I like writing, but sometimes I despise it. It doesn't really come easily to me because I have a hard time starting. After that, it flows pretty well. I've always had a tendency to ramble though -- I'm workin' on it. This is ironic because now that I've written what you just read (or at the very least, what I just re-read over in my head), my writing is flowing and words are coming easily.
Christmas break has been good, it has truly been a break. A good time to recharge my batteries, if I can use a rather overused phrase. I've read a lot this break, mostly in front of the Fireplace Channel (yeah, that's right, the Fireplace Channel), because that's how classy I am.
I've read three books over this break. First was "The Pickton File" by Stevie Cameron. I've written about Vancouver's DTES on here and on BelowtheLine and bought this book for my Mom as a Christmas gift last year. She's always liked reading about murder and watching Court TV proceedings. It's never really been my thing.
Cameron was the Irving Chair in Journalism during the first semester of my first year at school. I ran into her one night heading down to a friend's room to do karaoke. She was doing laundry in my residence's locked wing, where people with single rooms live. Apparently, people who live in suites also make use of the laundry room.
At the time, I hadn't really recognized what I wanted to do with my journalism and I'm not sure I even knew why I wanted to be a journalist. That's all kind of transpired within me over the last year.
Anyway, we had a good chat but I wish I had read the book then. I would have liked to have the chance to talk with her more in depth about her experiences. Oh well.
After that, I picked up "Missing Sarah" at my local library (see: previous blog post on how the public library is one of my favourite places), a beautiful memoir about one of Pickton's victims. The book was written by the woman's sister, Maggie de Vries. It was heartwrenching, truthful, eye-opening and changed some of the stereotypes I may have had ingrained in me about sex work. It was real.
Finally, I read "Hey Nostradamus!" by Douglas Coupland. I've always wanted to check out Coupland, and I kind of grabbed this book on a whim when I visited the library to pick up "Missing Sarah". I wanted to read "Generation X" but I wasn't able to find it for some reason or another. Some other time.
It was a good read. A lot of thought back and forth about faith and life and purpose and the like. I'd like to read more Coupland, but I want to read more in general and haven't yet pushed myself to find the time do so as much as I'd like while in school, save for news.
I've also put a dent in "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey. I know the book is a bit fabricated and the style of writing annoys me, but I found myself drawn in particularly late at night when I cannot fall asleep.
So there you have it. I've certainly done more than read this break, don't get me wrong. I've seen a lot of family and friends that I haven't seen since the summer or since Thanksgiving. That was nice.
The one thing I am aching to do while home is to go for a jog. I suppose I could still go for a jog, despite the snow covering the ground, but it's not quite the same. It's not the same in a gym on a treadmill either. I just like the reckless abandon of jogging outside. Add it onto my list of the many reasons I wish I lived somewhere with a more favourable climate.
Speaking of running, remember the guy I wrote about in a previous blog post that runs past my house everyday like clockwork? Well, I do. I haven't seen him in ages, I began to wonder if he was still running. I was heading down to my grandmother's house the other night and sure enough, he ran past, even though it was pretty cold out that night.
I wanted to run after him and talk to him. I don't even know what I'd say without sounding creepy. I don't know him at all. Yet, he's been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. My inner creature of habit was quite pleased.
After Hours - We Are Scientists
Showing posts with label DTES. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DTES. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2010
Friday, July 3, 2009
Street Sleeper
An article by Ethan Baron was published in The Province, a small daily out of BC, on June 4th, 2009 titled "Lock up the addicts until they're clean".
The online version indicates it was published under the Health section of the paper but doesn't specify whether the piece is opinion or not. Given that I'm not familiar with the columnist or the paper for that matter, I won't go futher with that. But I do have some serious qualms with what the columnist is trying to say.
The article is about the social chaos going on right now on the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, which I've blogged about a few times on here.
Baron argues, as the title suggests, that we should lock up all of the addicts on the DTES and force treatment upon them. His logic is that forcing them to be clean would save more money than is being poured into the area now for policing and other services that the homeless take advantage of everyday.
