MAYBE THE NIMBY SIDE HAS A POINT

How would the west side like its own addict recovery
highrise?

I am given to understand that NIMBYism is a bad thing. Moralists tell me so.

I used to think this myself, believing that the Not-In-My-Backyard syndrome
was the basest expression of man's selfishness.

I thought this, of course, until I had a backyard of my own.

Now I am not so sure.

NIMBYism is very much in the news these last few weeks because of the loud
and wounded howls emanating from the area of Fraser and 41st, where the City
of Vancouver, in partnership with the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and
BC Housing, hopes to erect a 39-unit apartment building for recovering
addicts with a history of mental illness.

Unstable ex-addicts, you say? Well, jeepers. On the Homeowner's
Alarm-o-Meter, that double whammy registers somewhere between Cold Sweat and
Worst Nightmare, and I don't care where you live.

This planned facility -- to be operated by the Triage Emergency Services and
Care Society -- will be kitty-corner to a high school, near an elementary
school and smack dab in the middle of a predominantly Chinese and South
Asian neighbourhood where tolerance for the drug culture is traditionally
low, if not non-existent.

This tells me someone in city hall failed to scope out the terrain, or
comprehend, through the veil of good intentions, the fear so ambitious a
project might inspire. (If built, it will be the largest such facility in
the city.)

Exacerbating that fear was the city's absolutely amateurish public
relations, sending out exactly 277 flyers to residents of the neighbourhood.
None of those flyers included a Chinese translation. Even Councillor Anne
Roberts, who lives in the neighbourhood and, to her credit, supports the
facility, was abashed:

"How can we," she said, "continue to not put things out in Chinese in a city
with such a large immigrant population and still carry on business?"

Good question, but a little late in the day. By the time the proposal
filtered through the neighbourhood's cultural and linguistic membranes, most
of the neighbours saw this as just another corrosive influence on their turf
- -- the importation of the social welfare cancer that has already eaten away
the Downtown Eastside and Chinatown. They said as much, vehemently, at two
public meetings held at John Oliver high school. The first attracted 1,000
people. Sun reporter Frances Bula described it as "volcanic."

Bula also quoted Councillor Peter Ladner, who was there, and who described
the crowd as exhibiting a "somewhat lynch-mob mentality" -- an interesting
choice of words, I thought. A current of self-righteousness ran just below
the surface of Ladner's comments -- even though he tried to soften them by
using the weasel word "somewhat." (I guess the mob hadn't lit its torches
yet.)

Ladner's characterization is fairly typical of an anti-NIMBY argument --
that NIMBYism is hysterical, ill-informed and, at bottom, morally puerile.
In other words: Shame! We are our brothers' keepers, the saints and city
councillors say, and who can argue with that?

Well, I can. If you look at a map of the mental health residential
facilities in the city, none exists south of King Edward and west of Cambie.
None. In southeast Vancouver, in those residential areas east of Cambie and
south of 41st Avenue, there is exactly one. As for those few residences that
are in the west side -- in Point Grey, Kitsilano and Shaughnessy -- none is
half the size of the Fraser proposal. All the largest residences, those with
20 or more apartments, are in the Downtown, Downtown Eastside or
Grandview-Woodlands areas -- the Eastside.

So? So how do you ask one neighbourhood to take on such a proposal when half
the city's neighbourhoods have shown exactly zero appetite for doing the
same? One of the basic tenets of the city's Four Pillars philosophy was the
promise to spread such services around equally.

In recognizing this geographic inequity, Dominic Flanagan, the housing
manager for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, told me yesterday:

"We have to build this kind of housing from one end of the city to another."

But standing in front of that conviction is the systemic, privileged
NIMBYism that has made this city what it is -- lop-sided. One side bears the
burden of being its brother's keeper: The other side, insulated by money,
has always done what the folks at Fraser and 41st have only begun to do.

They have precedence on their side -- if not, in some people's eyes, the
angels.