CANADA'S POOREST POSTAL CODE

For The Past Half-Generation, Public Policy Has Concentrated Poverty
Here -- Now There Is A Chance To Rethink That Policy

With the changes they supported in November's municipal election,
Vancouver residents now have their first opportunity in half a
generation to rethink the Downtown Eastside. Our most troubled
neighbourhood surely needs rethinking, because the public policies we
have pursued there recently have failed almost totally.

The 24-hour, wide-open drug market roars on around Hastings and Main,
only slightly abated despite all the police manpower thrown at it in
recent years.

The over-ballyhooed injection site has opened, but there has been all
too little ballyhoo about the addiction treatment beds that have
failed to open here, or elsewhere in the province. I hope former
mayor Larry Campbell makes headway on this crucial issue in Ottawa,
because he got no traction at all on it as mayor.

Astonishingly, the Downtown Eastside remains Canada's poorest postal
code, despite the middle class and better incomes brought there by
the new gentry occupying condos along its northern edge, facing Burrard Inlet.

The simple but difficult fact of all this is that public policy has
concentrated poverty and drug abuse in the Downtown Eastside, making
it poorer and more desperate than any stretch of Northern Manitoba
lakeland or Labrador outports, a shameful state of affairs,
especially considering this average income-raising influx of
well-heeled new residents.

Almost unselfconsciously, our planners and politicians have conceived
the Downtown Eastside as the dark twin to the glamorous urban star
they tell us they have conceived on the rest of the downtown
peninsular. Like most artificial stars, this one has been cruelly over-hyped.

High-density apartment living has replaced the balanced live and work
zone that used to be worthy of the name downtown. The same cruel
logic has spawned an indigent correlative to this -- a
correspondingly high concentration of social housing and front-line
poverty agencies packed into one hyper-stressed neighbourhood.

A high-rise, high-density residential zone for retirees and global
investors looking for havens in times of limited stock returns will
soon occupy one half of our core, begetting, seemingly, a parallel
high density concentration of junkies, streetwalkers, no-RRSP seniors
and single parents in the other half. Is this the brilliant urban
planning we have heard so much about?

This Downtown Eastside has sunk to this state neither through some
inborn character flaw common to its residents, nor through some
inevitability of poverty, but because Vancouver's planners and
politicians have found it convenient to first create, then intensify
ours, the most artificial of slums.

In order to re-think the Downtown Eastside -- and from these
sometimes difficult insights, heal it -- a few convenient illusions
need to be dispelled.

The first and most important is that the Downtown Eastside is your
typical urban slum, no different from those in other Canadian cities.
Every poor neighbourhood on the continent has substance abuse
problems, but none can match our pathetic ratio of one third of
Downtown Eastside residents being current or recovering addicts and
alcohol abusers.

The reasons for this calamity are found in history and past public
policy. For the first three quarters of the 20th century, what we now
call the Downtown Eastside was almost the only area in the city where
bar and tavern licences were issued, and even today, when many of its
dozens of tavern and cabaret licences have been reallocated to the
new Granville booze strip, the Downtown Eastside still has this
city's highest concentration of drinking establishments.

In other words, for more than half its history, Vancouver managed its
alcohol problems by loading them onto one tiny area. Until the NDP
opened up neighbourhood pub licences in the 1970s, there were huge
swaths of south and westside Vancouver without any outlets whatsoever
for a drink without a meal.

This huge concentration of liquor licences into Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside is the urban planning equivalent of binge drinking -- too
much, in too small an area, in too short a time, making for
disastrous consequences for cities, just as it does for individuals.

The Downtown Eastside thus became -- by the decisions of lawmakers
and ongoing actions by city managers -- B.C.'s designed zone for
addiction. At first the drug of public preference here was alcohol,
but it did not take long for the opiates long available in Chinatown
to also take deep root in this rich soil of more-than-tolerated libertinage.

Today, the cultures of crystal meth, cocaine, heroin and alcohol
intertwine in what is -- in the opinion of this student of cities --
the world's most cross-addicted urban neighbourhood.