While there may not be much logic to the situation on the DTES as Baron says, I also don't think there is much logic to his solution either.
First of all, while many of the people on the DTES are addicted, they also face a number of other issues. Many face mental health issues which aren't going to go away with simple treatment. If it was that simple, addiction wouldn't exist in our society.
Second, while it is easy to force someone to become clean by detoxing them, or locking them up, that's not going to erase the addiction. Therapy might, but that requires the person to be willing and ready to tackle whatever issues are behind their addictions. And as one of the officers in Baron's story admits, many of these people do have underlying issues which has resulted in the addiction.
So, say that we lock up all of the addicts on the DTES. And we'll say that they detox so technically they are leaving treatment chemical-free. What then? While there are many services in the DTES to help people put their lives back together and find employment, where are they going to live? Certainly short-term housing isn't an issue in the DTES, but long-term housing is. And of course, all of this requires a person motivated to leave a life of addiction and poverty.
I've spoken to people directly involved in the community while researching for a piece I wrote back in March about the problem. The main consensus with all of the people I talked to was that the first step to addressing the issues in the DTES is safe housing. For someone trying to rebuild their life and stay off of drugs, if you can't afford to live somewhere in which you can maintain your dignity, it's rough.
But, alas, there is not one easy fix to the DTES. Just as there is no easy fix for kicking addiction. While programs like InSite, Vancouver's controversial safe injection site, do not necessarily intend to send every addict that walks through the door into detox or treatment, they offer a piece of dignity to these people. Yes, they're injecting drugs, but they're not doing it in a dirty alleyway and the risk of overdose or AIDS is reduced.
The thing that struck me the most when I was reading this article by Baron is something that Mark Townsend of The Portland Hotel Society told me when I was doing research for my DTES article. He told me that developing a sense of community is important to the DTES. A neighbourhood of poor people doesn't have to be a negative thing. Addiction, of course is a negative thing, but the fact that many overlook is that the DTES doesn't consist entirely of addicts.
As far as I'm concerned, poverty is just as big of an issue as addiction in this country, and that needs to be solved before we can take on the issues of this community and the issues of addiction. Give them safe housing, support and treatment for those who face addictions or other issues, and perhaps a change will happen.
But you can't "fix" anything if they're going to back to sleeping on the street or in dilapidated, overpriced and unsanitary housing. I think that's the one thing that Baron overlooks in his article.
You can lock up the addicts which will provide a band-aid fix, but if you want to solve the problem permanently, you must address the issue of poverty and everything that goes with that.
Everyone has their opinion on how we should tackle a community that faces a challenge like the DTES. Mine is that people need to bloom where they are. Turn a negative into a positive and build a strong community.
And that's why I had trouble digesting Baron's take on the situation.
Street Sleeper, Grand Theft Bus
The online version indicates it was published under the Health section of the paper but doesn't specify whether the piece is opinion or not. Given that I'm not familiar with the columnist or the paper for that matter, I won't go futher with that. But I do have some serious qualms with what the columnist is trying to say.
The article is about the social chaos going on right now on the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, which I've blogged about a few times on here.
Baron argues, as the title suggests, that we should lock up all of the addicts on the DTES and force treatment upon them. His logic is that forcing them to be clean would save more money than is being poured into the area now for policing and other services that the homeless take advantage of everyday.
While there may not be much logic to the situation on the DTES as Baron says, I also don't think there is much logic to his solution either.
First of all, while many of the people on the DTES are addicted, they also face a number of other issues. Many face mental health issues which aren't going to go away with simple treatment. If it was that simple, addiction wouldn't exist in our society.
Second, while it is easy to force someone to become clean by detoxing them, or locking them up, that's not going to erase the addiction. Therapy might, but that requires the person to be willing and ready to tackle whatever issues are behind their addictions. And as one of the officers in Baron's story admits, many of these people do have underlying issues which has resulted in the addiction.
