Anne-Marie Monks, a 62-year-old homeless woman, recently had a tantalizing offer of a free trip away from the grittiest streets of Vancouver. Her welfare officer said she could have a bus ticket to visit her daughter in Kamloops.
Good offers are as rare as three hot meals in her neighbourhood. But Ms. Monks declined. “It was a one-way ticket,” she said.
“This wasn't a visit, it was telling me to go away and never come back.”
Sending the homeless out of town might not be official policy, but with the 2010 Olympics looming, some worry it will be the ticket to cleaning up the Dante-like stretch of Vancouver known as the Downtown Eastside.
Every major city in Canada has destitute people, but nowhere are they concentrated in such a harrowing display of human desperation as in Vancouver, where a dense neighbourhood of junkies, streetwalkers and mentally ill people openly challenges British Columbia's licence-plate slogan, “The Best Place on Earth.” The area is a 10-minute stroll from the site designated as the Olympics' international media centre.
With the clock ticking down to Feb. 12, 2010, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell this week assured reporters at the Beijing Olympics that Vancouver's Downtown Eastside would be a different place by the time the Winter Games start.
Mr. Campbell set out a formidable challenge with a short deadline for a neighbourhood that is well known as Canada's poorest postal code.
But if he falls short, it will not be for lack of trying, provincial and municipal politicians and government staff said this week.
A massive investment has been made in the past two years to break the grip of addiction and homelessness on thousands in British Columbia. The impact is expected to reverberate across the province, but the final measure will be taken in the Downtown Eastside.
Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan said the city is in the golden age of social housing. “We are seeing more investment in social and supportive housing than ever in the history of the city.”
He cautioned not to expect a significant demographic shift. “The Downtown Eastside will be for many years a place you find people of low incomes,” he said.
But he believes the clusters of addicts, mentally ill people and the homeless will fade away. “There has been an effort to keep all the social problems in one neighbourhood, and I do not think that serves the people who have those problems very well,” he said. “We find that, when they can move outside the Downtown Eastside, a lot of problems go away.”
Echoing a recent study that found that those who moved out of the Downtown Eastside reported a significant decrease in unstable housing and heroin and cocaine injection, Mr. Sullivan indicated he was confident that a surge in social housing, new mental health facilities and treatment programs in Vancouver – and beyond – will bring results.
The Downtown Eastside is a world of misery crammed into 10 blocks. The local amenities include a 24-hour drive-thru drug market, lanes where addicts openly inject drugs, and dealers who work in view of the police station. Homeless people sleep on the sidewalk, in doorways and in Oppenheimer Park, a few blocks from Hastings Street, where a tent city sprouted in mid-June.
Two days after Mr. Campbell was grilled in Beijing about Vancouver's homelessness problem, authorities dismantled the tents and offered rooms in residential hotels. Yesterday, crews were picking up litter in the park. No sign of the tent city remained.
Police said they acted in co-operation with B.C. Housing and welfare officials. “When you start having numbers of people camping out, you start moving into personal safety issues,” said Constable Jana McGuinness of the Vancouver police. “Before anyone could be harmed, a solution – even short-term – needed to be found.”
But critics said the park was a political embarrassment. The homeless people there bypassed those who have waited for housing for months. “It was politically motivated,” said Vancouver Park Board commissioner Spencer Herbert. “It was a public-relations disaster to have 40 people in tents just a couple of blocks from GM Place, where Olympics events will be happening. The timing is very curious, with [Mr.] Campbell getting nailed about the homeless. I think they decided they needed to get the problem ‘disappeared.'“ B.C. Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman insisted the government does not intend to clean up the neighbourhood by handing out one-way bus tickets. No one is going to be forced to do anything, he said. “No one is being pushed out of any area because of the Olympics.”
