Realization that there's strength in numbers became key to the
group's success. It was a lot easier to carry a sign along Fraser
Street demanding that criminals leave the area when 60 people joined
in, as happened in August during one of Block Out's first major
actions. Assisted by Burke and his office, the group also pressured
Vancouver police for increased patrols. A sting operation by police
in the fall resulted in a slew of arrests and warnings to prostitutes
and dealers. The word was out that Block Out wanted the neighbourhood
cleaned up. By winter, prostitution was down, drug dealing was in
retreat and many properties looked cleaner.

>From the beginning, Fraser Street residents knew if they succeeded in
pushing out prostitutes and dealers, the illicit activity would only
move to another part of the city. After all that's how the problem
came to their area, and that's exactly what happened after similar
campaigns in the West End, Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Burnaby and
Surrey-not to mention other Canadian cities, says SFU criminologist
John Lowman, who specializes in researching prostitution.

"We have detailed records of the geography of Vancouver's
prostitution strolls from 1960 to 1999 and one thing is clear:
vigilante action displaces street prostitution; it does not suppress
it," he says. "The displacement usually occurs not because of the
vigilantism as such, but because police step in. Using a variety of
techniques, including telling women that they will not be prosecuted
if they work in the recognized strolls, they restore order. If the
police end the practice of tolerating prostitution in certain areas,
vigilante action may not achieve anything."

Worse, Lowman says Vancouver police have adopted a strategy of
allowing informal red light strolls in industrial areas where the
potential for violence, including murder, against prostitutes has
risen dangerously.

Raven Bowen, project coordinator for the Mount Pleasant-based
Prostitution Alternatives Counselling Education, admits residents
have the right to safe neighbourhoods. But she shares Lowman's
analysis that community action displaces prostitution as opposed to
making it disappear. She says poverty and histories of personal abuse
are the impetus for much of the activity that bothers the residents,
and she wonders how much real compassion the activist residents have
for women who work the streets. In March, PACE is renovating six
housing suites near Fraser and Broadway for young women getting out
of prostitution, and hopes to secure volunteers assistance from the
community. "That's when we'll know [if] we're getting community
support," says Bowen.

Both Bowen and Lowman also argue that if the residents want a
long-term solution to the problem of prostitution, they should lobby
the federal government to change laws governing the trade. Bowen says
this means changing federal laws to allow the creation of safe areas
in the city for prostitutes to sell sex to men.

But is it fair to saddle a group of ordinary East Side residents with
the responsibility for a long-term solution to a perennial and
immensely messy social question like street prostitution?

Tim Everett, who coordinates civilian street patrols for the Dickens
Community Crime Watch, doesn't think so. Centred along Kingsway near
the frequently vandalized Charles Dickens elementary school, the
Dickens group formed in October when, as Everett says, Kingsway
suddenly became a "war zone."

After receiving training from Const. Gerry Burke and the Cedar
Cottage Neighbourhood Safety Office, the residents organized daily
and nightly patrols, reporting suspicious activity to police. As with
the Fraser group, they've watched prostitution and drug dealing
decline through the winter. "If these people come into our
neighbourhood, you can bet we'll write down their licence plate
numbers and pass them on to police," Everett says. "We've asserted
the fact that there are residents in the area, and we want to be
here."

The loose group of volunteers has a diverse range of opinions on
crime and prostitution. Some, moved by the working women they see on
nearby streets, have formed a sub-committee to look at far-reaching
solutions. But finding solutions and convincing governments to
implement them is not easy for volunteers busy with jobs and families.

"We're not a professional lobby group," says Everett. "We don't have
anyone on a payroll. We just want to make our neighbourhood safe."

Late last year, councillors Lynne Kennedy and Gordon Price met with
Fraser and Dickens organizers and were sympathetic. Price, who helped
organize some of the city's earliest anti-prostitution campaigns in
the West End in the early 1980s, says residents have the right to
establish minimum standards of behaviour for their neighbourhoods.
"Prostitution and drugs seek out weak communities," he says.

But Kennedy says council will never consider safe areas, or red light
districts, for prostitutes because she says it's a federal government
issue beyond the city's legal jurisdiction. She also questions the
morality of the city effectively condoning a trade she considers
harmful to women.

"We have no power to do that," says Kennedy. "Why would we spend our
energy on something like that? We'd rather take a positive role."

A positive role for Kennedy means the city's ongoing support for its
"john schools." Run by the John Howard Society, the schools educate
men caught soliciting prostitutes about the social consequences both
for women selling sex and the neighbourhoods in which sex is sold.
Kennedy says 180 men have gone through the program in the past two
years, and the city also hopes to sponsor a program to help
prostitutes quit the trade. But even Kennedy admits the schools will
never banish prostitution for good.

Const. Gerry Burke finds pushing prostitutes from one street to the
next ultimately frustrating, and suggests police or the courts be
given wider powers to channel prostitutes that turn tricks for drug
money into better detox programs. But Burke isn't holding his breath.
"They'll still be dealing with this problem when I retire," he says.

For the Dickens and Block Out volunteers, that could mean many more
years of marches and street patrols. Residents even wonder whether
the decline in numbers of prostitutes is more due to cold and rainy
winter weather than their efforts.

Yet Everett, Loukas, Tylor and their fellow activists have no plans
to leave the neighborhoods they love. In fact, they've widened their
agenda to include reviving the sagging economic fortunes of their
commercial districts, peppered with retail vacancies. Members of
Block Out have met with merchants and encouraged them to take pride
in the area and the storefronts. Along with the Dickens residents,
they're also researching the idea of city-sponsored business
improvement associations to support and attract more enterprises.

Loukas echoes a common view that Fraser has a chance to become like
Main Street, now undergoing a small-scale urban renaissance. She says
she's also discovered what a rich resource her previously unknown
neighbours were. In the fall, anonymous neighbours dropped off boxes
of vegetables and fruits on Loukas and Hunter's doorstep to thank
them for getting the ball rolling. It's made them even more
determined to fight for their neighbourhood.

"It's been fantastic getting to know my neighbours," says Loukas.
"You can leave your house and know people are looking out for it.

"I think that the relationship I have in this area is something not
many people have in a big city. It would be horrible to lose."