So, say that we lock up all of the addicts on the DTES. And we'll say that they detox so technically they are leaving treatment chemical-free. What then? While there are many services in the DTES to help people put their lives back together and find employment, where are they going to live? Certainly short-term housing isn't an issue in the DTES, but long-term housing is. And of course, all of this requires a person motivated to leave a life of addiction and poverty.
I've spoken to people directly involved in the community while researching for a piece I wrote back in March about the problem. The main consensus with all of the people I talked to was that the first step to addressing the issues in the DTES is safe housing. For someone trying to rebuild their life and stay off of drugs, if you can't afford to live somewhere in which you can maintain your dignity, it's rough.
But, alas, there is not one easy fix to the DTES. Just as there is no easy fix for kicking addiction. While programs like InSite, Vancouver's controversial safe injection site, do not necessarily intend to send every addict that walks through the door into detox or treatment, they offer a piece of dignity to these people. Yes, they're injecting drugs, but they're not doing it in a dirty alleyway and the risk of overdose or AIDS is reduced.
The thing that struck me the most when I was reading this article by Baron is something that Mark Townsend of The Portland Hotel Society told me when I was doing research for my DTES article. He told me that developing a sense of community is important to the DTES. A neighbourhood of poor people doesn't have to be a negative thing. Addiction, of course is a negative thing, but the fact that many overlook is that the DTES doesn't consist entirely of addicts.
As far as I'm concerned, poverty is just as big of an issue as addiction in this country, and that needs to be solved before we can take on the issues of this community and the issues of addiction. Give them safe housing, support and treatment for those who face addictions or other issues, and perhaps a change will happen.
But you can't "fix" anything if they're going to back to sleeping on the street or in dilapidated, overpriced and unsanitary housing. I think that's the one thing that Baron overlooks in his article.
You can lock up the addicts which will provide a band-aid fix, but if you want to solve the problem permanently, you must address the issue of poverty and everything that goes with that.
Everyone has their opinion on how we should tackle a community that faces a challenge like the DTES. Mine is that people need to bloom where they are. Turn a negative into a positive and build a strong community.
And that's why I had trouble digesting Baron's take on the situation.
Street Sleeper, Grand Theft Bus
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Bloom where you are
With the 21st Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver next year, the area has received quite a bit of attention over the last couple of years.
What can easily be forgotten by all of the attention being netted for Vancouver by the Olympics is that a group of people facing some of the most unique challenges in Canada are hidden away in the city.
The Downtown East Side of Vancouver was home to 16,590 people during the last count in 2001. However, since many residents of the neighbourhood move frequently from place to place, this number often fluctuates.
The notorious East Hastings Street is the backbone of the neighbourhood and is evidence of all of the complex issues faced by the residents. Homelessness, an open-air drug market and the sex trade industry thrive on East Hastings, a sign of a people struggling to survive from day-to-day.
Look a bit further and you will find an area known as Blood Alley, which many of the Downtown’s homeless population call home. Huddled under the shelter of the extended roofs of many of the small businesses in the area, the street population of Vancouver take refuge from the elements year-round on Blood Alley. It begs the question of how these people became concentrated into one area, and why they seem to be forgotten.
Few understand the complex social issues of the Downtown East Side as well as Mark Townsend. Townsend is a manager at the Portland Hotel Society, a non-profit organization in the Downtown East Side offering services and advocacy to those who have been left behind by the system; the most vulnerable.
Townsend says that the main issue plaguing the Downtown East Side is poverty. Clean, safe housing might be the first step to improving the quality of life for the poor.
“There could be better housing. Decent housing goes a long way to making a better life,” says Townsend.
“If you are sharing a bathroom and kitchen with many other people and living in an 80-square foot room with no resources, cable or money, it’s not very fun.”
Townsend is referring to the many former hotels in the Downtown that have been converted to rooming houses to meet an overwhelming need for cheap housing. In addition to being very cramped, the conditions inside of these rooms are often unsanitary and almost squalor, with drug paraphernalia littering the premises.