Safely stowed away on the dog end of the downtown peninsula,
Vancouverites looked away from the situation, and it should come as
no great surprise that our police looked away, too. The downtown
eastside is not only where we warehouse the poor -- bad enough itself
- -- but also where we render them helpless by inexcusably
concentrating them within a culture of addiction.

This situation is reflected in the rise of VANDU -- Vancouver Area
Network of Drug Users -- and other lobby groups for the addicted, as
they came to realize the political power their concentrated numbers
brought, much amplified by sympathetic news media. But Vancouver has
many other Disneys of dissipation that have built the theme park of
addiction that is the Downtown Eastside.

There is a similarly shameful story to tell about the
over-concentration of social housing in the area. Vancouverites could
not abide public housing along their own residential streets, and
supported self-serving politicians and empire-building agencies who
took the easy way out -- over-concentrating it on the Downtown Eastside.

Christian missions had long located their hostels in the
neighbourhood, and the rooming houses above beer parlours provided
geared-to-welfare accommodation for generations of the indigent and
the addicted. But these prior concentrations were much intensified
with the rise of the Downtown Eastside Residents Association, and its
central personality, Jim Green.

The best thing that ever happened to the Downtown Eastside was Jim
Green. The worst thing that ever happened to the Downtown Eastside
was Jim Green.

It is quite possible to hold both of these opinions, as I do. This
first estimation is based on his early organizing and community
development work in Vancouver's most troubled neighbourhood,
especially his role in protecting single resident occupancy hotels,
before Expo 86, and after.

These accomplishments were counteracted by his later, overtly
political career, where he sponsored too high a concentration of
social housing in this already-stressed neighbourhood. Development of
social housing was the key funding source for DERA, and putting ever
more units on the ground here paid Green's salary, modest as it was.

Jim Green became a block boss in two senses: Other politicians and
bureaucrats implicitly recognized him as the mayor of the Downtown
Eastside while at the same time he was building blocks and blocks of
social housing, especially during the previous NDP provincial
government. Green and DERA's fatal mistake was not using their
evident expertise to develop social housing in other neighbourhoods,
but concentrating it here, for their own political reasons.

Just as COPE split to create Vision Vancouver, Jim Green's DERA
subdivided to form the Portland Hotel Society, which carries on this
area-specific tradition of providing more social housing.

In November, 2002, Vancouver elected its highest-ever concentration
of COPE politicians, in large part because it was thought they had
the right ideas and policies for a mounting urban crisis -- the
drug-plagued Downtown Eastside, the central issue of that campaign.

Seeing only nominal improvement by 2005, the Downtown Eastside's
continuing problems and their extensions into the middle class
redoubts of the West End and Grandview-Woodlands played no small role
in the decimation of that same class-conscious political party, and
the defeat of Jim Green.

In this, Green was as much a victim of Vancouverites' continuing wish
to have someone else deal with the Downtown Eastside's problems, as
he was of his own over-reaching political ambition. With his
departure we have lost a valuable spokesman and fine councillor.

But the defeat of COPE -- and especially the defeat of Green -- means
that the public policies that have shaped the Downtown Eastside can
now be reconsidered for the first time in half a generation.

Like it or not, Vancouver has left behind the "let Jim take care of
it" era for Downtown Eastside public policy.

Solutions

What is to be done, then?

To start, November's political changes in other municipalities make
things easier to set the Downtown Eastside right. A new mayor for
Surrey brings at least the possibility that it will start to work
with Vancouver rather than struggle against it to put in place
regional services for the poor and addicted.

Similarly, Richmond, the Tri-Cities and North Shore communities are
not pulling their weight in providing social housing in any form
other than seniors' residences. New units for singles and families in
these municipalities will take some of the killing pressure off the
Downtown Eastside.

I have always been a supporter of Woodward's redevelopment, but not
of the current scheme, which was shaped far too much by Green's
personal quirks and agenda.

