On Monday I received a polite email from Brian Hutchison, a journalist with the National Post. Could he speak with me about the DTES?
I was familiar with Hutchison's writing since he's one of the few journalists who has written about the excessive waste of government money spent on renovating buildings like the Marble Arch, the Pennsylvania Hotel and others in the DTES. The Vancouver Sun's Jeff Lee is another.
I had a lengthy and frank conversation with Hutchison and shared with him my concerns about the planning process. We discussed the experience with Marguerite House, a City of Vancouver social housing project that has been described as a war-zone because of the City's desire to concentrate too many formerly homeless or hard-to-house residents in a building that's too large. I told him I feared this project was a microcosm for what might happen in the DTES under the current planning proposals.
Yesterday I received another email from the National Post. This time they wanted to take a photo of me in the DTES. I knew this would probably lead to no good....but I agreed. :-)
The photographer Tijana Martin was a young creative who, with her piercings and outfit, might well have been a friend of my daughter Claire. She was very, very diligent and when I complimented her on how hard she was working she shared that this was her first National Post assignment, and didn't want to disappoint.
What was interesting is that during the 20 minutes that she was taking photos on three corners of Hastings & Main, I could watch various drug deals taking place. Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm disturbed to see this happening, especially when some of the clientele are people without proper shoes, and obviously suffering from mental illness.
At any rate, here is Brian Hutchison's story, and the accompanying photos by Tijana. I suspect she didn't disappoint her client!
Brian Hutchinson: City
proposal ignores ‘deplorable’ reality of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside
Tijana
Martin for National Post
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside area is not a wonderful
community, developer and architect Michael Geller dares to say in response to a
new city proposal.
“What I’m saying is not allowed,” notes
Vancouver developer and architect Michael Geller. Not allowed, because his
observations and opinions about the largest urban slum in Canada run contrary
to the official view peddled by Vancouver City Hall.
“We’re supposed
to say that the Downtown Eastside is a wonderful community,” Mr. Geller
explains. “But it’s deplorable.”
You don’t
get that impression, reading the city’s latest proposal for its perennially
distressed, highly subsidized neighbourhood. This is the big one, years in the
making, some 200 pages long. The Downtown Eastside Local Area Plan was released
last week, and calls for $1-billion — yes, $1-billion — in new spending, most
of it for 4,400 new social housing units to be built over 30 years.
Well,
forget it, says Mr. Geller. That kind of cash is never going to come, not from
the provincial and federal governments who are supposed to put up half, with
the rest from the city and other sources. The government cupboards are bare.
B.C.’s deputy premier and minister responsible for housing, Rich Coleman,
offered the Vancouver Sun this blunt response to the city’s new DTES
plan: “We don’t build ‘social housing’ any more.”
The
long-anticipated plan falls off the mark in other ways, says Mr. Geller, a
former city council candidate. It was influenced — “highjacked,” he claims — by
special interest groups, especially those whom he calls the DTES “poverty
activists.” For reasons of their own, they want a neighbourhood exclusive to
the poor and the marginalized. A ghetto, one might say.
Examine
closely their objectives. The new neighbourhood plan is meant to “ensure that
the future of the Downtown Eastside improves the lives of those who currently
live in the area, particularly low-income people and those who are most
vulnerable which will benefit the city as a whole.”
Related
Who are
these vulnerable persons and groups? “Aboriginal communities, children, women,
youth, drug users, homeless, people affected by mental illness, disabled,
seniors and sex workers.” Many would argue that any resident or visitor in the
DTES can feel vulnerable, it’s that bad. Regardless, the goal is back-assward.
In the real world, a neighbourhood’s success depends on its residents, not on
community plans and social engineers.
Like some
other notable Vancouverites, including left-leaning former mayor Mike Harcourt,
Mr. Geller says he’s fed up with the area’s criminal activity, especially the
open drug peddling and drug use. The DTES has its share of law-abiding,
productive residents, to be sure. It’s home to many of the city’s hard-working
poor and their children. But the fact remains, and it’s plain as day, the place
is also a quasi-sanctioned outdoor shooting gallery filled with cut-throat drug
dealers, and addictions, despair and disease.
The
city’s response is the same, year after year. Spend more public funds
attracting the afflicted, and those teetering on the precipice. Build new
subsidized housing, purchase and renovate 100-year-old tenements at ludicrous
prices, stuff the mentally ill and “hard to house” into them, and have them
fend for themselves in the mean streets outside. Pretend to ignore the
predators who lurk everywhere and sell everything, including the flesh of young
girls. Celebrate the “diversity.”
The new
plan doesn’t diverge. It is “filled with platitudes,” says Mr. Geller. It fails
to address the neighbourhood’s core problem: Addictions-related activities and
crime. Instead, the document carries on about the DTES’s “complex ‘local
economy’ related to the survival livelihoods of at least half its residents who
are dependent on income assistance and pensions. Activities that make up this
realm include self-employment through micro-enterprise, binning, vending,
bartering and volunteering for income supplementation.”
Tijana
Martin for National Post
“There is too much concern to keep [Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside] as a low-income community,” developer Michael Geller says.
It’s
bafflegab. Worse, says Mr. Geller, the plan recommends a strategy to exacerbate
the neighbourhood’s troubles. “There is too much concern to keep [the DTES] as
a low-income community, and to exclude any new condominium development in
certain areas,” he says. What the area needs is more investment from all
corners of society, and from people living there.
But the
plan would, for example, isolate a particularly squalid piece of the
neighbourhood, which it identifies as the Downtown Eastside Oppenheimer
District, effectively blocking any new, multi-family private residential
development from the area. Proposed rezoning would promote social housing only.
Another
example: Old tenements that are presently in terrible condition would be
purchased from their owners, renovated, and the tiny rooms rented back to
people on social assistance. This is already common practice in the DTES, and
it’s very expensive and inefficient. Approximately 900 hotel rooms — most of
them around 350 square feet — have already been purchased and are targeted for
renovation and improvement, at a cost of $128,888 per room. In specific cases,
renovations have cost taxpayers more than $1,000 per square foot, far more than
the city would have spent simply building apartments from scratch.
What’s
more, the new city plan proposes to cram single occupants into rooms as small
as 250 square feet. And in concentrated districts. There’s a term for it:
Warehousing the addicted and the poor. But you won’t read that in the 200-page
report, because like other uncomfortable truths, it’s just not allowed.