“If that’s all that your life consists of, it will really affect you,” says Townsend.
Living in unsanitary conditions with no means of escape can be mentally debilitating, making it hard for people to maintain their dignity. This is when many people turn to addiction.
Paul Ryan of Hope in Shadows, an organization ran by the Pivot Legal Society, agrees that housing could be the big difference.
“There is a major problem with homelessness. People who are homeless are often targeted more by drug dealers,” admits Ryan, who has worked in the area for four or five years now.
Located on the west end of Hastings Street, the Portland Hotel Society offers shelter for residents with nowhere else to go. Most notably, they run Insite, North America’s only safe injection site.
Insite allows intravenous drug users to inject in a sterile area with clean needles. They are monitored by staff members after they inject to ensure that no one overdoses.
Insite also offers a detox program, advocacy and most importantly, a place for addicts to come and sit and have a coffee with other people from the community.
The project has been highly controversial, with the current Conservative government calling for it to be shut down more than once, saying that the site is not helping enough people to warrant staying open and that it encourages drug use. Townsend argues that people need to look at who is being helped rather than who is not.
“It saves lives, money, and there is no evidence that it encourages drug use,” says Townsend.
Ryan agrees, saying that if 70 people use Insite, that is 70 people that would be at risk of overdosing or contracting diseases like HIV/AIDS if Insite did not exist.
“It’s really, really busy – they are running to capacity,” he says.
“The fact that it can’t help everyone doesn’t mean that that it’s not working.”
Ryan blames the need for expensive programs like Insite on a policy of containment practiced in the last 10 years which has forced all of the low-income people in Vancouver to migrate to the Downtown East Side. He says that working wages and social assistance rates were better in the 1990s and the problem of containment in the Downtown has only gotten worse since then.
Townsend thinks that the area needs to develop a sense of community instead of adopting a fully mixed income situation.
“Mixed is not necessarily the solution. We need to create a community and embrace that there are neighbourhoods of poor people.”
“It’s not just one big ghetto that should be bulldozed.”
Creating a sense of community is precisely what Paul Ryan’s organization, Hope in Shadows, is all about. Through their annual photo contest, they enable residents to share their neighbourhood through snapshots taken from their perspective.
Carolyn Wong, who also works with Hope in Shadows, says that they then create a medium for the best photographers to sell their work in a calendar and make their own profits. It gives them something to be proud of.
“We wanted to do something to highlight the community and its strengths,” says Wong.
“The feeling was that the marginalized people in the area deserve and need that opportunity to represent a positive self-identity.”
Positive things like the Hope in Shadows project are often overshadowed by negative things going on in the neighbourhood, according to Lani Russwurm, who works with the Downtown East Side Community Arts Network.
“Media coverage almost exclusively focuses on the social ills concentrated in the area,” says Russwurm.
“The underreported part of the story is that there is a very strong sense of community solidarity here, more than in any other neighbourhood I know of.”
The group looks at art not only as a feasible way to make a living, but also a method of healing. For many, art is all that they have.
“For people without much money, the ability to create is often the one thing that can’t be taken away from them.”
It does not matter how much media attention is directed towards the problems of Canada’s forgotten slum, or how many band-aid fixes are implemented.
It can only be fixed if people in poverty are humanized and a sense of community is emphasized. Through photography, art or even the small pieces of communication between fellow addicts at Insite, positive things are happening on the Downtown East Side; people are blooming where they are.
What can easily be forgotten by all of the attention being netted for Vancouver by the Olympics is that a group of people facing some of the most unique challenges in Canada are hidden away in the city.
The Downtown East Side of Vancouver was home to 16,590 people during the last count in 2001. However, since many residents of the neighbourhood move frequently from place to place, this number often fluctuates.
The notorious East Hastings Street is the backbone of the neighbourhood and is evidence of all of the complex issues faced by the residents. Homelessness, an open-air drug market and the sex trade industry thrive on East Hastings, a sign of a people struggling to survive from day-to-day.
