REHABILITATING THE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE STARTS WITH SAFE STREETS

Congratulations to the Globe and Mail for putting the Downtown
Eastside's (DTES) inscrutable problems under the label of "Canada's
slum" in its recent series. Far too often, this neighbourhood is seen
as an isolated problem, with solutions to its myriad problems to be
found only by spending money in that neighbourhood. The DTES is a
national problem, the Vancouver manifestation of a national outbreak
of homelessness. The DTES will only stop being a slum when we have a
national homelessness policy, a national mental health policy and
still more spending across the province for drug treatment, mental
health treatment and social housing.

Most of the most troubled people in the DTES weren't born there. They
migrate there in search of cheap housing, social services and drugs
that are impossible to find in such concentration in one place
anywhere else in Canada. No other city in Canada pushes all its most
addicted and mentally challenged residents into one small area and
then tears its hair out in frustration because the area is a
crack-farm dream-world for drug dealers and infectious diseases.

The Globe did some rough calculations to come up with a figure of
$1.4 billion spent in the DTES since 2000. Yet the neighbourhood, in
spite of heroic efforts by many dedicated people, is in worse shape than ever.

So why do we keep spending money there, adding services and social
housing there, when it only makes the situation worse? Because DTES
activists demand we keep doing it. Driven by some combination of
compassion, guilt, frustration, ignorance and fear, well-meaning
politicians fall in line in the faint hope of finally reaching a tipping point.

It's not going to happen until we start adding social services
throughout the region, the province and the country, and until we
allow more healthy, tax-paying citizens into the mix in the DTES.

Yet every time someone heads in that direction, hysteria breaks out.
Just ask Terry Hui, who wanted to build some market housing at 58
West Hastings Street. He was threatened with pickets at all his sales
sites and besieged with angry messages on his personal e-mail
account. The message from his opponents is that no market housing
will be allowed until all the needs of the most vulnerable are met.
That's just a politically correct way of saying they like this
neighbourhood the way it is, whether it works or not. Just keep paying.

People of all kinds need to be able to walk down sidewalks in all
parts of the city without being hassled. Yet when the police step in
to enforce minimum standards of order on Hastings Street - such as
stopping people from blocking the sidewalks with impromptu flea
markets for stolen goods or from stumbling out into oncoming traffic
- - again, the barricades go up. This is a pre-cursor to loading people
onto buses and into jails to clean up the city for the Olympics,
angry anti-poverty advocates said last week. Disruptive behaviour on
DTES sidewalks has become a special-needs civil right.

The No. 1 goal of the Vancouver Agreement, a noble attempt to bring
all three levels of government together to make this community
healthy again, was to attract new business to the area. No one will
locate a business where customers fear to tread, so the millions of
dollars we are spending to bring business and jobs to the area are doomed.

In return for the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in the
DTES, all the residents - and the city council - should be willing to
do their part to at least make the streets safe. How about simply
agreeing that open drug dealing and selling stolen goods on the
sidewalks are not a good thing? We're not even there yet.