VANCOUVER'S GROWING PAINS

The City Has Canada's Highest House Prices And Persistent Poverty And
Drug Crime. The Once Near-Perfect City Is Showing Signs Of Decline In
Urban Life

It regularly tops surveys of the world's most livable cities.
Vancouver's combination of natural beauty and urban sophistication
has drawn expatriates from far and wide. But some ordinary
Vancouverites wonder whether their increasingly gritty city is worthy
of all the accolades.

Nobody can take away its beautiful setting, on a deep harbour backed
by British Columbia's coastal mountains. It enjoys the mildest
climate in Canada.

Far-sighted decisions by the city fathers have endowed downtown
Vancouver with a wooded 400-hectare (1,000-acre) waterfront park and
a long seaside walkway. No freeway slices through the city centre.

The presence of residential areas close by has prevented the downtown
from becoming a desert by night.

But many residents are angry at signs of decline in the quality of
urban life. Some of the problems are the by-product of success.

The city's population is only 600,000, but the overall urban area's
is two million. That figure is expected to increase by 50 per cent
over the next 25 years. One consequence of growth is the highest
property prices in Canada, with an average home costing $518,000.
That is forcing young families to distant suburbs, swelling traffic congestion.

Critics claim the authorities have been slow to respond to the
growth. Only now are suburban railways being built. Opponents worry a
$3 billion road-building plan by the provincial government threatens
to reverse Vancouver's relative success in containing sprawl and will
funnel thousands more cars into the city.

But it is the once pleasant downtown that causes most alarm. Homeless
panhandlers yell at theatregoers, while young addicts deal drugs on
street corners. They spill out from the Downtown East Side, an area
of decrepit boarding houses, sleazy bars and boarded-up shops
infamous for the country's highest poverty rate and drug addiction.
The problems have resisted decades of expensive government effort.

Four years ago, the voters swept out a conservative city council in
favor of a left-of-centre civic party. The new council announced a
different approach to drugs, involving harm reduction and treatment
as well as enforcement.

It set up North America's first safe heroin-injection site and
pressed the provincial government to house the homeless but it was
then overcome by bickering. Last autumn, voters turned to a re-energized right.

The new mayor, Sam Sullivan, is having little more success than his
predecessors. His most promising scheme is an attempt to rein in
sprawl by increasing housing density in central areas. But on the
crucial issues of drugs and crime, he has made little progress.

Sullivan advocates a heroin maintenance and treatment program for
addicts, of the kind pioneered in Switzerland. This would reduce
crime, he says, but it requires federal legislation to implement.

He wants a community court to deal specifically with the mentally ill
people and drug addicts who cause trouble on downtown streets, but
that would have to be set up by the provincial government.

If Vancouver is to continue to live up to its reputation as an urban
paradise, it will need a city government with the power, as well as
the will, to keep it that way.