Look a bit further and you will find an area known as Blood Alley, which many of the Downtown’s homeless population call home. Huddled under the shelter of the extended roofs of many of the small businesses in the area, the street population of Vancouver take refuge from the elements year-round on Blood Alley. It begs the question of how these people became concentrated into one area, and why they seem to be forgotten.
Few understand the complex social issues of the Downtown East Side as well as Mark Townsend. Townsend is a manager at the Portland Hotel Society, a non-profit organization in the Downtown East Side offering services and advocacy to those who have been left behind by the system; the most vulnerable.
Townsend says that the main issue plaguing the Downtown East Side is poverty. Clean, safe housing might be the first step to improving the quality of life for the poor.
“There could be better housing. Decent housing goes a long way to making a better life,” says Townsend.
“If you are sharing a bathroom and kitchen with many other people and living in an 80-square foot room with no resources, cable or money, it’s not very fun.”
Townsend is referring to the many former hotels in the Downtown that have been converted to rooming houses to meet an overwhelming need for cheap housing. In addition to being very cramped, the conditions inside of these rooms are often unsanitary and almost squalor, with drug paraphernalia littering the premises.
“If that’s all that your life consists of, it will really affect you,” says Townsend.
Living in unsanitary conditions with no means of escape can be mentally debilitating, making it hard for people to maintain their dignity. This is when many people turn to addiction.
Paul Ryan of Hope in Shadows, an organization ran by the Pivot Legal Society, agrees that housing could be the big difference.
“There is a major problem with homelessness. People who are homeless are often targeted more by drug dealers,” admits Ryan, who has worked in the area for four or five years now.
Located on the west end of Hastings Street, the Portland Hotel Society offers shelter for residents with nowhere else to go. Most notably, they run Insite, North America’s only safe injection site.
Insite allows intravenous drug users to inject in a sterile area with clean needles. They are monitored by staff members after they inject to ensure that no one overdoses.
Insite also offers a detox program, advocacy and most importantly, a place for addicts to come and sit and have a coffee with other people from the community.
The project has been highly controversial, with the current Conservative government calling for it to be shut down more than once, saying that the site is not helping enough people to warrant staying open and that it encourages drug use. Townsend argues that people need to look at who is being helped rather than who is not.
“It saves lives, money, and there is no evidence that it encourages drug use,” says Townsend.
Ryan agrees, saying that if 70 people use Insite, that is 70 people that would be at risk of overdosing or contracting diseases like HIV/AIDS if Insite did not exist.
“It’s really, really busy – they are running to capacity,” he says.
“The fact that it can’t help everyone doesn’t mean that that it’s not working.”
Ryan blames the need for expensive programs like Insite on a policy of containment practiced in the last 10 years which has forced all of the low-income people in Vancouver to migrate to the Downtown East Side. He says that working wages and social assistance rates were better in the 1990s and the problem of containment in the Downtown has only gotten worse since then.
Townsend thinks that the area needs to develop a sense of community instead of adopting a fully mixed income situation.
“Mixed is not necessarily the solution. We need to create a community and embrace that there are neighbourhoods of poor people.”
“It’s not just one big ghetto that should be bulldozed.”
Creating a sense of community is precisely what Paul Ryan’s organization, Hope in Shadows, is all about. Through their annual photo contest, they enable residents to share their neighbourhood through snapshots taken from their perspective.
Carolyn Wong, who also works with Hope in Shadows, says that they then create a medium for the best photographers to sell their work in a calendar and make their own profits. It gives them something to be proud of.
“We wanted to do something to highlight the community and its strengths,” says Wong.
“The feeling was that the marginalized people in the area deserve and need that opportunity to represent a positive self-identity.”
Positive things like the Hope in Shadows project are often overshadowed by negative things going on in the neighbourhood, according to Lani Russwurm, who works with the Downtown East Side Community Arts Network.
“Media coverage almost exclusively focuses on the social ills concentrated in the area,” says Russwurm.