Principal amongst these was Green's insistence on retaining too much
of the brick shell of the former department store building itself.
Green's dogged attachment to the old store's walls and floors is
directly responsible for the woefully inadequate public open space in
the current scheme, coupled with lots of expensive office space
proposed within its patched-up walls for which there is no current
market --except for non-profit organizations.

Rather than serving as extras in Green's Woodward's spectacular,
these non-profit groups are better spread throughout the Downtown
Eastside in a program of heritage building renewal that will bring
renewed historic structures, needed lower skill level jobs, and new
homes for arts and public service agencies.

We should talk seriously about moving a federal government department
or two there -- does Indian and Northern Affairs really need to park
itself in three downtown core office towers?

A miniature of the Downtown Eastside itself, Green so loaded the
Woodward's redevelopment with his agenda that developer Ian Gillespie
wisely waited through the civic election before signing a final
contract. A more modest Woodward's redevelopment will do fewer things
well, rather than pretend to save the neighbourhood in one quick
construction stroke, as in Green's election rhetoric.

In my opinion, after approval of a scaled-down Woodward's project,
there should be a moratorium on further high-rise condominium
development on the Downtown Eastside. We must not crush the scale,
character and heritage building stock of our most historic
neighbourhood under an extension of downtown's concrete glacier of
third-rate towers.

Similarly, there also needs to be a moratorium on further social
housing and front-line poverty agency concentration in the Downtown
Eastside. We have ample evidence now that the ultra-concentration of
poverty in a drug slum has not worked, and this neighbourhood needs a breather.

It will test the political will of our new NPA-dominated council to
stop the expansion of condo towers into the Downtown Eastside, and
even more so, locate half-way houses and addict support services as
needed on the westside and in south Vancouver. But with former mayor
Philip Owen's late initiatives as a precedent, the new council might
just pull it off, because it was elected with strong support from
these very areas.

But this social housing moratorium should not proceed without a
realistic parallel plan to build new, resident-owned affordable
housing in the Downtown Eastside-Strathcona area. Affordable,
resident-owned housing is the key, as it will provide the stable core
our inner eastside has long lacked, supporting its institutions
- --schools, gyms, arts facilities -- and its businesses -- the area
sorely needs a supermarket. Vancouver is full of working poor
families, but DERA, the Portland Hotel Society and Green seldom chose
to build for them.

As it happens, we have the perfect area for this needed affordable
housing initiative in the False Creek Flats behind the train station,
running east along the southern edge of Strathcona.

With wide stretches of underdeveloped land, the Flats are precisely
the right place for a radical re-thinking of everything that makes
housing ultra-expensive in Vancouver: building regulations and
conventions; municipal development fees and standards; and a lack of
creative financing.

The time has passed that our globally recognized development industry
can concentrate solely on luxury condos. Its skills and ingenuity are
now urgently needed to build modest homes for working people.

Low cost resident-owned housing is a much better idea for the area
than a large hunk of it serving as a new home for St. Paul's
Hospital, a move more motivated by Providence Health Care's desire to
cash in on inflated West End land values, than any architectural
limitation in their current physical plant.

There is plenty of land for other, more desirable industrial and
office uses on the Flats (the east False Creek basin is almost the
same size as our downtown peninsula, minus Stanley Park), in addition
to hundreds, maybe thousands of resident-owned houses that can be built here.

Creating a vital area for working people and immigrants around two
sides of the Downtown Eastside would infuse it with new vitality.
Immigrants are the lifeblood of Vancouver, and one of the many
demographic disasters of the Downtown Eastside is that it has the
lowest ratio of people born elsewhere of any Vancouver neighbourhood.

There will always be poor and addicted Vancouverites in the Downtown
Eastside, but it is high time this city stopped shunting its problems
to the schemes of flawed saviours like Green, and tired social
democratic cures like the ever-mounting concentration of social
housing there, and there alone.

Integrated into the rest of Vancouver for the first time by new
resident-owned neighbourhoods constructed around the vast,
almost-empty zones that flank it, the Downtown Eastside would then
have its last, best chance to pull itself up by its bootstraps.