- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I am a native Vancouverite and I have both lived and worked on the Downtown Eastside at various times in my life. I still visit many friends who have chosen to stay and raise their families near Main and Hastings when they might easily live somewhere else in the city. It is a vibrant community with a lot of good points as well as severe problems, as tough as this is to believe. It is also fairly safe. Sure, if you park on the street, your car probably will get broken into and B&Es are common but chances are you won't get shot during an armed mugging. These are still comparatively rare in Vancouver.
Visitors to Vancouver and even residents are rightly appalled by the rampant open drug use and general chaos of the Downtown Eastside when they see it. But this is kind of the point because it is pretty hard to avoid seeing it. Unlike most North American cities where such problems are tucked away and hidden, Main and Hastings is a major Vancouver intersection and a main transit point for people heading into and out of the city. Both the Main and the Fraser buses, two of the busiest routes in the city, have stops right in front of he Carnegie Centre, site of much dealing activity but also of immaculately clean and safe public washrooms. I wonder if many of the people who have written letters here have bothered to visit them. I have and have taken my children in as well.
The roots of the drug problem in Vancouver are many and complex. The city is not only scenically stunning but is also a tough port city. Drugs have always been readily available. The crackdown by the police over the past few years has moved much of the open dealing and using to other parts of the city. A substantial number of the street drug addicts we see were mentally ill before they became addicted. Vancouver is rapidly becoming a city of the very rich and the very poor. Safe, affordable public housing is almost non-existent. Proper housing, located where people are living as opposed to warehousing in vast no-go areas, does make a difference.
Insite has made a big difference in a very small area of the city. Residents and business people, who once were firmly against such a facility in their neighbourhood, now just as firmly support its continued existence. But one facility really can only do so much. I wonder if the people who are horrified to see open homelessness, mental illness, drug dealing and drug using on their home turf would be willing to support mental health facilities, safe injection sites and housing in their neighbourhoods. If the kurfuffle in my neighbourhood (41st and Fraser) when the Coast Health Authority tried to build a residence for the mentally ill, multiply addicted homeless residents already here is any indication, I very much doubt it. NIMBYism is a major barrier to solving this problem city wide but it is not going to go away unless we spread these facilities city wide.