“The underreported part of the story is that there is a very strong sense of community solidarity here, more than in any other neighbourhood I know of.”
The group looks at art not only as a feasible way to make a living, but also a method of healing. For many, art is all that they have.
“For people without much money, the ability to create is often the one thing that can’t be taken away from them.”
It does not matter how much media attention is directed towards the problems of Canada’s forgotten slum, or how many band-aid fixes are implemented.
It can only be fixed if people in poverty are humanized and a sense of community is emphasized. Through photography, art or even the small pieces of communication between fellow addicts at Insite, positive things are happening on the Downtown East Side; people are blooming where they are.
Monday, March 9, 2009
In View
As an added note to my earlier blog post about the Downtown East Side, a really great interview was published in the Globe and Mail yesterday with a UBC prof who founded a program called The Learning Exchange. The program connects the UBC community with the inner-city communities of Vancouver. They also offer outreach programs for the community.
Here's the link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090308.wbcdtesfryer9/BNStory/thefix/home
I think she's given some of the best answers yet on what s can be done to improve the state of some of Vancouver's most troubled neighbourhoods. I hope that community leaders in other vulnerable neighbourhoods around the country take note of some of Fryer's ideas because I think that they are pretty innovative.
The idea of pairing up university students with the community is also a really great idea, because the community gains a few more role models, and the students gain knowledge on what it is like to live in those areas. That knowledge, hopefully, erases any previous stereotypes they may have had about people living under the poverty line.
Poverty isn't the only big issue in Canada's Olympic city right now. A wave of gang violence seems to have overtaken the city. While poverty and drugs are perhaps two causes of this violence, some ideas need to be formed that detail how Vancouver citizens can take their city back, in more ways than one.
In View - Tragically Hip
Here's the link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090308.wbcdtesfryer9/BNStory/thefix/home
I think she's given some of the best answers yet on what s can be done to improve the state of some of Vancouver's most troubled neighbourhoods. I hope that community leaders in other vulnerable neighbourhoods around the country take note of some of Fryer's ideas because I think that they are pretty innovative.
The idea of pairing up university students with the community is also a really great idea, because the community gains a few more role models, and the students gain knowledge on what it is like to live in those areas. That knowledge, hopefully, erases any previous stereotypes they may have had about people living under the poverty line.
Poverty isn't the only big issue in Canada's Olympic city right now. A wave of gang violence seems to have overtaken the city. While poverty and drugs are perhaps two causes of this violence, some ideas need to be formed that detail how Vancouver citizens can take their city back, in more ways than one.
In View - Tragically Hip
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Take Me to the Riot
With the 2010 Vancouver Olympics quick approaching, a lot of pressure is being put on the BC government and Vancouver municipality to clean up the Downtown East Side area.
For those not familiar, it's one of the worst cases of neighbourhood concentrated poverty in the country. The drug and prostitution markets thrive, and no one seems to know how to put the pieces back together. People in poverty seem to gravitate to the area because of the affordable housing, but it is certainly not an ideal place to live, and the sense of community is almost non-existant.
The Globe & Mail has been running an extensive series on the Downtown East Side (which can be found here). It offers suggestions on how to fix the problem, stats on what has been done so far, personal stories from residents of the neighbourhood, and lots more.
According to The Globe and Mail's estimates, $1.4 billion has been poured into the area since 2000. That's a lot of money for one neighbourhood. Yet, there seems to have been no significant change. Money has been spent largely on renovating housing (like old hotels that have long turned into drug dens), cracking down on crime, community health and outreach programs, etc.
Some say that a sense of community needs to be built to salvage the area. I think that's part of it. Giving people legitimate ways out of poverty and addiction would help too. Someone suggested turning it into a mixed income neighbourhood would help and I'd agree there too.
But there's obviously an issue if that's the only place the most vulnerable in the city can afford to live. You can't attract a wide range of incomes if the rest of the city doesn't offer anywhere for the poor to live because everyone low income will gravitate back to that area again. And why shouldn't they be entitled to a nice place to live in a safe, strong neighbourhood? They're people too. It should be somewhere that people of all walks of life can be proud of.
