HOUSE OF HORRORS IN DECLINING LOCALITY

The neighbourhood, while largely one of neat lawns and aluminum siding,
suffers from a blight of these little houses

The crack house, empty and now famously described by the RCMP as the House
of Horrors, is on 108th Ave., one of those big, inhuman, four-lane roads in
Surrey that is designed to be a street but acts like a freeway.

It does not encourage community: It encourages speeding. People take 108th
on their way from somewhere else to somewhere else.

The house itself is stucco, filthy and small. Its empty front picture
window is as dark as a black eye. Its yard is a mess. It could use a
bulldozer.

Its shabbiness is nothing out of the ordinary. The neighbourhood, while
still largely one of neat lawns and aluminum siding, suffers from a blight
of these little houses. Many are rental properties. You drive down the
side streets and see nice house, nice house, nice house, and then you see a
house with a flag for drapes and a Ford Torino with no plates in the
driveway and a pair of grinning pit bulls patrolling the threadbare front
lawn. There will often be a packrat clutter of junk, too, caught, usually,
in a wilderness of brambles - an orphaned car tire, rolls of mildewed shag
carpet, the skeletons of cheap kitchen chairs. It is not just poverty
rotting there in full view - it is a kind of cancer eating away at the
civic body. It hasn't always been this way.

"It's real bad now," said one neighbour, who did not want to be identified
for fear of retribution. "I've lived here for 28 years and when I first
moved in it was working people who took care of their homes.

"Then the ALRT came, and people bought up the homes on speculation -
everybody thought the price of real estate would go up. They didn't care
about what kind of tenants moved in."

When the real homeowners moved out, they took with them pride of place. She
has watched drug deals go down in front of her house, and has seen
prostitutes ply their trade on her street. She endured two growops in the
house next door, she said, and a meth house down the block.

This is Whalley; 20 and 30 years ago, it was a solid, lower and
middle-class neighbourhood. But several factors conspired to destabilize
North Surrey. When gentrification began to shrink the stock of low-cost
rental housing in Vancouver, the poor and transient began to migrate
outward. They found a high concentration of cheap rental properties in
North Surrey created, paradoxically, by SkyTrain.

But SkyTrain has yet to turn North Surrey into the next Metrotown. It
attracts an outsized percentage of single mothers - more than one-third of
Surrey's single-parent families live in Whalley. Average incomes are so
low that transience is a way of life here: One social worker told me that a
local elementary school has a turnover rate of more than 100 per cent.

Babies are born with cocaine addiction or with fetal alcohol syndrome;
teens are recruited to push drugs.

This kind of stuff doesn't just happen out of the blue - Houses of Horror
and prostitution and cocaine-addicted babies sprout in the cracks of the
urban landscape. You don't get them to any great degree in healthy,
affluent neighbourhoods like, say, South Surrey or White Rock, where much
of the Surrey council happens to reside.

But that's local politics everywhere, isn't it? Geography is everything.
After all, how long would a city tolerate landlords whose tenants operate a
crack house if its mayor or council members lived next door?