OUR BLINDNESS TO FIXES FOR SOCIAL PROBLEMS IS COSTLY

Life on the front lines facing a load of social issues these past
three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that
can't come to grips with what's going on in its streets.

It's been something of a grim awakening.

Not the issues so much -- 23 years in journalism had already
introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people
living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit
sector in 2004.

No, it's my newfound knowledge that we're paralyzed with indecision
about what to do about any of it that has proved the most unsettling.

I sometimes fear I'm drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a
risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain
haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s.

I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy
for its common sense.

Tasked with finding a way to keep aging people out of hospital when
they didn't need to be there, the project team figured out a solution
using a variety of strategies ranging from helping seniors with their
household chores to developing mobile psychiatric care.

Yet less than a decade later, I checked back into the story and found
the whole concept behind the project had been erased from the
collective memory, to the point that the original problems had
returned and the identical strategies were being talked about as if
they'd never been tried.

I eventually lost count of the number of good initiatives that
suffered a similar fate. We have a discouraging habit of identifying
a problem, attempting a solution, cutting the funding before change
can really take root, then reidentifying the same problem a few years
on and doing it all over again.

Nothing positive comes from cynicism, that's the truth. But boy, it's
waiting for you once you start paying attention to how little
actually gets done about our most pressing problems.

It's probably been close to a decade since I walked through
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and realized it had reached the point
where reclamation seemed an impossible dream.

Vacant and boarded-up buildings lined the streets. The handful of
businesses still struggling to stay open couldn't lure customers into
the area. Sick and desperate people manouevered the sidewalks like
drugged-out, heartbreaking zombies.

I was struck at the time by how fortunate Victoria was to have
escaped a similar fate. To see a wonderful city like Vancouver with
such devastation at its core was tragic.

But that visit was a long time ago and Victoria has lost considerable
ground in the intervening years. We are not yet the Downtown
Eastside, but neither are we even close to the healthy city we used to be.

We have real problems. If we can't fix them, they will grow into
profound ones. That's the unassailable lesson of the Downtown
Eastside, one that we ignore at our peril.

Like the Downtown Eastside, the reasons for Victoria's urban problems
start with the closing of B.C.'s big institutions in the 1980s and
carry on through global economic shifts, the virtual end of social
housing, cheap and readily available street drugs, relentless cuts to
all social supports and an equally relentless refusal to believe any
of this is happening.

Add in the tendency of one troubled family to beget many, and you get
the picture.

But homelessness need not be a condition of our times. Drug addiction
and mental illness can be dealt with.

Yes, we've left things a little late, but a better world for all is
still within our reach.

How will the work be done? As always, one person at a time.

Were we to just get on with it, there could be a happy ending for
everybody. We already know what it takes and in some cases are
already doing it. We just need to do much, much more, for as long as
it takes to reach the point where we can see the difference in our
healthy, happy downtowns.

Research typically shows that setting people up with the help they
need costs virtually the same -- and sometimes much less -- as
leaving them to rattle around in their personal disaster zones.

But even if it cost more, it's surely worth our while to fix our urban malaise.

Why can't we act? Perhaps it has to do with a culture that holds
people responsible for getting out from under their own messes. I get
the importance of the principle, but what we're seeing in our
downtown is how life turns out for the folks who just can't make that
happen. How long are we prepared to stand on principle?

Once upon a time, I would have thought that a wealthy, privileged
city would stop at nothing to save its beautiful core from becoming
just another disturbing example of failed social policy and inaction.

On my good days, I still do.