WANTED: NEW HOPE ON HASTINGS

Conditions In The Downtown Eastside Are 'Simply Unacceptable' And
It's Time For Change

Former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen steps out of his car on Carrall
Street at Hastings on a gun-metal-grey morning. In khaki pants and
blue blazer, with matching vest and tie, the 75-year-old looks beyond
out of place.

But a sick-looking man sitting in a doorway looks up at him, their
eyes meet, and the man mumbles: "You ought to be back at city hall.
You knew what was going on."

Owen smiles, then walks into the rain toward the Carnegie Centre.

He figures he took this walk 100 times while mayor from 1993 to 2002
as he pondered a city strategy to deal with the Downtown Eastside
street tragedy.

Owen's walks led to a largely forgotten policy to focus equally on
harm reduction, treatment, enforcement and prevention -- the Four
Pillars Strategy.

Today, Owen walks the street in grim frustration at what might have
been and with distaste at what he sees as a costly and unmanaged
effort to help the residents there.

Of the area's population of 16,000, roughly 6,000 are injection drug
users. Between 600 and 1,000 of Metro Vancouver's estimated 2,660
homeless population are to be found there, most of them suffering
from mental illness and addiction.

Owen estimates there are 300 agencies of one sort or another
providing services in the area.

"Everybody has forgotten the basics. Nobody even talks about the Four
Pillars any more," says Owen. "It really infuriates me. There are
15-to-20-year-old girls down here and they were five-to-10-year-old
girls when we started this. It's self-perpetuating. They keep pouring
money in and there's no co-ordination, no-one overseeing it. There's
no one in charge and it's bull----.

"We are manufacturing misery. We don't need the kind of money they've
wasted to solve the problem," he says.

In the six years after Owen retired as mayor, his successors, Larry
Campbell and Sam Sullivan, also tried to tackle the issues. Now they
are the "top priority" for Vancouver's new mayor, Gregor Robertson,
who won a landslide victory after promising to end homelessness by 2015.

"The city has to be the leadership for that change, and I'm very
hopeful we are making that change now with the total focus on
homelessness," he says.

Robertson believes the problems plaguing the Downtown Eastside are
clear: a lack of affordable housing, drug treatment and mental-health
care. This clarity is changing public perception, he says, and is
bringing forth solutions faster.

"I'm very optimistic. There's lots of work ahead and much more
commitment needed from the provincial and federal governments, but I
think we're turning a corner."

There are signs of change, but the Downtown Eastside is still a
topsy-turvy world where needle-scarred addicts shoot up in the shadow
of a church steeple and an open-air drug market flourishes mere
blocks from the police station; where some homeless prefer to bunk
down in a vomit-drenched doorway rather than a bug-infested room; and
where people stumble and shuffle through the streets, frantically
picking at an imagined hole in their body or arguing with voices only
they can hear.

A 2007 United Nations report singled out the Downtown Eastside as one
of North America's most troubled and drug-infested neighbourhoods,
with a hepatitis-C rate of just below 70 per cent and an estimated

30-per-cent HIV-prevalence rate rivalling that of Botswana.

Despite the well-meaning efforts of hundreds of agencies, huge
amounts of money and some positive changes, the general consensus
among front-line workers is that things aren't substantially better.

"People keep coming in with ideas and there's a lot of money that
gets poured into this neighbourhood every year," says Rev. Janet
MacPhee of the Union Gospel Mission. "But it never seems to get
better. We're not out of business."

Fr. Matthew Johnson, an outreach priest at St. James Anglican Church
at Gore and Hastings, says the changes wrought in the neighbourhood
in the past two decades are staggering.

"In the '80s, I never saw too many people living on the street under
cardboard or tarpaulin or in doorways. Now I can't go for a walk in
one block without seeing one or two trying to survive in a doorway."

Those who toil on the streets of the Downtown Eastside are witness to
some of the worst in human depravity: Unscrupulous dealers targeting
the mentally ill and getting them to fork over welfare cheques;
drug-addled predators tipping over seniors in wheelchairs or
motorcycle scooters, then robbing them of their stipends; underage
prostitutes kept docile by "rocks" of crack cocaine left by their pimps.

Some of the dilapidated singleroom accommodations that are a housing
staple in the Downtown Eastside are so bad - bursting with rats,
cockroaches and bedbugs, thick with crack smoke - that residents
often take their chances sleeping outside. But the neglect of the
buildings pales in comparison to the state of the lives of some residents.