I'd strongly encourage people if anyone else is actually reading this to look up the subject, maybe find a documentary on the people who live there. Some of them have sad stories, some of them have amazing stories, some of them have horrible stories, but they've all got a story. They're all real people, and for one reason or another (by choice or not by choice), they found themselves on the Downtown East Side.
Until we humanize people in poverty and eradicate stereotypes and assumptions, it will never end. That's the first step to fixing the DTES and other vulnerable neighbourhoods.
"Grey skies and light fading/Headlamps making patterns on the wall/Uptown, it's dead now/But out here, no one seems to care at all."
-Take Me To The Riot, Stars.
Editor's Note: Since I've written this blog post, I have had the chance to dialogue with a couple of people leading the fight against poverty in the DTES for a feature I was working on originally for the Aquinian.
I said in this post that there is virtually no community in the neighbourhood, but that is one thing that I was wrong about. People in the neighbourhood look out for each other, and while many of them live lifestyles that are not condoned by most of us, they're still people. They still form bonds.
So, I just wanted to clear that up and say that I was wrong on that. The community in the DTES is thriving, but it can always be made stronger. The main challenge is to get the people off of the street and into safe housing and then to give them the resources to fight whatever other challenges they face.
For those not familiar, it's one of the worst cases of neighbourhood concentrated poverty in the country. The drug and prostitution markets thrive, and no one seems to know how to put the pieces back together. People in poverty seem to gravitate to the area because of the affordable housing, but it is certainly not an ideal place to live, and the sense of community is almost non-existant.
The Globe & Mail has been running an extensive series on the Downtown East Side (which can be found here). It offers suggestions on how to fix the problem, stats on what has been done so far, personal stories from residents of the neighbourhood, and lots more.
According to The Globe and Mail's estimates, $1.4 billion has been poured into the area since 2000. That's a lot of money for one neighbourhood. Yet, there seems to have been no significant change. Money has been spent largely on renovating housing (like old hotels that have long turned into drug dens), cracking down on crime, community health and outreach programs, etc.
Some say that a sense of community needs to be built to salvage the area. I think that's part of it. Giving people legitimate ways out of poverty and addiction would help too. Someone suggested turning it into a mixed income neighbourhood would help and I'd agree there too.
But there's obviously an issue if that's the only place the most vulnerable in the city can afford to live. You can't attract a wide range of incomes if the rest of the city doesn't offer anywhere for the poor to live because everyone low income will gravitate back to that area again. And why shouldn't they be entitled to a nice place to live in a safe, strong neighbourhood? They're people too. It should be somewhere that people of all walks of life can be proud of.
I'd strongly encourage people if anyone else is actually reading this to look up the subject, maybe find a documentary on the people who live there. Some of them have sad stories, some of them have amazing stories, some of them have horrible stories, but they've all got a story. They're all real people, and for one reason or another (by choice or not by choice), they found themselves on the Downtown East Side.
Until we humanize people in poverty and eradicate stereotypes and assumptions, it will never end. That's the first step to fixing the DTES and other vulnerable neighbourhoods.
"Grey skies and light fading/Headlamps making patterns on the wall/Uptown, it's dead now/But out here, no one seems to care at all."
-Take Me To The Riot, Stars.
Editor's Note: Since I've written this blog post, I have had the chance to dialogue with a couple of people leading the fight against poverty in the DTES for a feature I was working on originally for the Aquinian.
I said in this post that there is virtually no community in the neighbourhood, but that is one thing that I was wrong about. People in the neighbourhood look out for each other, and while many of them live lifestyles that are not condoned by most of us, they're still people. They still form bonds.
So, I just wanted to clear that up and say that I was wrong on that. The community in the DTES is thriving, but it can always be made stronger. The main challenge is to get the people off of the street and into safe housing and then to give them the resources to fight whatever other challenges they face.
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