Janice Abbott, executive director of Atira Women's Resources, recalls
meeting a man in his mid-50s sitting in the middle of his room with
"stuff" piled from floor to ceiling around him and only a swarm of
buzzing flies for company.

"He was sitting in his own feces and vomit. I don't know how long it
had been since anybody had knocked on his door to see if he was OK,"
says Abbott.

Politicians of every stripe have tried to help the beleaguered
neighbourhood, armed with reports, task forces, pet projects and all
the best intentions in the world, but with little impact.

Emergency calls from the Downtown Eastside have steadily risen,
reaching almost 35,000 a year in 2005. The cost at one
single-roomoccupancy (SRO) hotel, the Roosevelt, alone is almost $1
million a year, and the Vancouver police bill for time spent dealing
with mental-health cases they are illequipped to handle comes to
about $9 million annually.

Not everyone in the Downtown Eastside is drug-addicted or mentally
ill. Some are simply poor and end up there because it's the only
place they can afford.

Many struggle with inner demons, the effects of childhood abuse,
violence and neglect, while others are "well-educated folks who fall
off the Earth when they get sucked into the drug world," says
MacPhee. "They don't want people to see them like this, so they come
here to hide."

After all, the Downtown Eastside is an easy place to disappear: when
the first of more than 60 women, many of them drug addicts and
prostitutes, began to vanish, it took almost 20 years before police
arrested a Port Coquitlam pig farmer named Robert Pickton.

The Downtown Eastside has gained worldwide notoriety. Every
journalist attending last year's world press briefing for the
Olympics was aware of the poverty-plagued neighbourhood, says Tourism
Vancouver's Walt Judas.

"We do hear remarks. People are surprised and shocked that within
such a beautiful city and an incredible destination with so many
attributes there exists a place like the Downtown Eastside," he says.

The neighbourhood has always been a little rough-and-tumble. But it
was also a thriving community of low-income, working families, says
NDP MP Libby Davies.

"I can remember the Downtown Eastside when there were shoe-repair
shops, grocery stores, Woodward's," she says. "Now that's all gone.
People have no money. The vast majority of people are completely
dependent on government programs and handouts."

Operating a business in the area isn't for the faint of heart.

"It's kind of like being in Beirut, Lebanon," said Jacqui Cohen,
president of the landmark Army & Navy, which opened its Cordova
Street location in 1919. "It's really like a war zone."

There are more drug dealers, and store security has been seeing more
weapons and violence recently, she says. "People are now carrying
switchblades, and bear spray is a huge thing."

To discourage drug dealers and addicts from coming into the store,
Cohen had to stop selling lighters and mouthwash six months ago. She
also removed pay phones.

"The worst time was when there were squatters in the [empty]
Woodward's . . . then there were the pigfarm murders, when you'd turn
on any TV channel and the Downtown Eastside would be in the news,"
she says. "We've come a long way since those days."

The neighbourhood is getting better, says Cohen, who believes it will
become Vancouver's Soho.

"This is the most exciting area to be in in the city. I am so proud
to be part of this community."

To paint the Downtown Eastside with one brush is to do the
neighbourhood a disservice.

Behind the tragedy playing out on the streets are caring, generous
and resilient residents - artists, activists, social workers,
missionaries and volunteers who devote their energy to improving the
lives of the city's most vulnerable.

It is also home to a lively cultural scene, with a concentration of
art galleries perhaps second only to those of tony South Granville.
And there are other signs of hope.

At the Beijing Olympics, Premier Gordon Campbell promised
"significant improvements" in time for the 2010 Olympics. The
provincial government has bought 23 single-roomoccupancy hotels,
protecting 1,371 units. An additional 441 units of supportive housing
are expected to be completed by 2010.

Progress, however, is outpaced by the need and slowed by opposing
factions and warring philosophies.

Former mayor Owen feels Vancouver needs to hire a "Downtown Eastside
czar," rationalize overlapping services and put money saved into
outreach services, education and treatment.

The one thing everyone agrees on is that action is needed.

The survey that found 2,660 homeless people in Metro Vancouver is
much on Johnson's mind.

On a cold winter afternoon recently, just before his daily walk on
the battered streets, he said: "This is simply unacceptable for a
Canadian society that considers itself civilized and caring."

- -- with files from Staff Reporters David Carrigg, Lora Grindlay and
Elaine O'Connor